Who Will Deliver Us from Severance?

First a spot of bragging, my People Before Tech book got longlisted for CMI's Management Book of the Year Award and I am truly chuffed because it means so many more people will read how we have to bridge the HR/IT gap if we want to distribute the human work and start with Psychological Safety to get happy teams that super perform and maybe that will mean less HumanDebt™ for someone somewhere.

Secondly, this will be one of those “I’m sorry team, but I don’t know what the intersection is between the newsletters and maybe you already read this” articles as I have spent the week obsessed with Severance. If you’ve never read the other articles you’re in luck, this may be a tad less boring but you can find them here - “The (Semi)Dystopian Answer to the Work/Life Balance Question” and To Be or Not to Be Human at Work

This will be my last article on the topic, promise, but here’s why I’m obsessed with Severance: it touches on all the big themes. Command and control to the extreme; workers’ right to respect, happiness and free will; thinking versus feeling at work; indoctrination; human dynamics in teams and the overarching ethical context.

I do wonder if it speaks “louder” to some of us and if those are the ones with more to deplore and bemoan. I do wonder how come I didn’t even understand the double-entendre behind what they call “the break room”. I wonder how come Hollywood types had enough insight into the office drama we live to have concocted this theme and if that means that command and control is now visible to society at large in a more glaring fashion than before. I also wonder how come some people saw the series and haven’t been as up in arms about its genius as we are here, despite being all about the HumanDebt in general themselves. I wonder if we’re ever truly safe from that future with the position we are getting our own selves in.

That’s the main win of it really, the way it’s made me wonder and I suspect, the way it’s made many people think.