The Formula

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 people happy? Respect, care, the magic of teamwork, being in flow and feeling like they are making an impact and doing their best and seeing it be recognised. That could very well be an exhaustive list as well and still, we’re all victims of the cognitive dissonance the status quo of the workplace engulfs us to the point that we either do not see that list or believe it to be un-fixable.

We never met an enterprise that was genuinely malevolent. The sorry state of generalised fear, the active disengagement, the dread, the mistreatment, the lack of emotional investment, the politics, the punitive and sanctioning behaviours, they may all be there but never are they intentional, who would, after, want to be the architect of so much misery that only collectively slows us down? So it’s never intentional. But it’s there.

In the absence of bad intentions, we can only attribute the sorry state of HumanDebt™ to hubris and negligence. There’s also something to be said about how this massive organisational inability of making our people happy has not been an evident issue before because the way that work was organised before the age of digital and Agile has never exposed the need for the human work. In slow, waterfall contexts we can subsist on command and control and lack of care for behaviours and emotions, in fast-paced, highly volatile environments where all we need is true collaboration and healthy team dynamics while we have also to apply self-care to be competitive. All that’s human work. None of that requires billions or PhDs. Most of the need is for goodwill really.

In this video, we reiterate that there’s a simple formula for any enterprise that genuinely has its mind and heart in the right place: