Dear CTO - Yes You Can: Start Eradicating the HumanDebt

This week we explored command and control further and its relationship with courage. In the midst of this heavy topic, we also posted this interview with the inimitable Bryan Finster so make sure you give that a watch. There are so many absolutely fascinating individuals with their hearts in the right place it makes us all keep at it. Like I keep saying - there’s plenty of inspiration and plenty of Superheroes - too bad we need them.

For the most part, our other conversations can not be on camera or even using names and that alone is a clear sign that there’s HumanDebt™ and fear. Speaking of, it warms my heart’s frozen corners to see how widely this concept I woke up to with a startle a few years ago has come. In the past few months, more and more people resonated with it and awareness is growing by the day with most of my keynotes centring on it, a university in Asia asking if we can start teaching it, an American enterprise having held an awareness tour culminating with a hackathon to ask everyone what could be done about it and countless people debating it and asking me to resend my definition of it every day. This isn’t great news because I’m an egomaniac, (I’m equally chuffed to see the mentions even in the absence of attribution -in innocent cases!-) but because it's a solid sign that we’re getting there people, this is good news! We’re getting closer and closer to the realisation that we have much left to do and we have to do the human work to manage any of the technical goals we have.

Yesterday afternoon I had one of those -sadly off the record- frank heart-to-hearts with a CTO who read the books (mine included, cheers for that!), knows the definition and is one of the most direct and passionate people you’ll meet. He has such a clear product vision and he has ensured people are kitted with the tenants of a successful Agile organisation but he is deploring that the delta between his shop and say Netflix in any indicator you would choose, remained obstinately large no matter how he tweaked the above. They’re a few thousand in the tech side of the organisation and he’s invested in making huge changes but he often despairs of the size of the job.

“I see it everywhere and it’s slowing us down to where it has us all but halting at times. What would you do really? How would you eradicate this HumanDebt if you could do only one thing?”

“That may be and we shouldn’t have ended up here but I feel that’s the only way now. Rethink everything. Tell people you *need* them to do less on ops and delivery and more of the human bits. It’s imperative for the business. Then transform the empty rhetoric into trustworthy change by in-building how you reward them for it - rethink performance management to include it and recognise the hard work consistently till it becomes a habit.”