In today’s video, we speak about what appears to be a tricky phase when it comes to Psychological Safety - when organisations find themselves trapped in an awareness-raising-only cycle. How can it be broken and when can the people work begin in earnest? As Ffion points out, it isn’t unusual,...
Last week, after a keynote, someone asked me “How can we break the cycle of eternal awareness-raising and no doing when it comes to Psychological Safety in our enterprise? How do we take the next step?”. When the conversation with the person who asked deepened, I came to find out they were at...
In this week’s Chasing Psychological Safety we’ve spoken about the fact that Psychological Safety is never “Done” and how, despite how it doesn’t immediately appear so, the reports of issues in the Google Borg SRE team are in fact good signs of the vast amounts of work they have dedicated to the...
In yesterday’s article, we outlined the very clear and basic fact that Psychological Safety can never be a “once and done” topic. No people-topic ever is, but in PS’s case, it is even more fragile and more likely to be lost as soon as one gets their eye off the ball. The latest example of this...
Psychological Safety Research
Before anything else let me be clear: everyone is doing their best and there are amazing people in pockets of obstinate excellence in every organisation and at every level of every department. That is utterly true irrespective of how “ranty” the following sounds and I would urge you to remember...
As TEH Kent Beck says - “who doesn’t love a rant?” so if you haven’t read his, please do so here or on Twitter (which has the added bonus of having some other awesome minds chime in including the one and only Gitte Klitgaard (@NativeWired) and then come back because we have to talk. It...
At PeopleNotTech we make no secret of the fact that we accuse organisations of having amassed a lot of HumanDebt and part of it is the resistance and lack of support for the human work and their reluctance is the primary culprit as to why employees do not have happier lives and can not perform...
In the last few articles, I’ve talked about the fact that we may be creating new HumanDebt™ and that the only way to combat it effectively is to distribute the people work to the teams. We’ve also written an article in he Fundamentals of Psychological Safety Series entitled “The People Work –...
They say nothing focuses the mind like a Table of Contents, don’t they?:) I’m considering another book (we have to frame and dissect the HumanDebt™ in more detail than this here allows us if we want to see large scale change) and that makes me think of all sorts of things I would not otherwise...
We lose followers and subscribers any time we go back to basics and we can’t blame the leavers. It’s tiring to hear “same old” and we eternally chase the new in particular in a “newsletter” but we simply can not cater exclusively to the Superheroes. They’ll be ok without us. We have to help hold...
For those of you who are Psychological Safety veterans and are further along the path with superheroes and advocates having made inroads and companies who now prioritise it thanks to their hard battles, this article may be too much of a return to clarity and you can skip it and instead, come...
It’s a weird one this year start, isn’t it? It feels like we should have so much more oomph. It feels like we ought to be brimming with gumption. That everyone should be “up and at it”. Like we are long overdue for an enthusiastic fresh start but also like we don’t quite have the energy or the...
To reiterate what we said yesterday- empathy matters, no strike that, it’s crucial. Obviously. We spend a lot of time with teams increasing it and checking it, we have several plays that help leaders and team members gain more of it and so on.
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.
