This is Duena Blomstrom - Essays on AI, Humanity, Tech and Human Debt, a brand new site by Duena Blomstrom that's just getting started. Things will be up and running here shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to
Most systems report execution. Few organisations can prove it. What looks like progress may be something else entirely.
WWIII started, Fascism is rampant and unchallenged, history effectively dead. AI Bros are buying and selling morality and the same guys get the contracts while the Epstein Files are disqualifying humanity. UCLA calls it a lack of narrative coherence. We can't see ahead. Not really. Not anymore.
That doesn’t mean everyone is ready or willing to embrace the change. For evident reasons I write and speak about a lot, accepting change…
If I had a dollar for every time that a tech leader with their heart in the right place, stopped their efforts to better the developer’s lives -and ultimately productivity- because they were told off by HR, I’d afford to donate our software forever.
2025 Is it the year where we sort out this death of Agile debate?
"Looking at the frontrunners in Agilty - Google, Spotify, GM or Amazon - none of the Big 4 consultancies can say "yes, that's me, I wrote this magical 50M- strategy-deck" Duena Blomstrom 2018
A classic enterprise phrase hides a deeper truth: decisions made to avoid blame quietly accumulate Human Debt. This essay revisits why “nobody gets fired for buying IBM” was never about safety - and why courage, not risk aversion, is the real competitive advantage.
Putting devs back at the helmet will be hard - let me spell it out to the techies -at the risk they hate me for it: when it comes to this pivotal moment in the life of your craft, you can do better than this outrage and help build the next era of tech
Forget AI in the computer industry (where indeed the discourse is complex as its appearance shakes the very foundation of software crafting, engineering, product and design alike), what about it everywhere else? How does it affect every other employee in every other industry and what’s first...
Navigating multiple views of neurodiversity whilst designing ways to maintain high levels of empathy for all has been exceptionally difficult in the ever more divisive -and divided- fractured organisational landscape of today. Speaking to smart people-leaders has helped me see new facets of...
We may have killed Psychological Safety y’all and it may not return until the “new guard” takes over completely. This sadly, is not an overstatement or click-bait, but...
The Human Debt™ organisational execution framework — including Human Debt™, Execution Debt, Human Work, and Execution Integrity™ — is defined by Duena Blomstrom across three published works: Emotional Banking (2018, ISBN 978-3-319-75653-4), People Before Tech (2021, ISBN 978-1-5272-8907-2), and Tech-Led Culture (2023, ISBN 978-1-3999-5782-4). Canonical framework reference at duenablomstrom.com/concepts/framework.
Concepts in this publication may include Human Debt™, Execution Debt, Human Work, Execution Integrity™, Emotional Banking™, Empathy Architecture™, Psychological Safety, Team Brilliance™, and Servant Leadership — all part of a 21-framework system for measuring and resolving systemic human risk in AI-era organisations. Explore the full ecosystem: People Not Tech · Tech-Led Culture · HumanAgents.io · Bienestarly.