Catherine Tinsley
Raffini Family Professor and Management Area Chair, Faculty Director of the Georgetown University Women’s Leadership Institute
For nearly three decades, Catherine H. Tinsley has pursued a deceptively simple question: What are we not seeing—and how is that shaping what we do? Her research reveals an uncomfortable truth: the failures organizations won't acknowledge, the biases leaders can't recognize, and the warnings teams systematically ignore are precisely what determine their fate. From the Challenger explosion to the 2008 financial crisis to persistent gender inequality, the pattern is the same—what remains hidden governs outcomes. Her work illuminates four critical blind spots:
1) She began by uncovering how culture shapes assumptions about what people consider appropriate, legitimate, and effective, and how these invisible assumptions create unnecessary conflict when people from different backgrounds collaborate, with applications for how the Department of Defense approaches coalition operations.
2) Her groundbreaking research on near-misses explains why we feel relief instead of alarm after close calls, and how this dangerous trick of the mind—studied through partnerships with NASA, DHS, and Fortune 500 companies—normalizes risk until catastrophe strikes.
3) Her research on gender inequality exposes a hidden architecture: not overt discrimination, but invisible beliefs and structural constraints that make inequality feel natural while systematically disadvantaging women, influencing corporate diversity programs worldwide.
4) Most recently, she's introduced the concept of the "organizational shadow" to management scholarship, arguing organizations and scholars systematically exclude uncomfortable phenomena (failure, vulnerability, dissent, privilege), which are precisely what we need for learning and equity. Her award-winning field experiment demonstrates that when leaders reframe failure as natural and informative rather than as stigma, employee performance improves by double digits. Separate research shows that when people share self-revealing personal narratives exposing their own vulnerability, they build trust even across deep ideological divides, a finding with profound implications for collaboration in polarized workplaces.
Professor Tinsley has secured over $3 million in research funding and published more than 50 articles in leading academic journals including Management Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Academy of Management Review. She has served on three National Academy of Sciences committees (as Vice-Chair for military environments), spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos on leadership and failure. She often writes for a public audience as well and has advised organizations from NASA to Merrill Lynch to Kate Spade.
Whether you're grappling with risk normalization in your organization, seeking evidence-based approaches to diversity and inclusion, navigating cross-cultural collaboration challenges, or wondering why your team can't learn from mistakes, her research offers both diagnosis and solution.
She holds a Ph.D. in Organization Behavior from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.
for more see: CatherineTinsley.com