We have to be honest - we know we have asked for a lot. We spent the last few years saying to you: “We have oodles of HumanDebt™and the only way to clear -or at least make a dent in it-, is to distribute it to the team level and let you do masses of “human work” to better yourselves, so here we...
Psychological Safety Research
Yesterday’s article tried to present a comprehensive view of both the causes and the symptoms of the resistance we all at times exhibit towards the human work. In today’s video, Ffion Jones talks you through some of the signs you can look out for to diminish the effects of this in your own...
We have to enter a continuous development mindset. As Gustavo Razzetti of Fearless Culture puts it “When it comes to culture, strive for evolution not revolution”. We have to comprehend that the human work is eminently necessary and that it will never be done. Neither of these points is an easy...
Anyone who hasn’t lived under a proverbial rock has seen the many discussions regarding "quiet quitting" over the past few weeks. I wrote about it as well in our Chasing Psychological Safety newsletter. I put it to us that there’s no quiet quitting in technology. Or not as much as everywhere...
Like we said yesterday, “quiet quitting” is most certainly not news and over the years it had many a names - “coasting”, “doing the bare minimum” or “inner resignation” but they all amount to the same thing - “disengagement”and its more insidiously disastrous cousin of “active disengagement” -...
For crying out loud can we stop inventing new terms, running in the direction of the next new shiny thing and instead focus on what matters: helping people do the human work so that their lives get better at work? Can we please just hanker down on the work and land the wins of the pandemic? Can...
There’s a lot we don’t talk about in the business world. A lot of silences, a lot of impostor syndrome at play and a heap load of impression management from everyone’s side at all times. We say a lot we may not truly mean and we bite our tongue and remain silent about far too many things that...
Yesterday’s article about the brewing further crisis we may be facing if we keep ignoring the major “to do” of having to process what we have been through over the pandemic has gotten a lot of reactions. I am very grateful to all the people who have sent messages sharing honestly and frankly....
As promised last week I am picking up the “state of us post pandemic” once again because we are nowhere better and it’s now officially “a few years down the line”. Beware this will be an up-in-arms article in the vein of the “Nobody’s OK FFS” ones of a few weeks ago and that’s because we have to...
As I’m sure you noticed *insert self-deprecating eye roll* there was no article last week and that’s because I was on a rare no-device vacation. Was it the restorative break I was hoping for? Perhaps not, I seem to have suffered from the same affliction I hear is widespread these days - the...
The article I wrote yesterday was designed to give us a different perspective. We collectively spend entirely too much time wondering whose fault it is. In this case - whose job is it to admit being responsible for the HumanDebt and fix it. And the easy answer is HR. This is why it was worth...
Before anything else let me start by saying that you won't "hear me" moan about the term "HR" here. We don't need me to repeat it, obviously referring to humans as "resources" is insanely bad but here we are and the polemics on the term won't move us further and movement is what we all so...
Today's newsletter is sponsored by Workplace from Meta, where culture and technology come together to create a more productive future of work. Check out www.workplace.com/future to learn more. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We all want to succeed and we all want to do our best work. We all also want to have the people who choose to share their skills with us and do a job for us to be happy, we do. We may not actually do anything about making that happen but in principle, of course we all want that. What makes our...
Ready for the “Even Greater Resignation” or "Great Resignation 2.0" or whatever else "catchy" title the papers will give it? No, no one is, but they’re both coming. As is a wave of “I deserve better” generalised self-respecting attitude of the workers that refuse to be the next victims of...
I see people spending time turning their thoughts into quotes complete with photos of themselves looking pensively into the distance and I sometimes cringe on their behalf. A step above liking and retweeting your own tweet, while we all can teach others many things, isn’t it awfully presumptuous...
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.