This is Duena Blomstrom - Essays on AI, Humanity, Tech and Human Debt, a brand new site by Duena Blomstrom that's just getting started. Things will be up and running here shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails when new content is published!

Most organisations are trying to improve performance.

Very few are asking a more fundamental question:

Is the work actually happening?

You believe your systems are working.

Why shouldn't you?

Tasks are marked complete
Dashboards show progress
Outputs are being generated

From the outside, everything looks fine.

But something feels off.

— Work takes longer than it should
— Decisions feel less certain
— People are quietly fixing things

You don’t have a performance problem.
You have a reality problem.

Download the short version (1-page PDF)
→ The Execution Illusion

Most organisations today operate on a dangerous assumption:

If a system reports execution, we assume execution happened.

This is no longer true.

A new failure mode has emerged:

Believable Non-Execution

Where:

work appears complete
systems report success
metrics look healthy

But:

outcomes don’t exist
value is not created
humans are compensating silently

The problem is not failure.

The problem is the appearance of success.

You’ve seen this.
You’ve worked around it.
You’ve probably explained it away.

1. A task is “done” but needs rework
2. AI output looks correct but requires heavy editing
3. Teams say “it works” — but avoid relying on it
4. Reports show progress — but nothing moves faster

No one escalates it.

Because:

— it technically “works”
— it doesn’t fully fail
— it’s easier to compensate than confront

And you chose not to escalate it—because it “wasn’t broken enough”.

Human Debt™

This is where the cost accumulates.

Not in systems.
In people.

Human Debt is the invisible effort required to make broken systems appear functional.

It looks like:

— manual fixes
— quiet workarounds
— double-checking outputs
— unspoken uncertainty

It is:

— unpaid
— untracked
— expected

And it grows.

It becomes part of how work gets done.
And once it does, no one questions it anymore.

Execution Debt

Over time, this becomes:

Execution Debt.

Where:

— work is reported as complete
— but execution is partial, fragile, or false

This creates:

— decisions based on incomplete reality
— optimisation of systems that don’t actually work
— compounding operational risk

You are now making decisions on work that never actually happened.

You can detect this.

But not where you’re looking.

Not in dashboards.
Not in metrics.

In behaviour.

You will recognise this immediately:

— Faster agreement, less challenge
— More output, less confidence
— Quiet corrections after “completion”
— Increasing reliance on checking, not trusting

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

You don’t need better metrics.

You need a different question.

Replace this:

“Is performance improving?”

With this:

Did execution actually happen?

AI didn’t create this problem.
It made it invisible at scale.

Because AI systems:

— generate outputs quickly
— appear correct
— are trusted too early

Which means:

You can scale non-execution without realising it.

You already know where this is happening.

There are parts of your organisation where:

— work is marked done, but isn’t
— systems are trusted, but shouldn’t be
— people are compensating, but not saying it

You’ve just learned to work around it.

Most organisations try to:

— improve performance
— optimise workflows
— increase adoption

Without answering the only question that matters:

Is execution real?

If you don’t verify execution:

— you cannot trust your metrics
— you cannot trust your systems
— you cannot trust your decisions

Before you optimise AI, verify execution.

Because if execution isn’t real—
neither are your results.

If this feels familiar:

→ Verify execution integrity
https://aiadoptionperformance.com

Download the short version (1-page PDF)
→ The Execution Illusion

We have such "bigger problems"... than my leaving LinkedIn because it's now a cesspit of brain gunk, AI slop and intellectual laziness hidden behind a "block" button, of course.

WWIII is effectivelty now on (1st or 2nd of March 2026 - what a bizarre experience to be living through the days that will later be recorded in history as Day 0 and not be sure which one it really is whilst everyone is playing chicken with war declarations!), and meanwhile, the Epstein Files are doing away with our scraps of humanity and forcing us to denounce the all-too-necessary cognitive dissonance that got us this far with the matrix and the organizational theatre.

Polycrisis is upon us all collectively and it is practially VUCA for us civilians.

Loads of foolishness happens in many industries these days when it comes to the future of work. Everyone can tell in their heart of hearts that the wind of change is blowing strong as carrying on like it’s 1996 is simply not sustainable when it comes to creating what is expected as outcomes by consumers if not stakeholders.

That doesn’t mean everyone is ready or willing to embrace the change. For evident reasons I write and speak about a lot, accepting change is necessary and executing is rarely joyous and straightforward and it puts people on defensive so deep it’s paralysing. This is of course not something that can be fixed overnight and the process of acceptance and then true alignment will take as long as it takes for those on the back foot to be convinced they can lower their heel and step on safe, solid ground.

In other words, businesses everywhere will have to make their dedication to the new ways of work crystal clear and demonstrate over and again that they sincerely mean it before employees will be willing to really change ways which they have been familiar with for tens of years.

Starting with managers and leaders who have to leave all they learned in business school at the door and manage without the clarity of “command and control”, to project managers and knowledge workers who now have to think and feel Agile and lean and to generally anyone who now has to leave their knowledge, their skills and even their sitting comfort zone for the pop-up/cross functional/swat teams, everyone has to accept that from hereon the game is new.

Here are some of the things we were all rewarded for traditionally:

Knowledge and expertise – hard skills over having empathy, purpose and a growth mindset – the skills which machines are starting to become infinitely better than humans at;

Being a “decisive” leader – controlling and commanding in lieu of being a servant leader and collaborating;

Sequential thinking – slow analysis versus speed and MVPing;

Getting approval – obtaining internal sign-off as a final act in a project versus depending on customer feedback;

Obeying – execution over curiosity, dialogue, creativity, learning and failing;

Individualism – “Keeping one’s job” and “looking good” over building things as a real team;

I haven’t said much in a while for a few reasons - some are good as we are developing cool things - a Belonging tool and a NeuroSpicy@Work platform and there are many excited product team design meetings and intense podcast conversations connected to both- and a few not that brilliant. You see, I’ve been feeling rather dejected with our “industry”. I had such great hopes for us but looking at the state of the workplace, the overall adoption of our software meant to augment the Human Work, and the mental and emotional state of tech teams drowning in Human Debt™ everywhere, I had to concede they may have been in vain. At least for now.

Of the many industries I have traversed over the past 20 years, the tech world is the only one where there is concern with human behaviour by any other employees than the HR department. Take DevOps - something that could have easily been technical only and yet it turned into an exploration of culture and arguably the most important one there is. It is what fascinated and attracted me to the Tech world in the first place and sparked my fetish for agility. Over the years I’ve met so very many so called “techies” who were more interested in human aspects than many leaders in other functions and industries and that still stands and is amazing.

What difference does that make though?

That’s right, that’s the kicker that occurred to me a few months ago and made me take a step back from my unwavering admiration of the DevOps discourse and the Human-focused side of Tech.

There is no real action. The exploration is entirely academic and there is a lack of willingness to “speak truth to power” and fix systemic issues. What’s worse? We don’t admit this to be the case.

“Agilists” and “Techies” are the first ones to understand Human Debt and yet what do they really and truly do about it? Loads at an individual level, yes, but at an enterprise level? At the level where it makes a difference en masse? That’s right, not much.

If I had a dollar for every time that a tech leader with their heart in the right place, stepped down from their efforts to better the developer’s lives -and ultimately productivity- and start a program, buy software or install a new practice of daily Human Work because they were told off by HR, I’d afford to donate our software forever. Incidentally, it has taken a lot of donating to get needles moving in this industry because of this very reason. This eventual backing off of those DevOps enthusiasts who know what’s what, when challenged (and at times threatened) by those who don’t either know, or care.

For a long time I had thought that Agility itself is the crux and the key because once every corner of the planet would be truly Agile in their heart of hearts, there is no way they could keep being so without the human work it necessitates to breed genuine psychological safety and true communication. In my overly optimistic dreams, this is why Agile would have changed Culture at large as an unlikely agent of transformative new ways. It’s what I wrote about in “Tech-Led Culture” - a book that very (very!) few have read partly because I’m a horrid marketer of my own stuff, and partly because it’s too heavy and carries this premise of a duty for change I envisioned us all to have.

To me, having seen the light on the topic of the importance of lowering Human Debt in enterprises, there is no way that vision wouldn’t have emboldened everyone to carry on fighting for genuine major change of culture.

Nowadays, call it cape fatigue or bitterness, but I don’t see it that way any more. I no longer believe that techies will be the “Human Debt Fighters and HumanWork Advocates” that we desperately need to apply all they know and feel to change workplace culture.. What I mistook for a combination of slow awareness building combined with an intense period of workplace changes, is in fact something else entirely that will stop most techies or DevOps enthusiasts from boldly pushing large scale cultural change that they have proof is needed at an organisational level. That something else is likely a combination between intense Impostor Syndrome on these topics and sheer self-preservation in a world ever-more-driven by dread and control.

This article builds on the Human Debt Framework.

Another from the "Golden Hits" edition. Got some 40k views on Forbes and got me such a stern talking from thieir editorial team (as you'll read in my Memoirs) that it had me move to LinkedIn. This was written many many moons ago obviously, but I revisited and if I were to change a word, it would only be much harsher because over the Pandemic the HumanDebt this led to compounded with the Tech Debt the "advised" organisations had and big failure stories came out of ING and SEB and others and many have been captured in either People Before Tech or, recently when they claimed they can do DevOps in TechLedCulture. There's more to that story that I documented since and it's going into Emotional Banking 2.0 which you can pre-order here.

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Over the last couple of years, 17 years after its birth in the manifesto, it seems that Agile as a concept is finally coming of age as a philosophy and way of thinking in lieu of being seen as a mere set of practices and a project management methodology.

This article builds on the Human Debt Framework.

Originally published in Forbes many many moons ago (2018, pre-pandemic) and needed to be re-read ever so often as "transformation" cycles have victors and losers and they all want safety so here's the revised version.

“Nobody gets fired for buying IBM”  is a phrase anyone working in technology has come across. When I first heard it close to 20 years ago before having it repeated in tens of the large organizations I’ve worked with, I remember being immediately puzzled “Why didn’t they? Why were they doing so in the first place?” and how the responses of patient industry veterans seemed unsatisfactory and to this day, they still do.

According to them, it was the only safe bet - when employees in various organizations were mandated to find the best piece of software or consultancy they could for a certain project, should they have bought it from IBM, this was to shield them from repercussions if anything had gone wrong as they presumably had the strongest of reputations for not allowing that to happen.

Why isn’t this “things our grandparents used to say”

If we are to closely examine where this comes from, above the simplistic idea of “they are a mammoth who can pay for it if it all goes belly up”  it’s a fascinating lesson in branding as IBM was known for only taking on a project if they firmly believed they could deliver what was expected of them, and that they would stay on to see it through, no matter the consequences and above the monetary motivation.

In other words, they were supremely dedicated to providing quality service to their clients. Leaving aside the consideration of why that should ever be anything but the norm in business in general, if we speak to IBMers that have been around “in the olden days”, they will confirm the conscientious stance was not PR but a strongly held internal belief of only engaging when they believed they could over-deliver. They -along with most everyone else in technology- would also admit that is no longer the case.

Over the past 30 years, IBM, as any other company has changed considerably and the software and services they provide are in no discernable fashion by default better than the competitors big and small, or even the opensource alternatives and as such, it’s nothing but sad that this hasn’t registered with parts of the market (it certainly has registered in places like China if you look up their history with the company) and that the phrase still reverberates today.

Job security at all costs

It would be interesting to examine who this motto truly pertains to. Is it the developer lead asked to do the comparison between IBM and another piece of software who suggested the latter who would go? Is it the head of procurement that approved it? Is it the P&L holder or really the executive who had nothing to do with the actual decision, but whose head would ultimately roll when the project proved a failure?

Between my LinkedIn shaddow ban, building a few new exciting ventures we're about to annunce and the podcasts things have been blissfully “quiet” from my side. Today though, I need to “write to you guys about something”. I’ve been putting it off in the hopes that either my perspective would change or I would be able to put it in a way that would land best, and quite frankly, neither the former nor the latter have transpired-so here goes: the tech industry’s response to “vibe coding” is wrong. I’ll pad this and explain myself, but ultimately, I believe it is acting as a disservice to the software industry to have this reaction to what’s been happening of late.

The AI Storm Is Here. We’re All Already in It.

No one reading this will be blind to the devastating effects AI can -and now does indeed- have on creativity and creation. Be it images, as in the latest Ghibli-style scandal of last week; writings, as in the Meta stealing our books scandal (BTW, that got two of my books-and countless articles about banks for some reason -so if you would like to support despite how Zuck robbed me, please buy them for real from Amazon: People Before Tech is here and Tech-Led Culture is here); or code, when it comes to having inserted itself into tech business strategy, practices, and jargon; or any of the many other ways in which human toil and spark is at risk, AI’s presence is undeniable and we need to reckon with its arrival and think ahead.

Hopefully, there is a well-thought-out ahead we can design, where the ethics of our collaboration allow for protecting existing and future creation with a valuable “by human.” Hopefully, we get to collectively, as a species, sit down and carefully consider what we hold dear and valuable-and hopefully, we design and quickly execute a path where the human-machine interaction is balanced and moral. All this hope is a whole other conversation, though. What we’re here to talk about is the software industry’s reaction to AI’s admittedly dangerous and chaotic arrival.

Vibe Coding Isn’t the Problem-The Gatekeeping Response May Be

IT, Business, Product, Leadership, HR, Ops-you name it, there is no area this AI foray into our status quo doesn’t affect in today’s tech businesses, and it is only going to intensify at warp speed but the technology community’s response has been abuzz with near-unanimous condemnation.

In a nutshell, there are two hypotheses that most seem to be thrown around as cause for debate in a myriad of forms: the “Will AI replace programmers?” and the “AI-generated code is garbage” one. The former is interesting and remains to be seen, but the latter is the crux of the issue we discuss today and the backdrop of tens of articles around LinkedIn.

The tech community is appalled at the number of applications and features created by neophytes that enjoy the low barrier to coding entry that the explosion of AI tools brings to every Joe and Jill. They deplore the lack of reliability and sustainability. They already saw apps with no genuine back-end, appalling security, lack of pipeline and ability to maintain or upgrade, and a complete lack of understanding of software architecture principles reflected in a few loud disasters in the past year. Some of the vibe code has already famously backfired, and AI is still 70% “hululu” (hallucinatory), so the outrage is natural, the mistrust is natural, the disdain in the face of broken pipes and clear future mounting risk of vibe-code making it to production and infecting every backend is a natural reaction.

What We’re Really  (Rightfully) Afraid Of and What Excites

Me? I’m not a techie per se, as I can barely write a few lines of code-I would have said “without Googling” in the day, but that feels superfluous now!-but after 25 years at the intersection of tech and business, I see all the many facets of these separate perspectives from a uniquely personal vantage point, as I’ve had each of those hats on at one point or another.  You could say I know why vibe coding blows and why, but I know why it rocks and why that is too.

As a creator who is losing income to AI impersonation and content assimilation every day and sees what it does to the creative industry, I loathe the current state of affairs with a passion, of course. As someone who doesn’t think AI will replace us in the software industry-or anywhere else completely, any time soon-I still think we need a valid “ethical contract” in place ASAP. As an intrapreneur and founder of software companies with DevOps fetishes and SRE magic, of course I am sharing much of the same concerns and am appalled by the ever-growing mass of applications churned out with no concern for the bigger picture or how sustainable or scalable any of this instant code a machine once wrote live in front of our marvelling eyes really is, once we deploy it out there.

But also, you know what? Ever the ableist, self-tormenting ADHDer, my career never stayed firmly on either the business or the tech side of things-or I would have joined into the stream of protesting and accusing pieces. But I can’t because I’m all Product at heart. And as a non-programmer CPO who has led multiple software product teams, I am feeling freed, I admit. Yes, I’m churning out prototypes (and “prompt-based-project-initialisations”™?!), but beyond that -which is magic Invision would have lent my team as far back as pre-pandemic-, I’m in love with the possibilities, the speed of shared visibility, the capability of common language, and ultimately yes, the capability to break past the IT gatekeeping we have been suffering for years, where we met more “computer says no”s than we can count. As that Product Owner? It was about time!

This article builds on the Human Debt Framework.

Forget AI in the computer industry (where indeed the discourse is complex as its appearance shakes the very foundation of software crafting, engineering, product and design alike), what about it everywhere else? How does it affect every other employee in every other industry and what’s first emergency for you as a leader of an “AI or DIE” company?

Let’s first look around for context. Much is happening in the world. Most of it dreadful. Little to be pleased for or feel proud about. No matter what side of the political spectrum you happen to be on, you’d have to be blind not to see how it all feels like it’s crumbling faster than we can build anything.

I have been writing about the tech and business world, for what is now gosh, nearly 20 years. I’ve been lucky that they have been pivotal years in human and technology development. When I started my career the internet was barely there, everything else came after. The revolution that iPhones brought about, cloud computing, SaaS, digital money, living our lives through apps, everything we see whizzing by on the infernal informational highway came at us at once in the space of only a few (tens of) years.

That makes us all sorely unprepared. It’s a lot. It’s incredibly much. Much more than our brains and our bodies were built for. And they are breaking on us.

The world is in the midst of a physical and mental health crisis of unprecedented size and it’s rare to find anyone who thinks they’re doing peachy. And all this is before we recount that it is hardly just the digital explosion that we grapple with but ecological disasters, pandemics and wars thrown in for universal good measure as if to test our final limits.  It’s no wonder we are faced with a world more divided and less compassionate than ever. Some even suggest we may collectively have developed “zoochosis”, a condition wild animals develop in captivity characterised by uncommon behaviours and distress. After all, we do indeed all live in cages of our own making and no one touches any grass anymore. (Millennium pun intended).

And then again, and above all this, we all have myriads of small and big life crises to navigate that make being open and kind at work, a truly trite consideration.

Whatever it is that has colluded to made humans more cruel and less connected than ever to each other, it’s here and it’s everywhere including in the workplace. HR and organisational efforts everywhere are as we know, largely useless if not even utterly impotent (if they weren’t they would have protected the diversity and equity work that is being thrown out the windows this year) so who is there to observe this worsening and change things? And mind you, change them not because it’s the nice and moral thing to do, but because presiding over a cruel, closed off and disconnected employee body is bad (and very costly!) business.

Truth be told, most of us are never in the office anymore and much of these interactions are yes harder to observe in particular with how we never learned to manage people remotely after all but there’s gaslighting, gossiping, isolation, mockery and worse in calls, email and zooms everywhere. There’s aggressive behaviour and there’s even systemic bullying we hardly ever point out and punish.  Not only that, but even more insidiously worryingly, there is a bevvy of daily small passive aggressive gestures towards each other within our own organisation when we aren’t happy at work and whilst we ignored disengagement for 20 years now it will bite us swiftly.

This may be different inside the team so you may not feel it at all at the bubble level. We’re all part of at least one team and any decent team will hopefully feel like a refuge and a point of proof that the world still stands and humans are open. Outside of the team though, whenever there’s interaction with other parts of the organisation there are loads of micro aggressions. The famous “throwing the monkey” concept of the 2000’s where corporate workers had become incredibly skilled at throwing the task back over the fence to another co-worker so that it becomes their to-do instead, is one such passive aggressive example but there are many. No one was doing it because they wanted to hurt another colleague but because they are tired, resentful and fed up and would do anything at times to get out of an assignment.

Kindness, compassion, empathy, humour, intuition, creating fearlessly, communicating openly, being human to each other - there are the things we are starting to forget. And to be honest with you, these are precisely the things we ought to have bettered so that we are prepared for what is to come.

We can’t. It’s here, it’s all encompassing and yes, it changes everything, yes but hear me out. This is not because it will take our jobs but because it will take away the veil of unexamined convention we had harboured at work. Things that ought to have been tested and were not, things that were never designed and thought out as they should have, things that worked held together by a corporate string and a prayer - they are all being exposed when we start attempting to automate.

There’s a rightful feel of unease in the air in every organisation where the “AI or DIE” wind swept through - people aren’t only afraid of being discarded in an instant as no longer of use -and the effects that has on their sense of reciprocal loyalty with their workplace!- but afraid of any action and decision they had ever made coming under scrutiny.

And they aren’t wrong to fear that. To keep things moving at this breakneck speed in business, we rightfully tolerated a high degree of inexactly and mistakes. The infamous tech and human debt. We took shortcuts, we may have tried unorthodox or unapproved things, we moved fast and made it works. If it all gets audited to be automated and rethought in terms of AI capabilities, will all of these past moments of inadequacy bust open? That is the dread. The vengeful arm of AI coming to collect on all our past mistakes and inferiority complexes. So people resist it. All of it. To keep the audit away. And when they do resist, they also entrench deeper into their distressed, unkind, unopen behaviours and that makes the automation and radical change towards AI even more urgent.

Organisations must first and foremost eliminate “AI Fear” before they will get to genuinely audit and automate their operations. They may think they have started doing it already as they are sinking millions into “will AI it all for you” empty promises from vendors of AI snake oil, but unless they change how their people feel, they won’t even be able to tell us what’s what inside the systems they built and we’ll all end up in Klarma or Duo PR and Employee Branding scandals.

Tell your people you are not firing them! (Unless of course if you are, case in which don’t lie to them, obvs:) but that you need them to be your most important asset  in this new world- the all important humans in the loop. Tell them you need them to co-architect the automation with you so that you are aiming to create ways in which AI will remove blockers, take away unpleasant tasks and speed them up, not try to sabotage and denounce them as they feared.

Tell them it’s safe. That they can breathe in and be open and just focus on working hard on their emotional intelligence and their uniquely human bits as you need them in this new era. Make them truly believe and comprehend that the ask is new. The ask, once the machines do all the other work, is for empathy, for creation, for reading minds and having hearts, for learning to express ourselves and for being bold, loud, kind and open to each other.

Don’t just tell them so either, practical action - limit their BAU assignments and ensure the WIP always has tasks to better their human in the loop capabilities and EQ with weekly tasks such as “Work on cross-team connection” or “Hold a safe space B!tch Fest”. Then honestly and critically look at how performance is judged in your organisation - do you truly reward your employees for the human work? If not, if it’s not called out explicitly as a priority, change that right away because the incentives of yesteryear will not bring you the results you need today.

I don’t know what it will take for your people in particular to grow in these matters - perhaps they need communication coaching, psychological safety and belonging tools, radical honesty, clean conflict techniques, coaches that specialise in emotional intelligence or simply more trust in leadership, safety and clarity but you should be able to rummage through the massive Human Debt™ you’ve always felt you’re carrying around, and think of the quickest levers of bettering the employees emotional state then do it.

If you’re serious about AI, leave the technicalities of how to automate for later and be serious about your people first. Reassure them, hear them, see them truly and bring them along so they build this better future of loops and machines and humans.

If you’re one of the ones who believes humans no longer matter -good luck! Your Human Debt™ will explode, and Tech Debt won’t be far behind.

If not and you’re a true leader reading this, forget about teaching your employees about LLMs, MCPs, agentic AI, etc and instead first teach them to bring their humanity at work unabashedly and consistently. To feel and to open. To be alive and themselves. To use their gut feeling and their years of feeling and interacting. Rethink their value around not their easy-to-now-replicate skills, but instead their uniquely human selves, the collection of un-replicable experiences and emotions that AI can only parrot. Tell them this. That the loop needs both. That this is a live building exercise, that they need to lay bricks of human foundation and remain as AI sherpas and teachers, not competitors.

Bring and keep your people in a loop where machines compliment them and your stock points soar - that’s the only way we can realise on AI’s promise at scale.

• Bring and keep your people in a loop where machines compliment them and your stock points soar - that’s the only way we can realise on AI’s promise at scale.
• And if we won’t, then sooner or later, in a reverse-Klarna move, AI will do away with the loop, the stock exchange and us all.
• Discover your neurodivergent traits - autism, ADHD, Dyspraxia, AuDHD, and more with affordable, science-informed quizzes. No waitlists. No gatekeeping. Just clarity, fast.

And if we won’t, then sooner or later, in a reverse-Klarna move, AI will do away with the loop, the stock exchange and us all.

Discover your neurodivergent traits - autism, ADHD, Dyspraxia, AuDHD, and more with affordable, science-informed quizzes. No waitlists. No gatekeeping. Just clarity, fast.

Navigating multiple views of neurodiversity whilst designing ways to maintain high levels of empathy for all has been exceptionally difficult in the ever more divisive -and divided- fractured organisational landscape of today. Speaking to smart people-leaders has helped me see new facets of challenges and talents many employees hide underneath their every-day “I’m Fine, it’s Fine” business suits armour. In helping them find ways to declare war on the armour and genuinely reach their colleagues, I found there’s much we’ve put off considering on the complex DEI topics and we can not allow for dismantling any inclusivity efforts before we rectify this.

Fundamentally inbuilt at the very base of the entire pyramid of topics that make up safety and inclusion at work - intersectionality: the way parts, sides, and dimensions of our human experience intersect and morph into each other. There are countless facets that, in various proportions, define those of us who don't neatly fit the mold. Let's call us "The Differents" for the sake of this reflection. Crucial to understand is that we are different in several ways at once. After all, no one is "only" autistic or "only" a single parent or "only" gender-non-conforming or "only" economically disadvantaged or "only" racially marginalised. These identities weave together, layering like film slides, each frame essential to bringing the full picture into motion.

Just consider how race, economic status, geography, and belief systems add complexity to these intersections. Being neurodivergent in an urban tech hub is vastly different from being neurodivergent in a rural, underfunded community. A Black autistic woman experiences workplaces differently than a white autistic man. A trans person navigating a high-income corporate role encounters different challenges than someone in a precarious gig economy job. These combinations aren't just footnotes; they fundamentally shape lived experiences.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: when these differences are overlooked or flattened into single-choice neat categories in the workplace, companies accrue even more HumanDebt. Just as Technical Debt builds up when shortcuts are taken in software, one of the ways in which HumanDebt accumulates, is when people in all their messy, intricate identities are reduced to checkbox diversity. It happens when we create performative inclusion policies but sideline neurodivergent voices in leadership and drive our best employees to fear disclosing a diagnosis, an identity, or any authentic data. It happens when we invest in DEI initiatives but fail to consider how socioeconomic background or cultural expectations influence workplace behavior or be genuinely curious about any of these challenges together.

So how many of us Differents are out there? What categories are we using to count us, and which experiences are being quietly excluded? Any gut-level estimation feels insufficient. But the bigger question looms. Why does it matter? How few of us Differents would there need to be for it to justify not caring? What is the threshold of difference that makes supporting us worthwhile?

This article builds on the Human Debt Framework.

We may have killed Psychological Safety y’all and it may not return until the “new guard” takes over completely. This sadly, is not an overstatement or click-bait, but bitter observation. With the exception of isolated pockets in smart enterprises, Psychological Safety is by and large at the lowest I’ve ever seen it after 6 years of studying it.

People are the least open, the least collaborative, the least willing to risk position and limb to express their honest opinions and companies are suffering from this, but they aren't measuring anything that would reveal it. So how do I know? The hundreds of interviews a week we have with the teams that are not yet our clients shows it and, much more concerningly, even the data from the teams that are using our software shows an overall decline of all indicators now.

Are the teams using it and doing the Human Work regularly better off than their counterparts? Of course they are, the dialogue is open and they have a tool to actively work on the actual components of Psychological Safety - they can improve their communication, their EQ, their resilience, their flexibility, genuine engagement and so on but they are having to do a lot more work to maintain levels that are keeping their teams functional than before. I say “functional” and not “efficient” or “productive” because the last two are not really measured. Anywhere.

Ask whoever your preferred Silicon Valley giant may be, how they measure the last two or even a general “team performance” category and if you are to dig into their data you’ll have to concede it’s shambolic.

Why is that? The fear of real dialogue has enveloped this area of HR if we are to be honest. Genuine data and knowledge of how one’s employees truly feel and think, is no longer a North Star in most places. They may claim it is, and “WeDOCare Theatre” still has regularly scheduled performances,  but I’m here to tell you it’s not important to anyone to know the innermost feelings of their employees or keep them expressing themselves fearlessly.

In the tech industry in particular, after the hundreds of thousands of layoffs and the daily messages on social media of big names not finding gainful new challenges, the climate of fearful silence is well and truly generalised now.

Let's be clear once more: this whole "return to the office" (RTO) charade is absolute insanity.

In this (exceptionally indignant and mercifully short) episode of our Secret Society for Human Work Advocates and Human Debt Fighters Podcast, Dr. Allessandria Pollizzi and I break it down in much more detail than I will do in writing here complete with a “Dear Jeff” note on my part so give it a listen and subscribe on our preferred platform

Unfortunately, much as we would like to maintain levity, this is monstrously serious because the Amazon RTO flare will signal to the rest of pack and unless something drastically changes to course-correct soon, this will all start spelling disaster.

I’m very lucky. I get to speak to incredible people who tirelessly think and feel all day. Some of these conversations are recorded and you can find them in our podcasts. Here’s what you may have missed on there of late:

Karen Ferris and I spoke about her new “Be Remarkable” book on resilience and the delta to leadership greatness and believe me, simply listening to her will go a long way to solving your looming leadership crisis - See the episode here or listen to it here

Dave Ballantyne and myself hosted dr. Cherry Vu and Rob England of Teal Unicorns and they have opened our eyes about cultures where “truth and beauty” in business are not dirty words but serve to underpin ways to lower the Cultural/HumanDebt of organisations in APAC- See the episode here or listen to it here

Dan Harris and I spoke about being diagnosed as an adult, disclosure, stigma, autistic families and the future of understanding neurodivergence in the business realm - See the episode here or listen to it here

On the Secret Society of Human Debt Fighters and Human Work Advocates Susan DiClemente spoke to us about women in STEM and quoted immediately actionable strategies that can help them succeed - see the episode here or listen to it here

I've been trying to avoid joining the "Is Agile dead?" conversation that pops up repeatedly, as it has once again on LinkedIn in recent months. It's tempting to get caught up in this debate, but it happens so frequently. Let's be honest—whenever there's a major change or new initiative in a company, someone inevitably questions, "What about Agile? Maybe it's not so great after all!"

When the rhetorics does rear its head, exasperatingly incomprehensible as it may be, I always refer people to my controversial “Agile Isn’t “Out”, You are!” Forbes article of years ago as it says it all, nothing changed and the backlash I get for it is the same no matter when it comes back around again.

Why does it? Because no one wants to hear it, as I postulated many times before, “Agile Isn’t Business, It’s Personal” - in that genuine capacity for agility is a state of mind and it is not as common as we want to believe. Having spent years studying agility and its psychological tenets as a self-professed “Agile anthropologist” I know it requires a combination of extreme grit, mental flexibility, resilience, intelligence, passion and a dash of perfectionism (debatable as the use of that is) and that it can never be done “by numbers” and without having genuinely embraced it at a deep personal level.

“It all hinges upon our EQ. What does emotional intelligence have to do with it?  I've often written about this in the past, Agile is a "Way of Thinking not a Way of Working".

Being Agile creates mental pressure to the practitioner. The old ways of work have served the employee for years, changing anything is intensely risky and most of us are risk averse when it comes to our professional lives. At the same time, anyone who looks under the hood understands that Agile speeds things up but may expose limitations as it needs the practitioner to eternally be alert, always question their progress, never stop pushing themselves and others and always strive for new and better. Excellence is not comfortable or easy to attain and all that Agile does is enable excellence.