What Stops YOU From Doing the Human Work?

The presumption of wanting ever higher performance, speed and betterment in Agile is a perfectionist’s dream. Not that being a perfectionist is a quality. Everything we ever do is to optimise for speed and -ideally client-driven quality-. Just look at the talk on VSM, Flow Engineering, and so much more. We want to make sure that not only are we exponentially faster and better than the non-Agile crowd, but that within our own corner we’re taking any blockers or delayers out and are moving as quick as humanly possible.

What sometimes bedazzles me is that while when we talk about tighter pipes or faster processes in any sense there’s little resistance - everyone agrees they want to be better-, when we talk about better human dynamics and the people work, the story is very different and there’s resistance galore.

What we tend to talk about here the most - how the organisation has oodles of HumanDebt and how they are drowning in lip service and are resisting the real human work and not providing enough organisational permission so they should audit themselves and do better, is entirely true and the greatest part of the resistance, but sadly, it isn’t the only kind there is and it is only the first layer.

Once you peel that off -IF you manage to peel that off which of course, is not a given and it’s a Sisyphean task for most of us- then you uncover what I call the team/individual resistance.

At PeopleNotTech we’ve worked with tens if not hundreds of organisations so far. Most of them have too great of organisation resistance for us to overcome. We try really hard, force their awareness curve towards the importance of the human work in general and Psychological Safety in particular as high up as we can, we empower their much-tried Superheroes, we give them a quick taste of what they could achieve but there comes a point where we have to decide if we ought to still invest or their HumanDebt is too great, the organisation too political, the learning curve too steep and the resilience of the Superheroes too fragile to keep trying.