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“Just between us Human Debt Fighters” - straight off the cutting floor of the Secret Society and the people AND tech podcasts, this is Duena’s voice so content will be behind a paywall at times.
Find more at www.duenablomstrom.com or at www.techledculture.com subscribe to my newsletters on SubStack, listen to my podcasts on all big platforms and buy my new book: Tech Led Culture: Maximising the Potential of Your Business and People” and lastly, but most importantly, come join the fight against Human Debt!
Duena Blomstrom (00:01.57)
Hi and welcome to what is going to be Dwenna's reading of People Before Tech. I have accepted or decided or resolved that the true reason why people haven't read People Before Tech, why most of us haven't even heard of the book, is that it came out at the wrong time, right in the middle of the pandemic. And because of that, people have missed it. Of course they have. Why else would they not mention it when they should have tribute it?
So in the spirit of that, I'll start with the preface and anything else such as interviews with Jim Kim or bits and pieces that I don't think are quite that key and maybe a reading of what Professor Dr. Amy Edmonds and her side in her kind preface, all of those you can keep away, but this is the meat of it. So welcome to the first part of this. The first part of People Before Tech, a book that came out, I should say, for context in 2020.
2021, I want to say, yeah. 2022. Let's check. One. Be positive. Yes. 2021. And a book that was, look, I'm confused. I've been saying the same thing for so long. It's not shocking that I don't know which one is which, right? And the book that has been recommended by Heather McGowan, who's a keynote speaker at the Adaptation Advantage. Maybe you've heard of her.
an incredible change management expert, Theo Presley, who's a futurist and co-author of The Future Starts Now, also a book I actually wrote in, and Gita Kittegard, who's an incredible agile coach and speaker on psychological safety, and of course, the one and only Brett King, and that is if we ignore who has prefaced and closed it. All of his people thankfully have
Duena Blomstrom (01:56.606)
Human debt is a term I called while working on my first book, Emotional Banking, Fixing Charter, Leveraging Fintech and Transforming Retail Banks into Brands. And it corresponds to an IT concept called tech debt, which refers to wrong turns, bad decisions or ignored mistakes made when writing code or architecting a system, which eventually have to be dealt with and cleaned up or the system is not sustainable and will collapse.
Human debt is the equivalent which we have created in workplaces where emotional quotient, EQ and human connection and teamwork have been... No, no, don't stop anything. Alarms are the bane of our lives. They happen a lot in our studio. Apologies everyone. We're worried. So.
Shall we try again? From Human Debt is the equivalent of this tech bit we were talking about, which we have created in workplaces where emotional quotient, referred from here on as EQ, human connection and teamwork have been neglected, demoted, and shunned. I resolved to find ways to do something about it. To power this work, I had to turn to my own why. These were the very...
in depth ways in which we were writing in the midst of the pandemic. Don't judge me. It's a simple and everyday one for me. I want to eradicate the human debt. And thanks to the new technological innovations, it is much less of a lofty goal than it may seem. The intention is not to point fingers and paint all organizations with the same brush.
as there are many pockets of greatness, from HR heroes to the agile superheroes, who are true change makers, often lonesome knights valiantly battling the windmills of the organisation with all their might. I have met tens, no hundreds of such exceptions, and I am not ungrateful or obtrusive that they exist. I am simply being honest about what the size of the remaining human debt is, despite of their effort.
Duena Blomstrom (04:08.406)
Broadly, we have neglected our workforce, okay? We have put their happiness second. We have made empty gestures of respect. We have barely considered their wellbeing. We have picked up and dropped terms such as employee satisfaction, engagement, morale, passion, purpose, collaboration, team building, and have done precious little for any of those. We have suffocated them with process and made them fearful and wary, often placing them in survival mode.
They are acutely stressed, they're tired, they're afraid and unmotivated. Their mental health is on the sharp decline and we pretend that's none of our business. We treat them as resources, we employ no true empathy, we value IQ over EQ. We regard anything to do with understanding and helping them as an afterthought or a weakness. We never prioritize and value them. It's a modern day tragedy and this accumulation of missed opportunities and lack of foresight and courage will eventually prove devastating.
side author note here, such as in the Dora report result.
Back to the reading. Just like technical debt always needs to be paid, the bill for human debt has been presented to the vast majority of incumbent organizations and those who will not find a way to pay it off urgently by investing in people practices, we'll see their businesses strain under the crippling effect of losing key staff and spending a growing percentage of time and resources backing accelerating turnover and lack of productivity.
Here, in this book, I will show how psychological safety is the only high-performance lever we need, and teams are the only unit we must focus on. I will demonstrate how frameworks and methodologies that are meant to help a mythical organization alongside empty rhetoric are harmful, and we shouldn't waste our time on that. However, if we get psychological safety right, it results in high-performing employees who will also be satisfied and emotionally balanced and really happy.
Duena Blomstrom (06:08.638)
Organizations are moving from detailed long-term planning ahead of time to use more loosely defined drawbacks and working in smaller increments with measurements and indicators for guidance, engaging in regular introspection and continuous improvement to produce the right results faster, something known as being agile. I plan to eventually be able to use these agile key performance indicators to show that simply because I feel that's agile's greatest calling, beyond delivering results fast.
It is that humanity has converted as a proof of concept of what it is possible to achieve if you shift the focus to humans. That's my why.
Sounds like a lot, but it isn't. It's a simple and deeply needed approach. I share it with the team. We're stupendously lucky, we know. For all of us at People No Tech, which I co-founded, this why is so evident. We need no mission pep talks and no visionary affirming moments. Change lives by making people happy and highly productive at work. It's so grand and deeply felt that it gets us all out of bed and ready to do hard work naturally. But of course, for other companies and other people, the why is so much harder to find.
If you run teams, you have to help them find it. And if you don't, and you only run yourself, you need to find it for yourself too. The name of our company in itself is arguably controversial. Being called people not tech when we are designing a software solution at the intersection of research and everyday work raises eyebrows. And that is precisely why we chose it. It is a paradox. We are more than willing to explore and debate at every given opportunity.
as it contains the crux of the issue. Even if we employ technology to enable chemistry at work and to design and foster the perfect team dynamic, and we use all the magic of TechWeek and Master, and why we firmly believe that real change at scale can never happen in the absence of any software to enable the people practice, it is still never about the software, but always about the people. It keeps us honest every day, and we hope it can keep you too. When we arrived at the best certainty that we...
Duena Blomstrom (08:09.862)
Effective to effect great scale change in organizations, we have to do so at the team level. We looked at many theories on networks and team dynamics from Tuckman or Gershik and more effective models such as Fire or Bee and then simply we looked at them over and over again and then we really realized that there isn't any other lever that correlates more closely to how well a team performs than how safe they feel as a unit. Sadly for anyone interested in a quick surefire fix that ensures people are effective when they are plunged into the new ways of work.
There is no other factor one can reliably point up. Giving people more money, tally their responsibility or perks, while nice and useful is not nearly as good as giving them a work environment where they feel heard, supported, and can flourish. It's that simple. Let's face it, the good of the enterprise, it's too lofty of a goal. No one wakes up in the morning and goes to work powered solely by the need to ensure more end customers have access to their product or service. For the most part, even the good of the team is too lofty of a goal.
Previously castrated by process and with few ways to do anything for the good of their people other than show compassion by commiserating over beers once in a blue moon, leaders find it hard to want to effect change. Most people at every level do want change and better meant to happen. They don't scoff at it as an afterthought in their hearts of heart. I don't believe in business concepts done exclusively in the name of higher moral ground. At the very least, some part of the motivation needs to be of a commercial nature where the business can immediately see the connected value.
Before psychological safety, despite the efforts of scholars and specialists who could show the negative impact on turnover or the positive impact on hands-on KPIs of employee satisfaction, the topic of keeping your workforce happy was viewed as something that was nice to think of if there's any time and budget left after we do the real stuff. Psychological safety is most commonly defined as being able to slow, to, being able, very funny.
to show and employ oneself without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career at an individual level in Kant's definition in 1990. But it has been developed into a solid definition of a group dynamic with the studies of Professor Dr Amy Edmondson, who calls it a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. We, at People in No-Tech and me personally, define a psychologically safe team as a team that feels like family and moves mountains together.
Duena Blomstrom (10:29.886)
One where it feels like they are making magic together, where they are speaking up, they're open, they're courageous, they're flexible, they're vulnerable, they're learning, they're unafraid, and they are having fun together. And it all happens in their bubble while having a sense of accomplishment about their amazing performance. Despite the immediate sense of relating that anyone reading these definitions feels, they were hardly noticed by the business world until Google resurrected and popularized the concept by placing psychological safety
as the first element of high performing teams they studied, that they found out that they had to have at the conclusion of their extensive highest total study. We will speak about this in the chapters to come. And we do, there are many chapters about that. Psychological, back to a point, all first note really quick, because it is a trendy conversation yet again, oh my God, your company is not family, your team doesn't have to be family. Your company is not family, your team does have to be family, get over yourself, look around, it does.
a sports performance team, maybe more than a family that hates each other, but it still needs to feel that way, where you got each other's back to where you could die for each other. If you don't have that, you don't have the family feeling and you don't have the psychology, because if you were all been fighting for it, don't get me started. Back to the reading. Despite the immediate sense of relating, when anyone reading these definitions feels, they were hardly noticed. As we said before, Google research was the concept of psychologicalism. Right?
So this is why I think that psychological safety changes the game when it comes to the human death. It has such a clear connection to productivity that for the first time here, there's this concept that incidentally means employees are happier at work while simultaneously being more productive and useful to the business in being so. Speaking of sad happiness, when it comes to the psychological safety, it isn't a goal, but a blessed by-product. In a sense, it is not a method to intentionally increase happiness. Instead, an aim to have done so
In order for people can be so that they can be vulnerable, therefore they can be courageous and flexible and resilient, open and connected. And psychologically safe teams are happy, substantially happier than their counterparts. This is a fact. And therefore they stay and they develop, but more importantly, they work faster and smarter. At Google, Amazon and a handful of others, there is a number of psychological, there is a number of psychological safety. Not only a number on employee happiness, although that exists too, but also specific measurement and bottom line correlation on psychological safety.
Duena Blomstrom (12:55.894)
We have to find out that this still existed at the time of the book. The number is not a public one, and in some cases not even one that's known to employees, but it exists and it informs more actions and decisions than surprisingly many of the traditional other business KPIs. This is why they do well. This is why they can employ technology to react fast to what the consumer needs and build addictive experiences. This is why they have culture that is envied and cited across the board. This is their secret source.
We're almost done, you guys. Stick with me. We're maybe three minutes away from deliverance, but then we'll feel like we all understand why the hell I wrote the first one. Years ago, when I first heard of the psychological safety construct, I had no clue what it meant. I immediately shudder with the idea of yet another fluffy for the good of the employee concept offered by misguided unions. It immediately evoked images of forced job security at all costs, such as what it is at times seen in Scandinavian countries where retaining employees is taken to extremes.
and combined with the power of the local unions, breeds a climate where performance and effort are superfluous as everyone is a permanent fixture. These days, I remind our team that many other people will feel this doubt at first until they connect with team's family and with teams make magic when they have psychological safety. And that we must help them overcome this pre-programmed reaction against quote unquote fluffy human topic.
If some will believe it is about automated job security, more will think it belongs in the same bucket as the mental wellness conversation as it applies to employees. These days, the topic of mental health is thankfully on everyone's agenda. So that's a natural association to make. A few others will tell us they've heard about Google's efforts, and it's all about trusting your teammates. The fact is, of course, in as far as it is about humans experiencing a healthy environment,
There is a connection between all of the above, but none of these is the actual definition, and the concept is far more complex and a lot more mercantile once we understand the connection to the high performing things of the digital elite. And that makes it all the more important and sustainable. As an undeniable poetic justice bonus, the new ways of work designed to showcase the speed of technology are de facto used to show the evident advantage of having happy people, just as it is admittedly an anomaly that technologists,
Duena Blomstrom (15:13.046)
will be the ones to find ways for their people to be a real team before HR or CEOs. But it doesn't ultimately matter how we arrive at this, as long as we stop thinking it's fluffy and we start showing that it's numbered.
They say money can't buy you happiness, but in the case of our employees, reducing your human debt to increase their psychological safety in teams and therefore the resilience and happiness can increase both the revenue and lasting success of your business. Psychological safety is a team dynamic concept. Teams are non-negotiable. Speaking up is the positive behavior we need to grow, to innovate, to create, to be highly performant, and impression management is the collection of fears that does the opposite. Ultimately, becoming truly agile at heart
and reducing your human debt through a people practice with EQ and psychological safety at the center is your only chance to win, like Google and like the rest of the digital elite. End of