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This idea for the forum and conversation space was born out of sheer frustration with the gap between HR and other departments that we encounter in our work at People Not Tech and Verdant Consulting every day.
Duena Blomstrom first brought up the concept of HumanDebt and its associated workplace horrors and mental health crisis it creates in her book People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age and has since worked tirelessly to democratise the need for regular Human Work in the workplace but it wasn’t until our teams came together to build a Psychological Safety ISO add-on for our Human Work Team Wellbeing Platform we realised we are coming towards the Human Work but from two different directions. Us at PeopleNotTech from the Agile/DevOps/Tech side of learning about humans, neuro-divergence, hacking high-performing cultures, being experimental and risk-thirsty, eternally irritated by the slow change and the good folk at Verdant Consulting having arrived at the same frustration coming from the other side, the HR side, the side who was mean to set-up and encourage the Human Work to begin with.
The Secret Society of Human Work Advocates welcomes every professional from any industry and at any level irrespective of job title or skillset as long as they agree the Human Work has to be done in the workplace for the well-being of the employees which leads to the success of the enterprise
We are searching for people who agree that:
Office and organisational structures of old are no longer fit for purpose;
Most organisations have a lot of Human Debt (defined as the equivalent of TechDebt and comprised of a collection of toxicity and ailments that have resulted from years of neglect and of treating people as resources;
The HumanWork (increasing EQ, 1-on-1s, Psychological Safety and good team dynamics, changing leadership, learning autonomy, etc) are mandatory to be performed regularly in today’s environment of necessary collaboration;
Come and start building the future of humans in the workplace with us to the day when our Society will no longer have to be Secret.
Duena Blomstrom (00:02.368)
Welcome back to a new episode of our podcast, The Secret Society for Human Work Advocates and Human Debt Fighters, Preventers and Deniers. I forgot.
Al (00:14.774)
Deniers are going to have a very short listen.
Duena Blomstrom (00:17.776)
Well, they can listen for a little bit. We welcome deniers. So if you're here because you think this Human Debt is BS, or it is because you didn't quite understand it existed in organizations, we'd be more than happy to hear from you, because it's that we're missing. We need to understand what is the hold up. I don't know how else to put it, but I think that's exactly where we picked this up, isn't it, what we were saying last.
Al (00:46.334)
Yeah, and I think also we see a lot of talk and conversation about these topics, not as much action. And I think it's worth sharing some of the things that are concerning, right, that we see. I mean, some things we see that are like encouraging as well. Yep, absolutely. We don't want this to be a bummer show, the bummer show.
Duena Blomstrom (00:56.349)
Mm.
Duena Blomstrom (01:06.686)
Encouraging?
Duena Blomstrom (01:12.56)
No, not only a Bummer Show. And if I get to play a good cup, you know I've depressed you too much. So let's take a step back. And I'll be up in arms as well, though, I will admit, because we've worked quite, as you well said, just more noise than ever and there is more noise than ever. Take it from someone that landed in technology and data and whatever, when there was, and manufacturing, when there was no noise. So when I first started talking about these things, I did sound like I was completely whack.
Al (01:36.834)
Yeah.
Duena Blomstrom (01:40.804)
and out there and there was no one else saying that. But these days, let me tell you, just by the three or four tags I get a day where people get up in arms on my behalf, that someone else is literally just freely never attributing, let's put it that way, if not just directly copy and pasting some of the things I was saying, that has never been more chatter. And I have a strange position about this. And if I don't know if this is interesting to our listeners necessarily, but just to amuse you.
Which is, whenever my team sense some of this, or when people that we work with tag us, thankfully on LinkedIn, I'm so grateful they do. Shout out to the really smart people in Germany and Holland and so on that have been going up in arms when people in the product industry come up with half-assed frameworks and stuff. Even people I had loads of respect for, is a gentleman called John Cutler. Anyways, I'm...
rambling a bit as usual. But what I wanted to say is, I'm not as up in arms about those moments, you know, the moments of non attribution, the noise, because believe it or not, we need the buzz, we need the noise terribly much. I've my life's work has been to create loads more noise about this because it was deafening silence. And if we if you think you hear too much about the fluff today, and you're an HR professional, that's sick and tired of all of these so and so's talk
Al (03:01.198)
Hmm.
Duena Blomstrom (03:09.736)
self care and soft skills and EQ and burnout. And if you're sick of that, let me tell you, you're new because none of that existed until five minutes ago. This is all, this is a genuine win that this new generation will get without even knowing they got it. And it's not even just in the workplace. I keep telling my kids to be grateful that in my lifetime alone, they...
Al (03:19.487)
Yeah.
Duena Blomstrom (03:35.624)
have attained a different standard in the workplace, in school, in acceptance of their queer-ness, you name it, right? They're not and they're up in arms and they think the world is shit, but that's their job. My job is to be the noise, the noise is good. What isn't necessarily good though, and what I'm afraid of is how do we make sure the cream gets to the top? How do we make sure that the sum is that an exact, this would be my dream state that in a year or two from now, someone could come up to me and say, look,
"I was a CEO of a mid-level Fortune 5000 company". "A bit stuck, I could see the bloody walls crumbling around me and these people" "didn't quite like each other and there was so much dread and disengage and we" "were doing all the things now by the book but nothing was working very well. "I knew there was something heavy. "I had read about your wacky Human Debt" crap but it didn't look like anything that "I could do myself. "And then one day you said, let's do these popcorn experiments. "I listened and then a few days later, I read an article.
"And it looked like this beautiful drawing from McKinsey about what types of people exist. "But I also read this research from the Dora report. "There wasn't quite as clear about what it meant to say, but it had the depth of all "this thing we're trying to build together. "And I knew that this is bollocks. "And I knew that this is not and it's value. "And I came to own the fight and you guys, the other Human Debt fighters with "resources and help and knowledge and tools have gotten me to where we are today.
Al (04:50.301)
Mm-hmm.
Duena Blomstrom (05:02.224)
And I can almost promise you that CEO would be in Fortune 500 at the minimum by then. So with a little bit of work put into it and just learning to discern between what's bollocks and what isn't, and there's a lot of noise, I have to have faith in leadership that they'll go, that's noise, that's genuine knowledge and passion that's been built on years of practice. So I'm not worried about the noise. Are you?
Al (05:07.265)
Yeah.
Al (05:26.414)
So I am, because I feel like the noise that, so there's a couple of things. I see noise that reinforces antiquated ideas, and so it's more self-talk about how people just need to, and I'll quote someone from my session I did yesterday. Somebody said, the suck it up mentality of leadership, that school of leadership.
And so when we see things like that labeling of people that you just mentioned for McKinsey, when we see Elon Musk talking about how psychological safety prevents innovation, when we... I know, I know. He's so, like, I think we should just do everything the opposite of him. But so that's, he's like Bizarro, Bizarro leader, like just do the opposite.
Duena Blomstrom (06:05.98)
He saw what he did. Oh, bless him. He's lost it completely. I didn't see that. Oh.
Duena Blomstrom (06:16.09)
Good.
Al (06:23.846)
So, you know, that I think people are looking to hide behind, I mean, or just ignoring data and just saying, I don't care what the data says, go ahead and return to office. That's that I find that concerning. But the one that's also I find concerning is the Google -ization or AI -ification of psychological safety as a buzzword that, like everybody now has become an expert on.
I was speaking to some of the National Safety Council's annual convention, which is huge. We have a huge event. It's a big event. They have, what, 6,000 people here, I think. And I heard about this one of the organizations that's kind of affiliated in this space. They're creating a psychological health and safety certification. The person who they have writing it...
no experience in this area, does not know, is just Googling their way through it. So now this is going to be potentially the standard. Just find that concerning because it's just people are just throwing out garbage. And here's the thing, just really quick. So with that, if I go with that, especially the bigger brands that kind of go with that and it doesn't work, I don't throw away the group that gave it to me. I throw away the concept, right?
Right? It's just like, it's, anyway, so those are some things that kind of keep me up at night.
Duena Blomstrom (07:55.792)
I am not claiming and I'm not going to lie to anyone. No, I lie. If anyone's new here, I'm always just, I have this sunny disposition. I never complain about anything. If anyone's new, don't listen to what they're trying to tell you. That's who I am. So I'll make this a special occasion and just do something completely opposite and out of character and say that, yes, there is.
Al (08:05.012)
You are so-
Al (08:10.174)
you turn this podcast into a house of lies.
Duena Blomstrom (08:23.428)
a lot of bollocks and shit out there. But if we're worried for the type of exec that will buy that, that will get that, they're not in the 5000. They're not in the 5000, they're not listening to the same... I think who we're talking to are people who are in the 5000, but they just don't feel they need... they have the balls or the tools or the ability or the space or the interest or the passion. I said this all along. I'm...
Al (08:30.45)
Yeah, that's not our group. You're right. That's not our group. Right.
Al (08:44.246)
The tools, that's what it is.
Duena Blomstrom (08:50.512)
think that's where it is. It's not that they don't know. I think when we come out of this, this generalised burnout wherein this team of burnouts wherein, which is a different type of burnout, by the way, I've been writing about lately, then you know, yes, then the individual burnout. And I think it's a really important thing that we start paying attention to, by the way, you and I should chat about that specifically for an episode. Because if you look at the idea of
Al (09:02.088)
Mm-hmm.
Al (09:06.422)
individual.
Al (09:16.394)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Duena Blomstrom (09:20.552)
combined then it's at that combined level you have to fix it. You cannot fix it with some knowledge individually and you cannot fix it with some norms that are not of the group that got burned out together. That's a different conversation but...
Al (09:30.774)
Yep, yep, yep.
But you're right, our audience are the secret society for Human work fighters, right? So for those of us who already get it, so this is for the third group, right? We get it. And there is data that is, and resources and tools that are readily available. I actually, part of my presentation yesterday was about how to make the business case for investing in mental health or psychological health and safety.
Duena Blomstrom (10:02.26)
No, excellent, excellent. And the way you make this case, yeah, you need to show that it works and it's so easy to show that it works. It's what we're working on and we haven't yet announced it, but here's the teaser. They are practically these small popcorn experiments that will show your leadership that, oh yeah, if I invest 20, 30, 10K, whatever it is, five bucks, I don't care, it's not about the numbers. If I invest X amount of money, a small modicum amount of money, I see X amount of result from my people when they have done.
Al (10:04.546)
Answer.
Al (10:07.894)
Yes.
Duena Blomstrom (10:32.084)
this specific bit of Human work. And that's what the experiment shows them. And if they will ignore an experiment and another experiment at the very minimum, you're left with three or four better teams. Every time we've done a POC with "People not Tech" and it didn't work out because the Human Debt in the organization had some HR director be too afraid to lose their job. Every time we did that, we still left five or six teams that had a better start. We left a couple of developers in tears as well, if I'm honest, one or two going, "Oh no! But come on!"
Al (10:35.1)
Yep.
Al (10:43.223)
Yep.
So, hey, let's talk about these popcorns. I love this concept. I really do. I think you're so good at creating these, I called it earlier, emotional word pictures, these ways of thinking, speaking out things that create a vision in my mind. So what are some examples in your mind of popcorn?
Duena Blomstrom (12:10.808)
Okay, here's one, here's one, here's one, say that someone gives us 50k, you and I go in there for two days to tell them what this is about in several ways that we think are the best way to move this message, I don't know what kind of company they are. And then we put these people in a virtual room, and they all do a team action. And then we measure them before with the software, and we measure them after with the software, and maybe they do two or three. And the two or three of them are in
Al (12:31.294)
Mm.
Al (12:35.19)
Mm-hmm.
Duena Blomstrom (12:39.924)
are aimed at improving specifically your openness or specifically your resilience. And if those went up after three of them, voila, I have a fucking shit that works and fixes my crap. And literally we have the tool for it. Other people can talk about it. We have the tool for it.
Al (12:50.58)
Yep.
Yep, yep, let me add one. Yes.
Absolutely.
Al (17:48.21)
One other thing I want to also talk about to support those Human Debt fighters, and which is what we wanted to do with the Secret Society, is talk about some of the things that are happening. There's a lot being published right now, both good and bad. And, but here's some good news, at least for us in the US, is that there's 30 plus states that have legislature in process that would make it illegal to have a toxic workplace.
which would enable, and most of them specifically address bullying. But bullying is one of the biggest problems that we have from a psychological health and safety perspective. Is it the only thing? No. But it's a start. And so that's pretty exciting for us here. The other thing is that if you have a CEO who's clueless about this, you're not alone, according to Deloitte.
Duena Blomstrom (18:31.049)
Boom.
Al (18:46.978)
89% of the C-suite thinks that they're really doing well around this, but only 41% of employees do. And yeah, there's a big disconnect going on. And you know what's interesting is they had a quote in here, I want to read this, 78% of the C-suite say the leadership should change if their company can't maintain an acceptable level of workforce well-being.
Duena Blomstrom (19:15.4)
They should, yeah. Everyone's agreeing there should be change. No one wants to do it.
Al (19:20.394)
No one wants to do it. But, yeah, I thought that those, especially the disconnect between the C-suite and.
Duena Blomstrom (19:21.651)
No.
Duena Blomstrom (19:28.168)
That's the disconnect. Yeah, you're right. It is such a gap between what people... And consider the following. Why would you lie in a survey?
Al (19:39.007)
Yes!
Duena Blomstrom (19:40.004)
If you're the exec that said that you knew you're lying, so you are impression managing. And let me tell you why people are impression managing in a survey for fear of being found out. So when you're not sure that the survey is anonymous and you're not sure that it's unattributable, that's when you impression manage. That's when you lie.
Al (19:52.994)
Mm-hmm.
Al (20:05.32)
Mm-hmm.
Duena Blomstrom (20:06.152)
You're not going to tell me that those are the stats, right? That if you take 10 managers, nine of them are clueless and just don't get it. That's not true. But they say that because they believe that the enterprise is going to be able to trace it back to them if they tell the truth. The difference, the disconnect there is as soon as you become a manager, you also become fearful of this bloody Human Debt you see everywhere and you are convinced it's going to come to bite you. And I, I'm developing this new theory to myself that
Al (20:12.297)
Yeah, no.
Al (20:18.999)
Mmm.
Al (20:28.11)
That's right.
Mm-hmm.
Duena Blomstrom (20:34.904)
It stems from technical teams, but I think it applies to every place. I think there's so much impression management that's necessary as a survival skill, that new managers that have been thrown into positions that they had no training or ability or interest in, experience the imposter syndrome they experience, the cognitive load of being dissonant between
Al (21:02.986)
And loneliness, the loneliness.
Duena Blomstrom (21:05.084)
right and how lonely it gets and how that's why we see those much higher effects of genuine burnout not people who have reported burnout people who have offed themselves because of burnout people who are in medical care because of burnout so the very last levels we see of it so i want us to think of the fact that there's a lot of this cognitive dissonance we are building in people a lot of this Human Debt
that we have seen at every level of this organization. Some of it is just theoretical and let's change bigger cultures, let's be better performing, fine. We know about that, right? And that's the one we like to talk about because we don't like this moral stance. But there is an absolute element of, we should, we should first look at the hygiene of the workplace. There are the bones of it so riddled with this Human Debt cancer that when we send people in this machinery, we don't even know.
where we F them up. And I think we F them up when we make them managers with no EQ ability, and when we make them people leaders with no attachment to the purpose of the company, and when we make them leave in a company that has no idea of what the five important things are that Aristotle has found. When we do that to people, we F them up. In a way, then it becomes hard to shake out of them, because these people will do well enough to go up the ladder of the organization and
Al (22:01.814)
Yeah.
Al (22:06.785)
Yep.
Al (22:21.201)
Yep, absolutely.
Duena Blomstrom (22:28.532)
They probably will play the corporate game well eventually, but they will be stuck somewhere where they're not their true, free, happy, creative, low-level self that gets to not manage people. And they're not at the very top, and they're right in the middle, stuck going, this is where I am. This is who we're talking to. We know you've been through that. Don't let other generations go through that by not giving them the easier tools. These days, convincing management to go themselves to an EQ course is nothing. Well, try that 15 or 20 years ago.
Al (22:58.469)
Yes, right.
Duena Blomstrom (22:58.472)
They would have snapped you, they would have sent you away, you would have had a horse head in the bed they don't need any more. You're in a much better position to make change and it's a pity not to do so.
Al (23:03.57)
Yeah.
Al (23:08.762)
No, and one of the people who will benefit the most is you, right? When you can understand more about how to Human, that includes and should actually start with you understanding yourself and what your needs are and how to take care of those in a way that's healthy for you and for everyone else in the workplace. One of the big problems we have is we kind of have this abused...
Duena Blomstrom (23:12.433)
It's stupid.
Al (23:38.174)
abused partner syndrome, I'm going to call it, of like, well, if I just, we somehow blame ourselves for the abuse that happens at work. As if I, and because we're told it, right? So we, we buy it. If I was just smarter, more prepared, had better business acumen, more organized, my favorite one, time management, you know, workload. I saw a
Duena Blomstrom (23:48.453)
Yeah.
Al (24:06.814)
research that showed that workload has increased by 50% for managers in the last few years. Okay, that's not a time management issue.
Duena Blomstrom (24:15.538)
And I would like you to.
Duena Blomstrom (24:19.4)
I would also like you to consider that doesn't even start to count the actual work. Whatever workload they are counting is guaranteed to not be the Human work they should be doing because we don't measure that in any enterprise.
Al (24:29.85)
No, it's not. Absolutely. Right. We just dismissed that. Yeah, we just dismissed that.
Duena Blomstrom (24:34.664)
So their work hasn't increased by 50%. It increased by 300%, but it's only the 50% that's visible in admin, whereas they need to do all the other shit that's a lot more complicated with humans. Yeah. We have sent people up the creek with zero EQ paddles, zero, "this is how you manage a team paddles". And we have a good chance to rectify this quickly in the wake of the pandemic, when we have to re-team anyways. But if we are re-teaming, idiotically around location or process
Al (24:43.754)
Yes, exactly, exactly. Yeah.
Al (24:50.248)
Yeah.
Al (25:02.496)
Yes.
Duena Blomstrom (25:10.361)
We are not going to get anywhere.
Al (25:13.363)
No, no. And here's what's going to happen is that this next generation is going to enter the workforce with a trauma-informed brain because of what happened during their formative years and zero tolerance. I mean...
Duena Blomstrom (25:30.372)
and an increase in justice and the demand for value immediately. And just you wait we will be retired within a month at this rate.
Al (25:36.589)
Absolutely.
Yes, I mean, look, I talked to a lot of HR professionals and people in recruiting, and that people aren't asking as much about career growth and career opportunity. They're talking about how healthy will I be working here? Tell me about your... Yeah. I need to be aligned to the values.
Duena Blomstrom (25:53.933)
Yeah. More time. All right. Yeah.
What are they? Do they care about whether I take care of myself? Do they go out a lot? Are they friendly? I'm noticing more and more of these smarter and smarter professionals are asking about the actual team they're going to. And I think this is actually unfortunately the... No, well, there's many things that are going to crystallise. And part of these, what I truly believe in that, I don't know if we were talking about earlier, I didn't know if you want to repeat that or not about what you're writing. I don't know if that's public or not. We were...
Al (26:10.231)
Yes.
Al (26:24.99)
Yeah, no, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Duena Blomstrom (26:26.908)
So, yeah, I'm going to need you to say it again. But part of this, what I believe in currently is the fact that I think what we know of the size of teams is wrong. I think they need to be smaller. I also think that what we are attempting with cross-functional teams, which is why we insisted teams shouldn't be stable, they can be as dynamic as we like, is not necessary in the...
Al (26:50.246)
More nimble.
Duena Blomstrom (26:54.464)
correct work formula of agility and of good enterprise. So as I'm starting to lean, I'm saying a heresy here, towards they probably have to be smaller than we thought, and they probably have to be a lot more stable than we thought for them to be super high performing. If you don't need it, but maybe this is the key, you might not need a high performance team. And that's something for smart CEOs to decide, where do I need a high performance team? Where do I need work horses that will not want as much autonomy or as much.
Because if you want a high performance team, you probably can only have a four or five elite team that I don't know how many exactly, the smaller group that are learning those passes like a high performance sports team, they need to learn those interactions. And so I think it's important to start redefining in terms of what's common work, what's solo work, what's creative work, what's habitual work, what's admin, what needs some spark, what maybe I can give my people, I don't know, better.
states, better states of flow, whatever it is that they need, in however, whatever, whatever you're doing, do it from a place of, let's redo the thing, because it's, we are where we can think of all this from new. Maybe we need some teams to be performing, some not to be, some teams to be, let's think in the new lens of neurodivergence. We need some people to be generalists and some people to be specialists and we need to...
Al (28:05.891)
Mm-hmm.
Duena Blomstrom (28:18.412)
understand both, recognize both, and value both, and we haven't done that. So much is wrong in the setup of the work place today, that if we all went home and had to write down what we're doing and how many of us would be really necessary for real, if you were to put it down like in a sims environment, maybe a third are necessary and are useful if they were to be doing their best work. Everyone else, I think, is a bit of surplus, and until we are smart enough to redefine that everywhere in the commercial end.
administrative world, we're going to have issues. But meanwhile, let's just deal with how do we keep the teams we have before the new generation kicks us out and before AI has won because we haven't pulled our thumbs to learn about our feelings. Let's just deal with our people. This is a small problem. If you think in a longer lens, fixing today the post pandemic return to work without inducing more Human Debt should be an easy one.
Many people are fucking it up as we speak.
Al (29:16.34)
Yeah.
Yep, absolutely. And because we've loosened, we've loosened up the ability to have these conversations, right? And we keep wanting to tighten it back down. Um, you mentioned, you know, a project that I started kind of accidentally, I started creating a workbook for other, uh, for our secret society, Human, Human people focus on Human work at work and Human Debt fighters, uh, that would give them a, how to get started as a workbook.
And then I just kept writing and writing. So now it's become an actual, like, long book. But the workbook part is still, huh?
Duena Blomstrom (29:53.036)
I have to look at it and see how much I give everyone everything. Let's look at it first. But your main instinct is to give everything.
Al (29:58.854)
Yeah, exactly. But I have, you know, so anyway, it's become more involved. But the core of it, how I started it was if I was in talking to all the people who listen to my work, who read my newsletter, etc., how can I help them do this work? And so the core of it actually takes 10 common business objectives.
and connects them to how, based on data, the psychological health and safety of your team gets you to that goal, right? So it goes through that. It also goes through, for 2024, what are identified right now, granted we're really bad at fortune telling in general, but what are the trends for 2024 and how does having a psychologically healthy and safe team help accomplish that? So...
Duena Blomstrom (30:36.135)
Excellent.
Al (30:57.53)
I think the more we can start having these conversations in the context of the business we're in and being realistic about what is our culture, how big is our Human Debt, what is the appetite, kind of where are we starting. So one of the other things I created was a mental health maturity model so that you can see where are we and what should I expect as far as the level of conversation we can have.
Duena Blomstrom (31:03.836)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Al (31:26.562)
Those are some tools that are in the works. I love our popcorn experiments. I think that's.
Duena Blomstrom (31:31.744)
So what we need to do is we're gonna connect those two things for you guys and put them on the pods page somehow so that you get access to these workbooks. As usual, I think I've been very transparent but we're happy to say this again, our model is loads of stuff for free and then some stuff will have to cost some money. Unfortunately, we haven't even worked out what that is and the things we've been charging the industry have been dismal over the years. So we can't keep doing that. I don't think anyone should have done that.
fooled ourselves into this. If you want to be, if you have, if you have a mission, you can't always also make a buck for it. It's kind of what we've been sold over the last 20 years, I would say, in the workplace more than anywhere else. So I think I see this, this trend more there and more globally than other people, because I got to live in the States and elsewhere in Europe, many other places and then landed in England. So I can see different cultures and I got to see them.
to my luck through a slice of time that was exactly digital adoption and exactly beginnings of technology. So I got really lucky to be in the right place at the right time, I think. But more so if you're going to be like winning at who saw the universe the best, but if you're going to be winning at who has the biggest swimming pool, I lost already. So this is the problem, right? We have very different ways of formulating this. So anyhow, I'm going
Al (32:55.475)
I'm sorry.
Duena Blomstrom (32:58.704)
Maybe not even go there because now it's dramatically down that path. But what we're saying is, we're saying many things, but this Human Debt that you feel is potentially different per culture. No, I'm not sold. It's very different per culture. But maybe it is. It doesn't matter. There's Human Debt advocates that you can talk to and you can see in our in our Tech-Led Culture Pods that are from everywhere. You're not going to find people that we don't know. We can't hook you up with. Second biggest problem is
Al (33:01.426)
uh
Al (33:21.534)
Duena Blomstrom (33:29.28)
what anything costs. 90% of the things we give away are all you need to get started on an amazing strategy. What you don't have and you're not gonna be able to have is the time to put them all together. So reach out to one of us, try and see if any of us Human Debt fighters can humanize with you somehow. It doesn't have to be in person, but having someone online that you can rely on that is stitching these together for you as just...
tools might be useful. Equally, if you don't need anyone, just look at the bloody Aristotle to-dos and take them from there. What do I need to do? I need to get dependable. What do I need to do? I need to get more purpose. What do I need to do? I need to get more psychological safety. Don't ask us. Go ask Google what needs happening. There are models of what works out there that are extremely understandable, simple, and show results. Like we said, we're going to connect these things, Alessandria's workbook and
Al (34:13.707)
I'm Mhm
Duena Blomstrom (34:26.872)
we're going to connect these things, Alessandria's workbook and our popcorn experiments are going to be kind of be available in one. But again, don't have to do it alone. And I don't know that you can do it alone. So a lot of.
Al (34:34.28)
No, I don't think that's really the key. You don't have to do it alone. You shouldn't do it alone. The last thing you need to do is burn yourself out, taking care of other people, which is what we tend to do. And you know, yeah. Are you feeling attacked?
Duena Blomstrom (34:48.128)
What you're talking about?
Duena Blomstrom (34:52.236)
No, no, not me. Yeah, no, I mean, we all know what we know, right? Anyone listening to this understands why we get up in arms and our blood pressure goes up. But we also, we can see you and we know that you've been pushing hard. And you know what? I think what, unfortunately, what Human Debt fighters have in common at this point is a hell lot of resilience because we've been fighting a lot and we've been overcoming burnout after burnout.
And I think that alone should be very valuable. We all have, I'm sure, a set of practices that are self-care related and self grown-up professional related. I wish we all had those and it was meant to. Here's something to put mandatory in your workbook policies, dear HR professionals. If you don't have a self-care routine, don't show up for work. Anyhow, I mean, look, we all know there are common sense, simple things we could do.
Al (35:50.385)
I know, I know. We just, we don't do it. Look, I've spent a lot of time the last few weeks doing courses on leadership burnout. I've done it for multiple groups. And the, it's just, it's this odd conundrum of I'm sacrificing myself for the team.
Duena Blomstrom (35:52.752)
So it's tough.
Al (36:12.01)
which means I'm burning out and yet all the data shows that when I do that, it's detrimental to the team. So I've convinced myself that what I'm doing is the right thing, but what I'm doing is really the wrong thing and intellectually I know it, but emotionally, I don't know what else to do. I think that's where we come in. I don't know what else to do and we have answers.
Duena Blomstrom (36:18.559)
with him.
Duena Blomstrom (36:25.5)
Yeah. Cognitive resonance. Yeah.
Duena Blomstrom (36:34.785)
That's what you're feeling is heavy and there's dread and there's fuck my life, I better change jobs and make a change. That's the Human Debt you're feeling, that heaviness of what now, right? And we can come in and I know you've heard this. I mean, we're not just trying to sell ourselves, right? But we are a very expensive alternative to a therapist, a life coach and a PT trainer. But you know what, it's not just for you. You can get this in one package. If you get one of us,
handful of people on Earth. But if you get one of these people in, I can guarantee that they can make more change with enough levers in hand than 10 years of programs. So it's just a question of how, and it's always been the case, right? In technology in particular, we're used to, then we have to have this maverick team come in and the swat team to save whatever. What we get ourselves into this situation that we need a swat team that needs to save us, I don't know. But here we are, and this time we genuinely have
Al (37:16.356)
Mm-hmm.
Al (37:24.482)
Yes.
Duena Blomstrom (37:31.68)
crisis situation. This Human Debt shit is all encompassing. It's coming to get everyone in various ways. And I know we're burnt out and we're in no mood, but we got to double down, find other Human Debt Fighters and just get it out of the workplace now once and for all, because this window is closing on us in the next year or two, I think. And on that note.
Al (37:50.485)
Okay. On that note...
Duena Blomstrom (37:55.024)
On that happy note, let's hope I'm wrong as usual and we will see you next week.
Al (38:01.634)
Bye!