How to avoid a workplace blow-up

March 13, 2026 — 5:01 am

I was recently given a higher-level role at work. My first big challenge seems silly on the surface, but it’s causing some anxiety in my team and I’m having trouble moving forward. My colleague regularly talks about numerology at work. For some of our colleagues, this is fun. But other colleagues think it’s offensive pseudoscience. I think I should join now, but I’m having a hard time knowing what to do. Any thoughts?

Constantly talking about pseudoscience at work is enough to drive anyone crazy.Simon Letch

Isn’t it often the case that what seems like a trivial situation at work eventually turns into something that threatens to tear the team apart?

The first thing to say – and recent events have made this point even more obvious – is that no matter how you approach the issue, don’t make it public. For anyone in your position trying to resolve an office issue as fairly as possible, there is no need to embarrass someone in front of their colleagues.

Even a mild verbal reprimand takes on a completely different color and can sometimes be humiliating when delivered outside the privacy of a meeting room.

This is what should not be done. Let’s get to what you do to be Do this to solve the problem. I think you need to talk to the person who practices numerology at some stage.

What should you say in this discussion? What makes this whole situation particularly difficult are the specifics of your colleague’s actions. I won’t talk about what exactly they did, but I will say that they were in a difficult situation; neither unnecessarily disgusting nor completely harmless.

Once you better understand the motivations behind these mystical readings, you will better understand what tone your discussion should take.

I can easily see how some of my colleagues might be insulted when this practice turns from a fun magic trick into pseudoscience masquerading as genuine insight.

To be clear, numerology has no scientific basis. But numerous mystical practices, if performed with sufficient skill, can intuitively seem like ‘real’ mechanisms for categorizing people and even predicting the future.

Whether your numerologist is a true believer, just a laugher, or an outright charlatan, there’s a chance they’ll rely on a lot to make their predictions seem like miraculous insights.

The biggest of these is the human brain’s tendency to recognize patterns. This helps us with everything from exercising to having a friendly conversation. However, it is a cognitive process that can lead us astray in environments where there is no consistent relationship between the data we encounter and the results we predict (or predict for us).

In these more difficult contexts and when paired with Barnum Effect and confirmation biaspattern recognition can fail us spectacularly.

If we are prepared to do so by a moderately proficient “reader,” we can begin to see confirmation of what we have been told everywhere. Even though the vast majority of our evidence suggests nothing of the sort, we can begin to think that, yes, the universe is sending me a “five-energy transit” regarding my career.

I mention all of this because I think you should definitely confront this person with a blunt, scientific rebuke, but keep the basic facts handy if they try to point the truth out as the one to prove themselves right.

Hopefully it won’t come to that, but there’s a chance that any attempt you make to rein in this activity will be met with accusations that you’re mocking your colleague’s genuinely held beliefs.

In such a situation, do not get stuck in a complicated argument where fallacy has a chance to prevail. Keep it dead simple and draw on the harm principle: Your colleague has every right to make sense of the world any way he wants, whether that involves numerology or belief in a clockwork universe. This right does not extend to imposing on others a purely subjective framework that has nothing to do with work.

Although the details are pretty extraordinary, at the heart of it all is a workplace story as old as time: An unwanted rape occurred. Part of your job is to figure out whether this rape is the product of something well-intentioned or well-intentioned (perhaps over-enthusiasm) or something more dangerous (for example, a desire to “validate” the job performance or moral worth of teammates).

Once you better understand the motivations and content behind these mystical readings, you will better understand what tone your discussion should take.