No, your DevOps/Agile transformation isn’t “done” because you got an award. Or because you had your CEO hail it as concluded as they handed some expensive Big 4 some unGodly new contract for “transformation maintenance” (this, sadly, shockingly, is a real thing).
As promised last week when we paid homage to the people who fight the good fight, this week we’re launching our Interviews with Superheroes (aka Human Debt Fighters) series. We all learn so much easier from storytelling that these voices of people who are living the talk are essential now more...
It doesn’t cease to amaze me how reluctant people are to “speak human” and express any feelings in the business world. We have all spent so long under this cloak of “professionalism” complete with impression management and wooden language, that we have come to be more comfortable in it than when...
Human Debt™
Someone was asking me how many followers we gain a week. For the Wednesday’ The Future is Agile newsletter? Loads. On here? None, on the contrary, we constantly lose followers. Every time we post. It’s not surprising, after all, we keep serving hard truths and uncomfortable realisations on...
Last week I wrote an article for the other newsletter and my inbox exploded with reactions. It was entitled “Let’s Be Honest, Nobody’s Fine” and it spoke about the fact that, while we are all trying our very best, the truth is we are far from recouped and all right following the last few...
On a completely different topic today - how are we all? Not as fine as we used to be. We may have super exciting things happening in your lives and we may be super grateful for having survived a global pandemic and those elations may be masking the non-fine-ness but it’s still there. We are...
We announced something this week that we hope will help make some start-ups/scale-ups fly. A super deep discount to our software so they can start on the human work early and make it a pillar of their culture so they don’t amass any HumanDebt™. One of the things that were clear was that there...
As you read yesterday, we’re announcing the 20 No HumanDebt™ Start-Ups Program where we’ll select twenty start-ups to support in their human work journey so we know they started out right and they won’t start amassing Human Debt before they even took flight. Please click here to find the short...
Anyone reading from PeopleNotTech regularly knows we have a bit of an obsession with being practical first and theoretical second. After all, our main thesis is that while yes, there are extreme amounts of HumanDebt™ everywhere, they will never be resolved by navel-gazing or even academic...
We write a lot here about the organisation, the team and the Superheroes. That we need to do something about the existent and ever-increasing HumanDebt™. That said “to do” is to distribute the needed work to the team level and let them fix themselves and then get into a groove of continuous...
Yesterday we spoke about the fact that the human work has to be priority, regular and intentional. Today’s video goes deeper into that. We make no secret of the fact that the human work isn’t easy and it isn’t a once-and-done. We wish we could tell you differently, that there were some...
For those of you reading this who aren’t familiar with what we do, at PeopleNotTech, we are building the first platform for the human work and we are betting on distributing the HumanDebt™ to the team level by empowering them to work on their own team dynamics through our playbook. Their choice...
Like many of us, I’ve had some of my first live engagements in aeons and I must admit the vibe is both eerie and awesome. It did seem to me like there’s a different type of feedback coming from the audience - everyone seems a lot more involved and more willing, to be ultra honest and open. Don’t...
Yesterday we started speaking to you about the hidden cost of inaction when it comes to HumanDebt and Psychological Safety. As you know, these articles and videos on Tuesdays are designed to be the actionable, practical advice companion to any of the big themes we tend to bring up in the Mondays...
Many people believe that one of the reasons why Psychological Safety isn’t being made a priority in the business world above the generalised lip-service level, is that employee wellbeing still feels like an afterthought and a nice-to-have and not a must-have. Granted, if we compare it to...
(Warning - super long. Please don't start reading it if you have no time and then get annoyed I am too verbose and therefore hit Unsubscribe :) We only ever talk about one thing: psychological safety as an enabler for high performance in teams.
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 978-3-319-75652-3), People Before Tech (2021, ISBN 978-1-4729-8545-3), and Tech-Led Culture (2023, ISBN 978-1-3986-1069-9). 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.