The Human Work Is Looking for Superheroes

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 repeat. It’s little wonder people want it out of sight. But unfortunately for all of us, there’s nothing to really unsubscribe from. Our annoyingly honest content will go away but the HumanDebt will stay. Nay, it will grow. The more we swat away the truths.

Obviously -and sadly- simply subscribing and reading this isn’t going to mean much but the courage to keep hearing it is something because it means all the Superheroes in training that are lurking in the bellies of the HumanDebt riddled beasts are one day going to be able to help to reverse it all and make true change happen for every one of their colleagues.

They would have read enough, raged enough, learned enough. They would have ultimately had enough because at some point, the indignation of how little human work is being done and how much hypocrisy the corporate world creates around us simply becomes unbearable and yes, most will simply elevate to cut their losses, stop the intellectual and emotional discomfort of observing injustice and human need go unanswered and leave but some will stay and fight and enable real shifts. Next week we will start to feature some of these superheroes on Tuesdays so stay tuned. They have such amazing stories.

This video repeats what we said yesterday - that there are 5 sine qua non conditions of succeeding in any modern enterprise and sadly for us all, none of them involves simply purchasing another training or giving people one day off - empathy, psychological safety in teams, time and resources, a focus on massive mindset change and true organisational permission to embed and mandate human work at every level of the organisation as a real priority and as the nucleus of the much-needed transformation.

“Transformation” and “change” have long been buzzwords but they can and should mean so much in the way of practicality - after all, anyone reading this could easily lead a revolutionary people strategy transformation if they were given the keys to the kingdom.