Old HumanDebt - New HumanDebt

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 consider, so it’s likely you’ll “hear” about some of them over the next few weeks as I ruminate through them, team. I’ll need your comments -in particular the negative ones, please disagree and challenge me!-.

One of the challenges I’d like to set for myself is to write about what’s wrong in a completely blameless way. No pointing of fingers. Not sure how to accomplish that or indeed that it's possible, but it's worth a shot. It would be so easy to blame it all on antiquated HR and in the same breath showcase the occasional woke people-person and their astounding work, or to accuse tone-deaf and dispassionate leaders or even excuses-making technologists but I think it’s important we all grab whatever responsibility we can for frankly the mess we are in, admit to its monumental size and roll our sleeves to work on it.

We’re all culpable, at every level. What I often point out in my keynotes is that there’s Human Debt at the Organisational level -and that’s the one we all think of when we comprehend the “like Tech Debt but for people topics” definition-, but there’s plenty of it at the team level as well, and it’s this latter one we should start with.

More interestingly - or at least to me- is understanding that there is Old HumanDebt - aka whatever we had collectively done wrong -or not right enough- by our employees before the pandemic and New HumanDebt which was created since and is sadly, growing by the day.

The bulk of this debt would come from how we would have lost the moment and let the opportunity pass us by. There has been such amazing momentum created in every imaginable industry in elevating the people topics from being viewed as second rate citizens that are a bit inconsequential and fluffy, to being seen as central to the conversation, taken seriously and discussed openly, that losing the dialogue and the understanding that it’s high time we invested the work, would be a crying shame.