The Vanishing Superheroes, the Organisation and the HumanDebt™

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 get me wrong, when you speak about agility, DevOps culture, psychological safety and HumanDebt™ to techies like I do, there’s always a presumed level of openness and I’ve been lucky enough to have met supremely honest and courageous people throughout the journey but that seems to be even more the case now that we are coming out on the other side of the pandemic.

That said, somehow it doesn’t strike me as positive, there’s a desperation quality to it all and not a refreshed and willing to move mountains one. It almost feels like some people feel cornered into calling a spade a spade not that they are doing so because they want to see solutions. Reluctance, a touch of surliness, dejection, maybe even resentment of being left in the same place as the dust settles on the great resignation and all of these feelings on a bedrock of being emotionally and intellectually burnout as we all are.

Yesterday, during a Q&A someone asked “What are you doing to protect or foster and help your “Superheroes” that are meant to initiate and advocate for the human work?” - My instinctive answer is “Not enough!” because I always want us to do better, but objectively we are one of the software vendors most acutely aware of the risk of burnout and disillusionment that our Superheroes face and we write and speak about it all the time because we are leading this gargantuan fight to get organisations to realise and diminish they HumanDebt and the internal dysfunctions that cause it.

We can’t do much more than come up with tips, communicate what works for others and repeat ad nauseam that we need them to double down on the self-care and self-compassion. We give away content, advice, time, sometimes even licenses, whatever we can do to help, we do but we know full well it’s small in comparison to the fight that’s needed. And we lost so many to this fight.

A cursory glance over our CRM suggests 80% of the Superheroes we had been counting on that had been instrumental to advance some of our hardest implementation processes and either battled windmills to get pilots and trials in place or even helped build stupendous internal business cases for why all teams need our tool so they can get started on the human work are simply gone.