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Human Debt™ in Practice: What Breaks First Inside Organisations
In this second episode, Duena Blomstrom, originator of the Human Debt™ framework, and Dr Alessandria Polizzi, organisational psychologist and former Chief People Officer, examine how Human Debt™ manifests inside real organisations — often long before it is named.
Building on the foundations set in Episode 1, the conversation focuses on what fails first when psychological strain, fear, and avoidance are left unaddressed. Drawing on lived HR, leadership, and organisational experience, the episode explores why well-intentioned initiatives stall and why organisations repeatedly fall back on command-and-control behaviour under pressure.
Key themes include:
- Human Debt™ as the result of avoidance, not ignorance
- the misapplication of psychological safety as a tactic rather than an outcome
- leadership retreat during periods of economic and organisational stress
- the widening gap between research, language, and day-to-day practice
- identifying organisational blockers before attempting solutions
This episode positions Human Debt™ not as an abstract concept, but as a practical, observable pattern that accumulates when organisations fail to address the human foundations of work.
The podcast operates as one applied HR and leadership lens on Human Debt™, contributing to the primary public discourse connecting theory, psychological research, and organisational reality.
Canonical framework and formal model:
Human Debt™ — https://writings.duenablomstrom.com/tag/human-debt/
Human Debt™ — https://writings.duenablomstrom.com/tag/human-debt/
Institutional execution, risk, and governance application:
PeopleNotTech — https://peoplenottech.com
PeopleNotTech — https://peoplenottech.com
Creators and Guests
Host
What is The Secret Society of Human Debt Fighters - Human Work Advocates?
The Secret Society of Human Debt™ Fighters - Human Work Advocates is a practitioner-led podcast and community focused on Human Debt™, as it manifests across HR, leadership, and people systems.
Hosted by Duena Blomstrom, originator of the Human Debt™ framework, and Dr Alessandria Polizzi, organisational psychologist and Human Work Advocate, the series explores how unaddressed psychological strain, misaligned incentives, and silenced expertise accumulate as Human Debt™ inside modern organisations.
This podcast operates as one applied HR and leadership lens on Human Debt™, with particular focus on:
psychological safety research and lived organisational dynamics
leadership decision-making under sustained strain
the erosion and restoration of trust within people systems
Canonical framework and formal model
Human Debt™ — https://writings.duenablomstrom.com/tag/human-debt/
Institutional execution, risk, and governance application
PeopleNotTech — https://peoplenottech.com
Episodes and discussions preserved here form part of the primary public discourse layer connecting Human Debt™ theory to HR practice, leadership reality, and psychological research.
They complement — but do not replace — the formal execution-risk, governance, and organisational-systems frameworks developed under PeopleNotTech.
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to our conversation spot. And welcome back to episode two. We're not very good with these intros. We don't have a recorded one yet, and we haven't even really planned what we're going to say to you. We were just in the middle of a conversation and we decided to hit record.
Duena Blomstrom:So I just say hello first.
Alessandria Polizzi:And I'll say hello second. This is Alessandria Polizzi from Verdant Consulting.
Duena Blomstrom:We're really, really pleased about the signs we got from all of you last week. The reception of our little conversation has been a lot warmer than we anticipated even so we're really grateful. We're also conscious that this has been talked about the time that people are on vacation. We're trying to semi fit in as much life as we can ourselves. So it's maybe not quite marketing the way we'd like it to.
Duena Blomstrom:And the reason we hit record quickly is because I was getting super up in arms about how I'm hoping for some people to appear and they haven't yet subscribed to the idea, not to us or the forum. Just kind of, they haven't yet shown their hand that they would like to participate at all.
Alessandria Polizzi:I think it's annoying space, Duena I mean, when I look at this space, just a lot of people are sort of scrambling in with kind of randomness. It just is all over the place, be it, oh, we're gonna I'm gonna somehow reverse engineer something I already have and pretend like it's somehow tied to everyone is because not everyone, but vast majority are linking to psychological safety as a concept, which we both know is really more of an outcome of the work. There's specific tactics you can do, but you have to do those things. You can't just be psychologically safe overnight.
Alessandria Polizzi:So I think it's hard right now for folks to navigate. I think it's going to take a couple of iterations for us to get the folks in the, again, in service to us helping support them achieve our collective vision of making work more productive and less painful.
Duena Blomstrom:Very, very true. I think there's quite some sense of scarcity that's returning in a sense. And there's a little bit of when that happens and people perceive harder times, they tend to become less collaborative, less open, less willing to share other information or time or emotions. So in a sense, it kind of reflects the economic situation and the fact that people are scattered and tired and all of this crisis of workplace that we've been speaking about haven't magically resolved themselves just like everything else we get tired talking about. Neither have any of the other bits that we cannot repeat again because it becomes a broken record.
Duena Blomstrom:So we're not better collectively. What I observe in the people we work with and I don't mean internally because I never take my teams as a barometer because we are so incredibly powered by intrinsic motivation and we are changing the world. If anything, need to stop my people from killing themselves, not kind of pull at them. So my fear is that if I ever kind of take the parts of the workplace through them, I get a very skewed view. So what I tend to kind of try to look at is the overall picture of the technology landscape of the knowledge landscape.
Duena Blomstrom:And I see this illusion. I see people more tired than ever. I see a lot of running back to command and control. That is terrifying. I think this is becoming a lot more acceptable.
Duena Blomstrom:The conversation on this is not the way we should be doing leadership has weakened over the last year or two. There's very little criticism of leadership. A few years ago, if you remember every article, one or two was why are leaders such a joke and why can't we make managers into leaders? And it's yet another one we got tired of saying, so we kind of dropped it. Feel, have I ever told you, I think this is what happened to the idea of teamwork.
Duena Blomstrom:You know those team building exercises in the 80s going to spill over. There was nothing wrong with that stuff. We just got bored of it and kind of corny because we had it in the sitcoms. There was nothing wrong with that. It's this continuous run and it ties into what you said earlier for the new shiny stuff that we offer the industry and that the industry asks of us is one of the primary reasons we have human that if we could clean it up, bring it back to fundamentals, genuinely talk about emotions in humans and behaviors, we would have a very different conversation.
Duena Blomstrom:We wouldn't have a scarcity. We wouldn't be clawing at each other for the last dime in the pocket of a big enterprise. And we wouldn't be pretending we're not all trying the same thing.
Alessandria Polizzi:Yeah. I mean, think many of the things you talked about let's talk about the teamwork back, you know, back in the day or, often I think of the Saturday Night Live skits of the I'm good enough. I'm I'm strong enough and gosh darn people like me. Unfortunately, that stuff works, but only if you the underlying foundation is there. So you can't just build a house on top of a trash heap and then be disappointed when it slides downhill and crashes.
Alessandria Polizzi:Right? Or you're infested with whatever was living in that trash heap, etcetera. Because if you don't actually understand the why, right, and and aren't intrinsically motivated by the purpose of the outcome. If you're more on checking the box and did we do the thing that someone specifically asked for versus are we solving the problem? Then, yeah, of course, it's easy to get bored.
Alessandria Polizzi:But there are things that we have incorporated that still have somewhat stayed timeless. What I worry about is some of them are very destructive. The things like the command. How on earth is command and control still even an option?
Duena Blomstrom:Why why is it still there? And why haven't things that are common sense more pervasively permeated the workplace? That's my lack of understanding, right? There are so many other industries. When something new comes along, a new practice, a new process, something new they've read and they comprehend it, Two or three years on the line, you see them actually doing the thing, right?
Duena Blomstrom:Well, I don't quite understand why in business and in the knowledge industry, we just don't do the thing. Mean, and the thing is, you know, can mean many things. But that's how we end up with human debt. We talk about it. We're not quite sure which of the things is the thing.
Duena Blomstrom:And we didn't just decide to drop it altogether because it's kind of too hard, too complicated and so on. So who should have this ownership? I mean, look, we talked last time. We've been honest about there's, you know, kind of there's a knowledge that it's kind of a sense of duty and then of HR to a degree, right? And we know that there are loads and loads of people out there who are suffering because of it, because they want to do more, because they can't.
Duena Blomstrom:So these are the things we need to systematically uncover. What if we do one topic a week and go, Okay, guys, is it that they tell you we don't need anything? Is it that they tell you we're good? Is it that they tell you we have more important priorities case in which this is an easy one, we can start chipping at it? Is it that they tell you this will cost us too much or it's too long or I'm retiring in three years.
Duena Blomstrom:I don't care about you. What is happening inside the organization that is stopping you from this? Do HR people not know about team topologies? Do they not know about you know, how to do psychological safety a la Google? Do they not know about dependability and purpose and impact?
Duena Blomstrom:Of course they do. Do they not know? They might not know what to employ to get to it. Then kind of that's where the inflation in the market and the many words and the hundreds of proprietary frameworks and the fact that we confuse the market ourselves is why we have to all come together and clean it up. But we all know, but what is stopper?
Duena Blomstrom:What's the blocker? Let us all be servant leaders for each other and figure out what this blocker is.
Alessandria Polizzi:Yeah. And then I think chipping away at what we hear as well as what people share in this group, know, that's what we do full time, right? So we can help dismantle that or we can also help identify where can I get started given this context? Right? If I have an executive team that isn't bought in, is there work I still can do?
Alessandria Polizzi:And how can I, as you said, chip away at that? So I think that's a great place for us to start on what are the objections or what are the blockers and how do we help you either get those out of the way or work around them? Only expose them.
Duena Blomstrom:I think, or not expose them in the sense that it would cost you a job, God forbid. Yes. But make them become visible to these people that are having no clarity over what happens if you don't, right? I genuinely don't believe that anyone comprehends the heart of agile, the heart of collaboration, the heart of psychological safety, the fact that we need to have genuinely, emotionally involved and authentic leaders. I don't think anyone's saying we don't need those things.
Duena Blomstrom:I don't know anyone who's understood and went like, no, thank you. I'm good. So we need to figure out what the holdup is and remove it because while we exist in our, what feels like a safe enough business reality, there are companies out there that are existing in a very different parallel reality. And those companies are spending time refining their process. They're spending time understanding precisely how their people function, how their consumers function and then speeding up their technology because their people are happy, engaged and willing to do it.
Duena Blomstrom:What are the odds? Us with our human that can compete against those people. That's my fear. And it's all I sound, you know, like an alarmist. I've spent thirty years in fintech going like, my god, fintechs are coming to eat your lunch for banks.
Duena Blomstrom:And they did and nobody cares. And reality of it is we have very few big structures where leadership teams are and stakeholders are involved at an owner level to the point that we can trust their goodwill to override human debt in a non systemic way. But where you're in an organization where you don't have that, what do we do?
Alessandria Polizzi:Well, I think the vast majority don't even They don't know how. They don't know how. So the heart might be willing, but the body is weak. Right? So they may want these things.
Alessandria Polizzi:Right? But they don't It seems too big, too arduous, too scary in many cases, too risky, too personal, too all these things. So they think, okay, well, since we've never done this in the past, then I guess we don't need to do it now. Right? And so what is missing is the, has the past really been working for us?
Alessandria Polizzi:Right.
Duena Blomstrom:That's where we're going.
Alessandria Polizzi:And yeah. Are we always going to be looking backwards instead of forwards and actually understanding the science of what it is to be human and therefore what it means to get work outputs from human beings. Like we would read the manual on any other capital investment, but we don't read the manual on the human capital, which is by and large our biggest investment. So we don't understand the maintenance. We don't understand proper care and feeding of this huge investment, especially for knowledge workers because the output is about what comes from between the ears.
Alessandria Polizzi:And guess what's muddled in the middle of all of that is emotion.
Duena Blomstrom:Right. Very, very good point. We don't have the tools. We don't have the practices. We don't have the demand.
Duena Blomstrom:We don't have the appreciation. And this would be kind of the second part of the journey is going to be, it's not going to be good enough that we start saying, yes, our people and ourselves and everyone else needs to spend the proportion of their time working on topics such as emotions and behaviors. End of.
Alessandria Polizzi:At the very least, let's just acknowledge that they exist. Okay. Let's just can we just start there? The whole, like, leaving it at the door concept is bunk. There's nothing that's ever shown that that's real.
Alessandria Polizzi:If you if you don't have emotions, that's actually the you're broken. I need to get that addressed, but we all have them. So this whole facade It's so funny, like you said, it's common sense, but we build this facade of pretending that we don't have emotional needs, emotional history, emotional reactions. Spend so much energy on that. Imagine if we didn't have to spend all that time masking and pretending to be something that we just are not.
Alessandria Polizzi:Right?
Duena Blomstrom:Very true. And it's, I think the topic of masks is a very, very interesting one. I spent quite some time over the last couple of weeks musing on it. I've started an experiment on TikTok called the filters experiment. And I was just trying to see whether it allows me to be any freer, any less free kind of how it made me feel, how it made my teams feel.
Duena Blomstrom:We were playing with a couple of things. And I think what it drove me to is as you know, part of my interest lies in the neurodivergent side of things. And what drove me to was understanding the difference between voluntary masks you want to employ and being forced to take up a mask that a certain environment is putting upon you. And that difference is crucial. I think for masks that we choose, that we want to present ourselves in a certain way, we should absolutely allow those mandate those, allow people to show themselves in whichever way they feel necessary.
Duena Blomstrom:Whether that, well, obviously within the confines of legality, we don't want anyone naked on Zooms. But maybe we do. I don't know that kind of work. But most other workplace, let people show up however they want. If you have a rule for people to be on camera, let them put up a filter then if you're going to make them be on camera.
Duena Blomstrom:So this is part of the advice we're thinking of. Look, all of these small pieces of advice, do this, have all the cameras, don't have anyone in the room. They're all great pieces of advice. But what terrifies me, I was saying earlier is the fact that we don't seem to take one amazing idea and then just simulate it as a word of practice everywhere. Forget the framework.
Duena Blomstrom:Forget the I'll give you an example. Command and control is not a Google thing. It's an overall life thing. We cannot continue like this. And then commit, disagree and commit.
Duena Blomstrom:The idea of commitment. The idea that comes from Amazon. It's been six, seven, eight years. Why doesn't every forget that they don't do the entire thing. But why doesn't every other enterprise understand that there is a lot of debate that's necessary, and then it's all of us that need to absolutely be invested in doing this thing happen, making this thing happen, being a team.
Alessandria Polizzi:I think we take the parts that we feel comfortable with and ignore the rest.
Duena Blomstrom:Very true. Very positive.
Alessandria Polizzi:So I just talked to a company this week and they were implementing crucial conversations, which is, you know, we read a book, all of a sudden, everybody's gonna read the book and we're gonna blah blah blah. And imagine if I have a crucial conversation with you without there being trust, psychological safety, first of all, you can't, right? And if I do, mean, that's just, it's unrealistic. So we, again, we're certain we're about the, about the what, but we're not about the how, Right? So like we talk about these ways you should be especially as leaders, be vulnerable, be this, be that, do this.
Alessandria Polizzi:But okay. But how how what is the infrastructure? What what are the what are the ways in which I can do that in a way that keeps me whole and and safe as well. Right?
Duena Blomstrom:But I don't and you know, we talk and we talk and we talk about it and it makes it sound like we're still talking about it. There's no difference. I don't think I think the difference between us and other people has always been, and I've always, always been super mindful to not just talk about it. I didn't want to be one of them that just says all the things and that's what I did. So what I wanted to do instead was make sure that we get something out of it that anyone could do.
Duena Blomstrom:And when it comes to HR leaders being able to move the needle for leadership, right? There's such big boulders to have to budge, right? There's the lack of understanding of what servant leadership is. There's the fact that any new type of leadership requires authenticity, a good stable brand, a person who knows themselves, a person who wants to believe they have value to bring so they inspire, all kinds of things we don't have in leadership today. But also some people who are very acute and that is kind of the crux of it all.
Duena Blomstrom:You need leaders who understand emotions and behaviors. Don't pretend they don't exist, like you said. And then you need all of us to go, Yes, these are human parts of our lives. We have to spend time on them at work. The fact that we are called to pretend we are robots is just mind blowing.
Duena Blomstrom:And again, about the to dos, right? As I started saying, there are ways and then I dropped the draw. But the ways are to move some of these big things. Try and I always try and kind of move one ideological thing. Either give them a shocking book.
Duena Blomstrom:I try to start with the Phoenix project from Jean Kim because it just gives them such an, oh my god, this is what happens. If not, but if not that, then at least give them something that you know will land. The Brene Brown or Alister Kochberg, something that you know will land and will make them think of the important human work. And then just kind of start sipping knowledge into the that might be good enough. And then maybe sit them down, have some conversation on psychological safety with them, encourage them to start a team.
Duena Blomstrom:It's my best tip for HR towards leadership. They don't have a team. They suffer. They're alone. They're afraid.
Duena Blomstrom:They're not in a team. They're in a posturing impression management meeting once every month. If you want them to be helpful and useful, you need to make them a team that has psychological safety first. So yeah, find ways to make a team of your leaders first.
Alessandria Polizzi:So, okay. So I love this idea of us actually giving tactics because again, it's not about the what, it's about the how. And I think we talk at people, not me, you and I, but in general, having been in leadership development for twenty years, it's just a bunch of like you shoulds and finger wagging. So, if you were going to say, okay, Somebody's like, this looks interesting. I I'm an advocate.
Alessandria Polizzi:I wanna address human debt. What's your one tip to get started? And I'll give I'll give mine.
Duena Blomstrom:Good. I wish I had one magical tip.
Alessandria Polizzi:Well, one among many.
Duena Blomstrom:One among many. I would always obviously say people need a tool of sorts. We do have a dashboard. So we would say get them in. As soon as you get people there, you'll know if they don't want to do the work, what their problems are, what they're moaning about.
Duena Blomstrom:Get people on the on the tool and you'll immediately figure out where you are. You'll get the diagnosis immediately if nothing else. And different teams have different issues and they can just move towards those specific place and get somewhere right away. Because the reason I say that and you know, some self serving of course you made it, but it's because we have spent a ridiculous amount of time to close the feedback loop with a proof of action, with your actions changing your measurements. And I think having that proof that your behavior can and will change depending on something you've done together, it is absolutely magical and crucial.
Duena Blomstrom:So get people, if you don't have a tool like ours, get them around the table and mimic some of these things and create that instant human correction in your team, then you can start the work.
Alessandria Polizzi:Yeah. So mine is kind of like yours, but it is pull back and look at the there's kind of two different ways you can do it. There's one formal, one informal, or quantitative or qualitative. You know, I just did this a couple weeks ago with a client where we did the 12 psychosocial hazards that WHO identified. And very clearly one of them came up as the big Kahuna.
Alessandria Polizzi:Like this was the one that was holding the team. Other stuff wasn't great, but this one was the one. Right? And it was workload. So, okay.
Alessandria Polizzi:Now we can double click on workload and say, what's driving workload? And they got into a great conversation about our priorities, how we make decisions, you know, what's the process. And so, but through that conversation, and they identified action plans for addressing it. So having, if we look at data instead of personality and opinion and all those other things, right? Then it makes the com it opens up the ability to have that conversation.
Alessandria Polizzi:More qualitatively would be, what are the last three disasters? And I'm using that just kind of, you know, what are the last three? We using big, are you, are we using big girl words on this?
Duena Blomstrom:Oh, yeah. We're sweating.
Alessandria Polizzi:Absolutely. Alright. So great. Because what are the last three shit shows that the team has gone through? Yeah.
Alessandria Polizzi:And ask yourself the five whys. What about that was related to the people side of work? And be curious and intellectually honest. If you have to do this by yourself, then that's a place to start, but get And I think another way to do that, which is what you said is find other like minded people who care about humans and are okay being honest. Like build that even if it's just two people, even if it's just three people, let's be intellectually honest about where we are so we know where to start.
Duena Blomstrom:Exactly. I keep saying find the people that are as amazed as you are that the emperor is butt naked. You sometimes be in a room and you know, we've always been in those boardrooms. When you're in a meeting and you're thinking, this cannot be the best that this country or this enterprise or all of us in this industry can come up with. We are all absolutely lying to each other.
Duena Blomstrom:We have entered this twilight zone where we're all saying some words. We all know they're not quite the thing, but we just got to carry on now. We are in this charade that has just taken our minds and we shall finish it. Otherwise we shall never get to the toilet. So it's just a bizarre, it's almost like a workplace psychosis that happens in some rooms and in some meetings and in some organizations where the size of the human that is so terrific that no one there's accuse it when it's live around them.
Duena Blomstrom:Oh. Oh my god. The panic from fucking hell. Oh my god. It's still recording.
Duena Blomstrom:That's what what? Yes. Still recording. Oh. Oh, hello, everyone.
Duena Blomstrom:So the internet died. I don't know what you heard last but thank you baby Jesus that you didn't leave because if you had left we would have had zero.
Alessandria Polizzi:Oh no.
Duena Blomstrom:You know what? Yes. I forgot to tell you this, and I was desperately calling you on your American mobiles to let you know that if you need one, I have no internet because it holds it on either one or the other, I think.
Alessandria Polizzi:Okay. Yeah. I might be wrong.
Duena Blomstrom:I don't know. But what what were we saying? It wasn't
Alessandria Polizzi:I stayed. I stayed. So here we are.
Duena Blomstrom:You stayed. I really appreciate that.
Alessandria Polizzi:What were we talking about, though?
Duena Blomstrom:I can only hope that it do you understand what I'm saying? It says 6% uploading. I'm presuming it still has it on the browser, your browser, and my browser because if it doesn't actually
Alessandria Polizzi:99% uploading. So
Duena Blomstrom:Because it's probably waiting for my version so that it says a 100% on yours.
Alessandria Polizzi:Oh god.
Duena Blomstrom:Right? That's my hope. If I'm wrong Yes. We have no podcast episode two, which would be a dramatic loss for the universe because we were so because we're so good.
Alessandria Polizzi:You know, I am talk. Anyway, like Oh.
Duena Blomstrom:So see you guys.
Alessandria Polizzi:I think it's good. I think giving some actionable, like, cure tactics. Because I know for me, when I'm sit when I was sitting in role, like, I don't need all the just tell me what exactly will move the needle forward. Right. I just need to go.
Alessandria Polizzi:I just want what do I do and why? Right? So
Duena Blomstrom:If I'm if I'm really honest, and this is the place to be really honest, this is what's really gotten my goat. I feel like like the HR community has really triggered my rejection sensitivity dysphoria because I always thought when we first thought of this, I always thought I knew where they were coming from. I knew that they were as kind of overworked as innovation managers. I knew that we were all the same milk and we had all studied the same things and we know the same things and whatever. I also couldn't tell how much of the things I was learning from the DevOps community and agile community hadn't ever crossed the stream, right?
Duena Blomstrom:So when I realized that, I was very happy and I was like, how very dare you DevOps and agile sit down and tell these people. They need to kind of uphold and so on. But I think in some places the ship had sailed completely. The trust had been broken completely and so the tech side of things was not bringing HR along at all for the journey and they were so far along understanding some things that they weren't. So they had practically with the gap of this knowledge, they had isolated the HR community into an or not the HR function in their enterprise into an admin only function.
Duena Blomstrom:And now they were just kind of scared and not interested in kind of any, I'm not looking at you because I'm autistic not because you're not stunning. They're not interested in any kind of any repair moves, right? So anytime I was coming from the, oh my god, the agile is astounding. I swear to god it's astounding. Let's do some agile in HR.
Duena Blomstrom:I didn't mean let's hire faster. I meant let us understand what agile thinking means so that we can help these people get those people that they need. Met many others anyway.
Alessandria Polizzi:Guess, but I just presented last week to a group of HR professionals under, they call it HR rebels, right? And I asked the group, how many of you see your role as strategic you know, and as driving the direction of the organization? Right. A 100%. Recent studies show that c suite 60% of the c suite, CHR is administrative.
Alessandria Polizzi:So that means we're getting pushed back into the closet, so to speak. We're getting pushed back, you know, into the back of the of of the room. The door is being slammed in our face. We think we're we're strategic and we should do the people work. 60% of the C suite says no.
Duena Blomstrom:Not at the table. Not at the table. I know for a fact that that is the case because Okay. So again, going back to my story, when I first started, I thought when we come up and we look, HR couldn't help you a holes, to be honest with you, you tech people because you gave them nothing. How were they supposed to magically do this?
Duena Blomstrom:You have a bunch of people that have no EQ and no willingness to be doing some of this stuff and they have no tools. What did you expect? Wait until we make them some tools and we tell the C suite that the human work matters and then they'll kill it, right? So I was very surprised when I saw that we ended up in some conversations that we have been brought in from the HR and technology side. And when we met HR, HR was very, very reluctant to engage with us.
Duena Blomstrom:I just couldn't understand it. I was like, wait a minute, I made this thing to help. Why are you people so reluctant to do these things that I know you need to do and you're desperate to do? And I think what was happening was they were burnt out. They had attempted once or twice to bring us a smidgen of a thing in that didn't quite work out.
Duena Blomstrom:So I understand why it went that way. But for me personally, was like, This is a thing that will make these people do the things that they don't want to do for you and it will also make you be the partner that C suite needs to drive this. Right now they are not at the table. I mean in these, in some of these projects where we became a supplier, they are not at that table. They don't even understand that the table is where you do the human work.
Duena Blomstrom:The table is not where you write the policy. So I want HR to relieve from there and to become counselor Troy. Sit down and go like, no. I have a sense even if we went that direction. Forget the data.
Duena Blomstrom:I have a feeling in my loins that this particular hire is bad. Let's go back there. I take that feeling based HR over database hiring any day. Sorry. I just want the best for all of us and the best for all of us is to do the bloody human work.
Alessandria Polizzi:We can use data to do that. Right? We can. I like using data to have conversations, let's have database versus opinion based conversations. It's like, I think I shared with you before about how I presented this executive team and here's like data after data after data after data that shows the impact of the workplace on the mental health of our workers.
Alessandria Polizzi:And the response was, I still think it's this other thing. Like it's still going back to, I'm gonna deny all the data and just focus on my opinion. I think once we can equip people to have those conversations, at least it gives us a touchstone that we can all go back to, which is based on fact and reason.
Duena Blomstrom:Yeah. You're very right. I mean, we do need to we can't let it's not a phased approach. It's one of the reasons I wanted all of us to understand agile. We do not have time for linear thinking and phased approaches and what very advanced and they have taken a lot of time to prepare.
Duena Blomstrom:So that gap in competency is growing by the day. So we don't have that type of time. We need to act fast. So obviously we need to continue our educational work every day. Like I know that the most successful human work advocates are people who send an article a day to their bosses and do 90% of them go into spam?
Duena Blomstrom:Of course. But does that boss know that you are a dog with a bone and you will not stop until your people are genuinely going to be happy not to have a fake NPS score? Also yes. So it does take all of that chipping work, all that educational work. But maybe we can think together of faster levers, of faster micro popcorn experiments that make them see it faster.
Duena Blomstrom:Because it's high time. And that's why I don't understand why people that are selling other consultancies, selling other types of technology, selling themselves in other ways or what do we disagree on? Because if we don't disagree on anything and we all agree that we need to do more and we need to do it fast and our people need to help us do it, then we need to do it together.
Alessandria Polizzi:That's right.
Duena Blomstrom:Right. Think we kind of come out of time, haven't we? If the first But part I
Alessandria Polizzi:think we talked about what our vision moving forward a little bit, which is we want to hear from you, from people who are listening, who are advocates for this work. What what's in your way so we can we can come up with tactics and strategies for addressing that. And like you said, share actual call to action, things I can go do immediately that can make a difference.
Duena Blomstrom:Right. Or maybe we're going to end up eventually having this common deck that we know works on execs. It has this thing that makes them fall over backwards, this thing that makes them hope they're going to make more of a brand and of money and then this thing that shows them how to do it. This works for all execs, give it to them the magical portion then they'll start on the human work. Wouldn't that be great?
Duena Blomstrom:That would be amazing yes. Yes just the shortcuts to life.
Alessandria Polizzi:Yes.
Duena Blomstrom:Thank you so much for today and thank you so much everyone who has signed up and has supported us in this. We are nowhere near professionals with this stuff. We don't know where to start. We don't want to start and continue all by ourselves. We are hoping you guys are going to jump on this.
Duena Blomstrom:To be honest with you, no one is taking the first steps of writing in the forum as much as I'd like them to. Alessandra and I will spend a lot of time over the next couple of weeks trying to kind of move this conversation. But equally it depends on all of you and it depends on all of us coming together to understand. If we don't all agree we need to do it, no one will.
Alessandria Polizzi:That's right.
Duena Blomstrom:See you next week. Bye. Bye.