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.
Are you an HR leader or have another role in an organization and you're tired of seeing people suffer? Well, to our secret society where we're going to talk about those problems and what you can do to help fix them. I'm Doctor. Alessandria Polizzi I am the CEO of Verdant Consulting.
Duena Blomstrom:I'm Duena Blomstrom. I'm a reluctant social entrepreneur. And together, we talk about people, technology and the workplace every week. Come join us. Hello, and welcome back.
Duena Blomstrom:As you heard in our Genius Jingle, we're going to be talking about all the things again, what humans, technology, and where we are at today. And today in particular, we should talk about what we're doing, because Alessandra, I will maybe give you a rundown. Last week, all of us put our heads together on how to help the industry. So, we might as well tell you what we came up with because we oftentimes end up doing something and not talking about it. Hi, by the way.
Alessandria Polizzi:Hello and hi, everyone. We're excited to continue to talk about. I mean, this is what Duena and I spend every day, every night thinking about, reading about, talking about, researching, etc, which is how do we create workplaces where people, actual humans, can thrive and do their best work? And how can we help people in role move that mission forward and remove the barriers that prevent us from helping create thriving organizations. Absolutely.
Duena Blomstrom:And we tried this in every which way, right? Let's face it, we started this journey from different points. Most of you listening to this would have started it from very different points, but one thing we absolutely all have in common is one time or another, we have burned for the same human ideals, which are, it's unfair and shitty to have people be treated poorly at work, and it's business wise to do so. And we all agree on this. I think everyone listening to this, but where we came to it from different parts is different, obviously.
Duena Blomstrom:And some of us are academic, some of us are elegant, some of us are neurotypical, some of us are able to take this fight in a more diplomatic way, and some of us have made us, all of us feel like we were too fast, too much, too passionate, too emotional, too eager to buy into this newfangled fluffy series when the world is actually more serious and more number based than that, And to focus on this one dogmatic topic. So we have been accused, if we are listening to this, we have during our lives been accused of being all kinds of non professional, heinous things, because we were trying to move the needle on the human that before we even knew it had a name. Whenever we try to, you know, right a little wrong or change a little small piece of our patch where we could make a change. So, because we've all been there, the question is, what can we do to move faster? And that is where we all started from, right?
Duena Blomstrom:When you go independently to try and change the world, you go, what can I do to both feed my family and change the world, Right? It's not a difficult starting point. We all agree. But I think what we found very fast is, I don't think it is that easy to change the world for people who wouldn't be able to afford it. It's a luxury that we, both of us, have invested in over the years and heavily.
Duena Blomstrom:Let's be honest, it cost us hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for us to be able to continue this fight and not give up at all the times when we would have been offered these fancy jobs and we could have just left it during our time, right? And that's the case for everyone listening. I don't think whether this is being listened to in one part of the world or in one industry or another, it makes a difference. But if you do listen to it in a few years, hopefully it makes no sense. Hopefully, I'm serious.
Duena Blomstrom:Hopefully you listen to them a while and you go like, what are they all about? What human dead? What toxicity? We don't do that anymore.
Alessandria Polizzi:So old
Duena Blomstrom:school. Don't do that. Yeah. So speaking of
Alessandria Polizzi:old school, so talk about what is that moment when you realized, is this it? Like, how is this how business is run? Many of us have had those kind of epiphany moments of, am I the only one that sees that this makes no sense? And so I want to share a couple of pieces of data because especially in not especially in tech, but I will say I know this happens in tech a lot where we have this grinded out mindset of, if we just put our head down and we just grind through this grind culture, hustle culture, working like an entrepreneur culture. And this misunderstanding and misuse of humans that doesn't align with the data.
Alessandria Polizzi:This is what I constantly say. I've gotten into heated discussions with other CPOs who say, oh, well, you know, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. Okay. But you don't have to break people to make omelet. And
Duena Blomstrom:are these intentionally broken eggs? I don't believe that anyone's breaking eggs with the intention of an omelet. I think they break eggs by mistake by stepping on them.
Alessandria Polizzi:Or there's this belief that if I was punished and had to sweat and stress and break down crying and all take up drinking or whatever I did, then everyone else should. But the data does not prove that. That would make sense. Exactly. So let me give you an example.
Alessandria Polizzi:There was one study I just was looking at this morning, in fact, that showed when I'm high stress, my job performance decreases by 55%, my errors increase by 63%. So if you want people to have high quality output, what you're doing is working actually against that as opposed to for it. So many of us have seen this, but we haven't had the data. And we also will question ourselves to say, why does everyone else seem to think that this is fine? And that's the secret society.
Alessandria Polizzi:Those are the folks that we're speaking to are the ones who are like, the emperor has no clothes.
Duena Blomstrom:That's right. The ones that can point to the naked butt. But also, I think the ones that can point to the naked butt and look at it from a point of view of why aren't they believing me? Why aren't they trusting me? And again, we are about the resources and what we can give you here.
Duena Blomstrom:And here it is. We can give you resources, the vast majority of them free, like the data, the studies, the videos, the critique, the editorials, the books. The books are not for free, but almost. They're for free for me, but you know what I mean. No one's making money on books.
Duena Blomstrom:You can look at all of these things and get some things out of them. We know you've been doing so over the years, and we thank you so much for using our work to further the cause internally. But I would also urge you to wonder again, why won't they hear it? Look at the fear in your exec teams and go, who is most afraid? Who has least of a team?
Duena Blomstrom:Who is listening to poor data because they are behind on elevating their own knowledge of societal moment, of the work moment, of the cultural moment, and of the work practices that they need. Who here is holding us back as an exec? And then try and work with those people, either as a personal coach or getting them in a team. I always say this, this easiest way. Put all of them in a team.
Duena Blomstrom:At least they'll have the accountability of being in a vehicle and they'll try to do something together. And the magic of having a millisecond of psychological safety with a team is unparalleled. So again, that would be the easiest way. And to help you, maybe, hopefully, what we've done last week was announced that we have taken our software, which has always been B2B, and then has been kept prisoner by hundreds of thousands of budget decisions and CPOs and CHROs slightly unsure as to how that's going to land, and whether or not their entire bet should be on this part of the work or any other learning part of the work. Because let's face it, when you're insignificant enough for your work to be given only this much of support and of money, you have to make some very horrible decisions.
Duena Blomstrom:And those decisions have many times been against the software we've made. And so with a heavy heart that that's where it is, because we've seen the good effect it has on people at the other end of the line where teams become so much tighter and more psychologically we've had to realize that this is not the route. We cannot ask the enterprise to get it in because the human that will stop it. So, what we've done instead go through this gargantuan amount of work so that any team from anywhere can get in today. And that they can do it by just going to www.techledculturetechnology for cost.
Duena Blomstrom:They can start working on it today. And this is done twofold. One, for teams to do it themselves, teams that are desperate because they can't connect with a human like you guys. And they need to do something because they cannot keep having these non human conversations and these non feeling, including topics and this separate emperor naked life that doesn't make them productive or happy. So for them to do it directly, but also for you HR professionals to have a way to demonstrate with a popcorn experiment or two or three over your enterprise, that in different teams, in different environments, this makes a difference.
Duena Blomstrom:That when your people put in the human work, it makes a difference. And I encourage you to show it to your execs, try this for a month or two, get that data into a paper and say, Look, this makes a difference like this. And it cost us almost nothing. And it meant that these people came to the table and they are now this much more engaged, this much more stable, this much more psychologically safe.
Alessandria Polizzi:Yeah. And producing more, more innovative, more able to take on change, more, more, more. The data proves out that it is a differentiator, just like Google showed in 2015. It is a differentiator between high performing teams and those who do not. And I think the culmination here too is also when we think about workplace mental health, that's what we're talking about.
Alessandria Polizzi:We're talking about understanding the psychology of how humans work and then meeting that need, maintaining that investment. And so right now, I think in The UK, it's Mental Health Awareness Week. Coming up, we have World Mental Health Day on 10:10. With our company, we do a lot around skill development, which is how we complement each other. So we're offering a free webinar on Eventbrite that anybody can offer to their team so you don't have to go out and reinvent the wheel.
Alessandria Polizzi:So think about that. What if on World Mental Health Day, you said we're going to have this free webinar. Again, everyone can take it. And then we're going to do a couple of teams. We're going to pilot using the software to get insights into what is in our way.
Alessandria Polizzi:And so all we're talking about is treating humans like humans instead of machines. And there's one hundred years of data on why that is important for business outcomes. And again, what Duana and I do every day is think about this and try to come up with ways to help people in organizations make progress and make a difference. Sorry,
Duena Blomstrom:go ahead. We tend to stay on top of each other a lot, but that's okay.
Alessandria Polizzi:So one of the things I think is fascinating is what you talked about, which is this fear at the top, right? And this mindset at the top. And there's this misguided belief that what we have been doing was working. Now, we know, again, from a data perspective, that the ways in which we mistreat people, the ways in which we have dysfunction and toxic behaviors, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, they diminish the output of the humans we have and also they hurt people. So it's not working, but there's this huge disconnect at the executive level.
Alessandria Polizzi:And that's the part that I think I'm having a really hard time wrapping my head around this kind of, like I said, the emperor's new clothes, this denial that what we're doing isn't working. I had a conversation with a leader at a government organization that I presented at last week, and his comment was, Well, how can I hold people accountable and make sure that they're psychologically healthy? And I was like, how are you giving them the feedback? Are you just telling them they suck or are you giving them feedback that's helpful? Because we all want feedback that's helpful.
Alessandria Polizzi:I mean, just like, how about if you just don't do it in a dysfunctional and abusive way? Like, the the mindset that it's an either or proposition is just fascinating to me. Do you see that too, Duana?
Duena Blomstrom:Yes. I see a lot of execs that are too tired to learn more faster. And I see a need that they do that immediately. I see us all going the wrong direction in terms of the human work in the workplace all the time. I see that big enterprises and in small enterprises, in the return to the office conversation, in the way we ignore the mental health crisis, in the way we ignore the leadership crisis, in the way in which we have dropped the conversational engagement completely, as if it's not a trendy topic anymore.
Duena Blomstrom:We just don't want to talk about it. Like it's been a few years of let's make a chief happiness officer and then let's drop it. Have we dropped it because people are happy? Is that why we dropped it? We're done with that?
Duena Blomstrom:These droppings are practically what would constitute and what's a mass into the human death eventually. It's because we get bored. It's because we are who we are, and our attention moves as fast as it does, and it's not sensationalist enough to talk about these things forever. It's just everyday misery for the people in the knowledge field, and they are too spoilt as they are because they don't work outside. And we all know what we
Alessandria Polizzi:come But up I also think it's because they're all surface. They're all window dressing. This isn't about fixing what's broken or fixing my bullshit. And we know the higher up you go in the organization, the more likely you are to be on the more ill side of mental health. So if you don't fix or at least build skills about you, then throwing all this window dressing, in my mind, to hide behind doing the actual work, which is self reflection, then of course it's not going to stick because it's not actually trying to fix a problem.
Duena Blomstrom:But maybe we should make it mandatory that every exec has a coach and a therapist.
Alessandria Polizzi:Do not disagree, but I also can we teach them some skills so that they can just in the moment without having to pick up the phone question whether or not they should do that?
Duena Blomstrom:They should have either or Okay, let's be honest, right? Everybody needs, everyone across the board needs a higher stepping stone in terms of understanding their emotions and the emotions of others. Everybody needs that, right? We have all lived through lives where we haven't been taught. Now, some people need them more urgently than others.
Duena Blomstrom:If you work in a blue collar job, or if you are about to retire, you probably are not interested in acquiring these skills. It's why you are, I would understand and excuse you. Everybody else, if you work in the knowledge economy, or you know, in some type of office job, or you're using your intellectual skill set, If you do not augment that intellectual skill set with an emotional skill set, you will not be competitive in the age of AI because your intellectual skill set can and will be replicated immediately by the machines. It is your emotional component of it that is irreplicable. So it is your choice if you want to remain competitive or not going forward.
Duena Blomstrom:And why so many execs would be pleased to say, no, thank you, I'm out, is a reflection of the fact that everyone is tired and like you say, overworked and burnt out. And we have such high degrees of mental health issues in execs. That's what we're seeing. No one wants to fix it. Everyone knows the Emperor is naked, But the ones that could fix it are just too tired, too checked out, and too unknowledgeable to do so.
Alessandria Polizzi:Well, let's talk about what that looks like. So PwC did a trust survey. And I know this isn't the same thing as psychological health and safety, but darn it, you kind of need trust in order to build psychological health and safety. So I think it's a good place for us to start. And, what I find fascinating, this is not the only study that I've seen show this is the huge disconnect between executives and their teams.
Alessandria Polizzi:I mean, right here, 46% of employees say that a trust damaging event was something that they expected. That means almost half of the team is expecting that, at least on an annual basis, you are going to jack something up where it just proves that you can't be trusted. And while we believe that we should have this trust, there's a gap in perception of whether or not we're trusted and skipping ahead to the punchline. We're not even seeing at the executive level that we're undermining trust, right? Over 50% of employees say that we've had one, but only 20% of business executives will admit.
Alessandria Polizzi:Exactly. And this is human debt. This is human debt right here.
Duena Blomstrom:That gap right there is human debt. Yes. That gap is human debt. But I think trust is a good one. Let's examine it.
Duena Blomstrom:Let's take a big step back and examine it because I feel like there will be maybe five or six topics that are the big ones that are worth discussing over and over again and returning to them over and over again. And quite frankly, I think those are the where and the when in terms of super flexibility, the role of trust, what does it take for individuals to be happy at work? What does it take for teams to be happy at work? What constitutes a healthy organization? If we can answer those five things and we agree on how we've answered it, it doesn't even matter that they are the correct frameworks we have chosen, but we have agreed together on a course of action, then we as a team, if we were to be a team in an enterprise, could just go ahead and test that, because we all had agreed on these five fundamental human things.
Duena Blomstrom:Let me tell you, even if everything they chose was bad, they would be a lot better off than the people that claim this whole thing doesn't exist and they can now wait for the good old times to come back.
Alessandria Polizzi:Although I do want to put a pin on happiness. Can you put a pin on happiness? I would like to talk about happiness. Absolutely.
Duena Blomstrom:If I didn't mention it I should
Alessandria Polizzi:say I'm not anti happy. Not anti happy, obviously. I
Duena Blomstrom:think that makes part of, to my mind that takes part of, you know how autistic I am, if it fits into a concept that I've quoted, I shall tell you it does. It's the individual, it's whether the individual is happy at work or not, right? It's the same one, I did quote it, I didn't take it away. And also if the team is happy or not, because here's one we never talked about, team happiness. We don't talk about that.
Alessandria Polizzi:I think it should be team wholeness. Yes, I think it should be team. Because you know what? Sometimes we're not happy and that's okay too. Sometimes we have conflicts.
Duena Blomstrom:Have we even discussed it? But why aren't we even why are we so uncomfortable to even discuss it at all as a topic? Anyways, back to these.
Alessandria Polizzi:Guess you're exactly right. What we're talking about is this, not the debate on those specifics, but on the like, we have no problem. My guys are fine. My guys are fine.
Duena Blomstrom:Everyone else is okay. Look, and that is possible. Us give you one inside tip from one of the conversations we've had internally to try and attack this on your behalf as best as we can. There's a little letter there that's for human debt fighters, but there's also one that's for human death preventers, because you're always invariably going to have this exec that fancies themselves, a super knowledgeable, fluffy topic expert. But when you look under the hood, he's just read some report in an airport for five minutes and it's kind of unclear on the big topics.
Duena Blomstrom:So for those people who are convinced that their guys are okay, then na na na, everything's fine. I read everything that Forbes has told me from the paid council in the last five minutes. Don't even get me started on that. So, I'm golden. Those people are a preventer.
Duena Blomstrom:They don't need to be a human dead fighter. You have no human dead, but if you want to make sure you don't get any, start your human work. So we got you on that as well, we think. So back to the big topics. Trust is one.
Duena Blomstrom:Yeah, happiness and individual team, whatever. Trust is one. The reason I'm so big on us getting the definitions right is because we've just talked to people that, oh my God, penguins, and let's all agree and whatever. And if we don't agree, let's establish another word for that because we're going to talk about it a lot. So let me tell you how I see it, and then you tell me how you see it, and then we see how we see it together.
Duena Blomstrom:This is a thing I've discovered I have to do in every conversation these days, otherwise with fluffy topics. Let me tell you what I mean, tell me what you mean, and then let's see if we can agree on a definition together. If we could do that. Look what I think we mean by trusted in the enterprise is one, a very fluffy encompass all term that everyone uses just to say the good stuff. Two, it's an unreally measurable magical sentiment of good value.
Duena Blomstrom:Three, when you start looking under the hood of what it really means for individuals, it means for groups of people, and what it means for the group of team in particular, then you're starting to see other components come in. In the individual's case, you then have to image both their characteristics as a person, and the way that they relate to their practical work, which is where you see most of this is in the team. So whether or not they trust the environment, they trust their co workers, they trust the messaging from the organization. So they have some Aristotle's core trusts of sorts, and whether or not they trust themselves enough to be psychologically safe. And note that I am now bringing in another term, is practically separate, that's a different topic.
Duena Blomstrom:So trust and psychological safety to me are two different things. Psychological safety is a team behavior and dynamic that only happens in that particular thing. Whereas I can trust my team, can trust myself, I can trust my organization without there being any psychological safety in the team necessarily. If I just came in and I'm all starry eyed and I'm drunk on purpose, but that doesn't make me psychologically safe with them. That's my definition of it.
Duena Blomstrom:Now, what's your definition? Let's then try to put them together.
Alessandria Polizzi:Okay. So, actually did a session on this with a company recently where we talked about because they brought me in originally because they were talking about trust, but what they really meant was psychological health and safety. So, trust is really like that's a non negotiable. If I don't trust you, I'm going to have a really hard time being psychologically safe. So, trust is the belief that people will do what they say, have the ability to do what they say, and are not looking to cause harm, but they have integrity.
Alessandria Polizzi:But the part that I have to start with in understanding not just are other people trustworthy is, am I trusting? Right? And that's that self reflection piece that I see we miss a lot whenever we do these conversations around skills at work because we don't look at ourselves and what we're bringing to the table. So just to kind of put a bow on it, I think you can't have psychological safety without trust. But trust is not the same as psychologically.
Alessandria Polizzi:Exactly.
Duena Blomstrom:I can't agree anymore. Yes. Those two things are 100% the case. I think it's really important that people don't attempt to measure trust. But if they do, that they look under the hood and don't just put some fluffy number on it because there are elements you can find.
Duena Blomstrom:I would argue that the Aristotle project went further than us in discussing trust, because if you want to define trust towards the organization or trust towards the team, those are elements of it. For instance, there's an element in the Aristotle project called dependability. This is what we mean. Do we depend on this team to give us the results they said they would at the time that they said they would? Note, this is not that they are high performing, this is not that they are super productive.
Duena Blomstrom:This is simply that you can count on their cadence of delivery. So it just means that they are dependable. That dependability is part of the trust. When you combine it with a sense of psychological safety in the team, you have even more trust. And when you feel that the organization as a team, you can believe their structure and clarity that they've communicated, that's a sign of trust towards the organization as well.
Duena Blomstrom:So, if you start looking at all of the five Aristotle parts, they all in a sense revert back to a sense of trust that we need to have in each other, including purpose, including impact. We can't really talk about either of these if we don't genuinely trust each other. How are we gonna instill a sense of purpose or recognize our impact if we don't feel it? So, it's a lot more complicated than that.
Alessandria Polizzi:Yeah. Well, I mean, okay. Sorry. So, let's just say I'm gonna build on that so I have a dependable trustworthy person or team does that mean that I can ask questions without fear retribution no does that mean that I can be my authentic self without feeling judged? No.
Alessandria Polizzi:So there are specific things within that psychologically safe behaviors model that are missing just if we don't get trust.
Duena Blomstrom:And sometimes these things are not necessarily this is something that's a bit more specialized and we absolutely don't have the time for it, but it's meaty, I think. I never really got to talk about these things with anyone, so you're going to be my victim. But when we started studying psychological safety and separating it into the component behaviors of psychological safety, and it's how we came up with the fact that people have to be flexible, learning, emotionally engaged, resilient, And they have to be courageous, obviously, open. But when we did that, we also were probably the only ones that have very spent a lot of time trying to understand the negative side of psychological safety, or rather the opposite of the good behaviors, the negative behaviors, the impression management part. And I think this is an interesting one.
Duena Blomstrom:There is intentional psychological safety that you can and should create. And then there is resulting psychological safety that you cannot create, but you can create the conditions for. And I think it's really important to think of it when you go in-depth into what you can and should try to change and what you can and should just keep an eye on, right? When it comes to psychological safety. And of these negative behaviors, when you create an environment where it feels good, it feels safe, These stops that the individual might have personally, because they don't trust themselves, because they maybe have lower self esteem, or maybe they've gone through a lot of trauma in other teams, or maybe they've been through places where the emperors were even naked there and they could never say.
Duena Blomstrom:All of this trauma from other places that had human that they come in with might disallow them from feeling that safe. So when you give them enough time for them to know that the social convention in this team is to be safe, then they will hopefully eventually start coming towards it. But you also have to be intentional, as they also have to be intentional. Like I said, you have to want to come towards it. Everyone wants to want to do, has to want to do the human work and not just some of us, or it will never work.
Duena Blomstrom:But psychological safety, you can and should create in your team, you can and should keep an eye on. You probably need what you always need. Look at the Aristotle project, get some resources from people like us in, and a lot of hand holding and of knowledge that we got you, we know what it feels like and we wish you the most of the fortune.
Alessandria Polizzi:Yeah. And the last one, let me just add, is stop thinking that psychologically safe means underperforming, lowering the bar, and not having conflict or crucial conversations. It is the opposite. What we are doing now is preventing all of those things from happening. This is how you get to those outcomes.
Duena Blomstrom:Thank you for listening to us, and we'll pick this up again. We'll get a little bit more agitated to give you some ideas and some tips, and hopefully not waste your time next time. We'll also have some guests soon, some of which are quite cool, and we're looking forward to all of you coming to join us in the pod, writing to us and getting in contact. Subscribe, obviously, click the bell, follow us on all these many channels where we're trying to fight the world and come join us. We will get there.
Duena Blomstrom:Have a lovely rest of your week. Bye. Bye.