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In this episode, Duena Blomstrom, originator of the Human Debt™ framework, and Dr Alessandria Polizzi, organisational psychologist and Human Work Advocate, continue their exploration of trust by focusing on executives and senior leaders as potential Human Debt™ Fighters — not just observers.
The conversation examines why Human Debt™ builds over time through broken psychological contracts, neglected human work, and fear-driven leadership — even in organisations that believe they are “doing the right things.”
Key themes include:
- Human Debt™ as accumulated organisational residue
- why respect, safety, and wellbeing are part of the employment exchange
- office politics and lack of empathy as early warning signs
- the executive perception gap on wellbeing and trust
- why burnout cultures are statistically unsustainable
- command-and-control leadership as a symptom of fear
- courage, stance-taking, and responsibility at the top
- moving from awareness to action without burning people out
The episode also shares practical examples of how organisations have begun to shift leadership behaviour by designing for participation, shared accountability, and servant leadership, rather than relying on slogans or training alone.
Rather than calling for more reports or frameworks, this conversation challenges leaders to act on what they already know — and to recognise human work as core operational 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 conversations on the pod that keeps us talking about the secret society of human work advocates and human dead fighters. We know it's a long title, but it's what keeps us all in the same place. You heard in the jingle, we're trying to always keep this conversation on what's new in the world of technology, people, culture, and the fight that we all are having as either preventers or fighters of this human death. Hi, Yep, Esther
Alessandria Polizzi:thanks for being part of this conversation too. I mean, really enjoy being able to share the vast knowledge that we both have built to help people address the barriers and help remove obstacles for pushing this work forward. Because sometimes it can be lonely.
Duena Blomstrom:It can, and it's very difficult to explain why terms that other people would find aspirational are difficult. And I think this is maybe a struggle many professionals have, which is some that many of us have left family members behind that work maybe not quite at the same professional level as us. And sometimes that changes over time, over our careers, and it's hard to It becomes more and more isolating because the responsibilities get heavier, and we end up in places where our struggle is not as common as it used to be when we were doing other things. So, we get where you're coming from, from multiple points of view. And what we were talking about in the last episode, and we'd like to pick up on again, are the state of the mental health crisis and this idea of trust.
Duena Blomstrom:Over the last few weeks, for those of you who haven't maybe listened to all the episodes and are just joining us in the very middle, we have tried to start a compilation of resources, we would say, for human death fighters, in the sense that anyone that's internally in job or external trying to make a better world in any which way, or even just people who want to start enterprise, right? We feel like there's a lot more that needs to be out there in terms of both knowledge and genuine hands on doing, and genuine hands on pieces of either software or books or work that you can start doing today. We all believe that needs to happen right away. It's imperative and we want to give you everything we can for free or almost free, and also find a way in which all of us human dead fighters, can amplify each other's voices and get to a place where collectively as a society, we move the world of work faster. That's what we're doing.
Duena Blomstrom:It's a big one, we know. But we also know that once you see the size of the human that you can't look away and you can't just forget it. So, we are here to stay, we're here to be doing this for the rest of forever. We beg you to come faster on this journey because the only people that shouldn't care about it are people that are just about to retire or are just not in professions where their skill sets are intellectually based. And if you are listening to this, you're probably not in those categories.
Alessandria Polizzi:But I would actually say, so let's hit on that for a second, at least in The US, the industries with the highest suicide rates, death by suicide, are oil and gas and construction. Those are skilled labor, not traditional knowledge workers. So we have a crisis across all levels, across all industries that needs to be addressed. And I think this concept of human debt is really important to think about because it isn't just a point in time. It is about the gunk that builds up over time.
Alessandria Polizzi:So if we kind of think about a heavy investment in big machinery, we have to pull that apart and clean it to make sure it's not dangerous, it doesn't hurt people, and it doesn't break down or burn out. So I think the more we talk about human debt, I think it's helpful to give examples of what we mean when we say human debt or the kinds of things that are indicative of telling us that we have human debt. Are there some things that people could look out for that would tell them that they have this going on in their organization?
Duena Blomstrom:I always say the best way to know if you have human debt is to read the definition and to listen to yourself. Do you go, Damn. Because if you recognize it and you can resonate with it, chances are there's a lot of it and it's already imprinting itself on your day to day life. In the sense that I don't know many organizations that are devoid of any human debt. To be very clear, most companies have built some, even those that have started from good foundations, and even those that were startups, or even those that started from people centric cultures and with a lot of money.
Duena Blomstrom:Everyone can and will build human debt that doesn't keep a keen and regular eye on their human work. It's that simple. And the examples that you were asking for are a lot more common than we expect. We all feel when we have office politics, which is endearingly considered office politics, but it's practically a collection of potentially problematic and toxic behaviors. When we have lack of empathy and humanity in a team or in an organization, you immediately feel it, we all immediately feel it.
Duena Blomstrom:It has direct consequences on our feeling of well-being and our implicit mental health coding and measurements of any kind. All of these things start being very easy to feel, but we equally don't know exactly where they started as mere employees. If we are to look at them from an academic perspective, we want to look down the rung of how did they acquire, we can start seeing times when these lack of trust episodes have happened in organization. This is what you are talking about in the last episode, which these episodes, the initial agreement we had with this organization has been broken. We have come to this organization with the presumption that we will give it the skills we have, and in exchange for it, we will receive compensation.
Duena Blomstrom:But that compensation is not necessarily material directly. That compensation is an element of respect, an element of value, an element of well-being that we have failed our people in, right? So we haven't been as efficient keeping people secure, safe, in a sense of well-being, in a trusting environment, in an empathic team where they feel seen, valued and understood. We haven't done those things right. Sometimes because the organization was dumb, sometimes because they cut corners, sometimes they didn't have the money, sometimes the change of guard was too quick and nobody picked up that particular project on DNI anymore.
Duena Blomstrom:Sometimes the tide has turned and the world is moving on and you haven't quite landed that one win for the people department. And this is one of those times in the history of the workplace, whether you are a skilled laborer or in the knowledge industry, it's the same time, which is, it's the moment where we question if the ways in which we work are fit for purpose today, and they aren't anymore. We need a lot more in the way of human skills across the board, everywhere. We need to look at each other with human eyes and go, right, how do we learn emotions? How do we learn empathy?
Duena Blomstrom:How do we learn communication? How do we learn how to make things faster afterwards? That's where we are, Yeah. I
Alessandria Polizzi:And I think one of the things that I want to kind of circle back to on that is this sense that we can avoid human debt, which, look, as humans, we make mistakes. We are flawed. So as a leader, you are going to make mistakes.
Duena Blomstrom:Right? Which means my third joke. That's not going to work.
Alessandria Polizzi:Most of us are flawed. So the expectation that you will be able to do it perfectly every time is perhaps what might be getting in the way of you being the best possible leader you can be, because we feel like a flaw means that somehow we failed. Rather, a flaw is an opportunity to better understand the needs of others. One of these actions of potentially creating human debt isn't about let's not create it, which we know we're going to, but what can we put into place to monitor when it happens and address it and to learn from it? So when we say preventers of human debt, to me, that looks like equipping people on acknowledging what it is, what it looks like.
Alessandria Polizzi:And also not just from a behavior perspective, what are our processes and ways of working that create this human debt, like create this noise? Do we have a culture of always being on Slack and having to respond every moment? Do we have a lack of role clarity so people are bumping into each other or doing double work? Like there are specific ways of working that also create that human debt. And that's one way that we can be more, I don't know, fully able to prevent it, but definitely mitigate it and decrease the risk and harm that it creates.
Duena Blomstrom:I think it's really important that we think of one, what it contains, but not necessarily how we've created it, because to me, it's very clear. Everything that should have been done, if you can name 10 projects that were big priority for HR in the last twenty years, those are the things that didn't quite land. So, don't think we can pick one to say, you know, attrition, we no longer have a problem with that. That's fine for us. Or, you know, kind of, I don't know, employee well-being.
Duena Blomstrom:We sorted that. Now our employees are well-being. It's none of those things that we can And none of us in this conversation believe that those things were once and done. But I do think that we have done an incredibly poor job of driving that to the business. And instead of saying to the business, you know how you expect people to do regular work on operational things, And you know how you expect people to do regular work on technical things and on admin things.
Duena Blomstrom:You have to expect people to do regular work on themselves and on their team. And when that is the expectation, you then give them the tools, you give them the support, you give them the, I don't know, money, the time and the appreciation and the thanks for it, and then people will do it. And then once you have taught your people how to take care of themselves, have a practice of human work, then you can feel like your enterprise is going. But the mere audacity of thinking that your life will just happen by miracle in terms of this, the most important of components, the human component is staggering, and it will just not take you further. This is the moment where the chips are down.
Duena Blomstrom:If we remain of the opinion that our work ways are fit for purpose and our way of excluding emotion is correct, we will not be here as enterprises in the next few years, simply because in this day and age, that is not an assumption that data support will hold water. You will not be here as an enterprise at all if you do not start creating a genuine people centric culture and not a lip service moment in your enterprise.
Alessandria Polizzi:Yeah. Mean, there's data on this that these high stress burnout cultures are not sustainable and are two times more likely to go bankrupt. So, if that's how you've built your business, that's not going to scale for the long term.
Duena Blomstrom:But let's be honest, which exec will tell you, Yep, that's what we're doing. We're burning people out. It's not a problem.
Alessandria Polizzi:Most of them would probably believe that they're not, right? Like if you look at the data, and this is where we get into this conundrum we talked about last time. If you look at the data of executives who believe that they're investing in well-being and that people are in a good place versus what people see as far as the investment and where they are, there is a huge discrepancy. And I think this is also the tone deafness around the return to work mindset. I had a conversation with the leader last week at a program and he was saying, Well, I need people to return to work because I need to make sure that they're getting the job done.
Alessandria Polizzi:And I'm like, If that's how you manage, they're not doing well. This is, as you know, it's
Duena Blomstrom:one of my big bugbears, the idea of command and control and how much of a leadership crisis we are traversing in the workplace where no one has been either trained or expected to be delivering anything in the human side of things when that is their only day job. And when we have plucked people from being specialists and technologists and made them into line managers and expected them to do things that would require a lot more knowledge and training than that, it's no surprise we have created an environment where no one thrives. So all of these big concepts, trust, what does it mean to work individually versus in a team? What does it mean to work individually in a team versus this organization? And then what are the elements that you can grab on to as very quickly levers of change, those are things we should all be a 100% clear on.
Duena Blomstrom:The fact that there is so much dissipated opinion in our world, let's put it elegantly, is not helping us. What happens, we said this over and over again, we have execs more confused than ever, not positively sure who to believe, whether or not the people that are telling them it's fine to insist on RTO and to forget all of this, the human moment are right, or is it the ones that are telling them they're going to be facing a grinder level revolt? They don't know what to believe, but they don't know what to believe. Let's not excuse execs because they don't know what to believe because they are unwilling to be courageous about having an opinion on these topics. They are not unknowledgeable.
Duena Blomstrom:It's not like no one needs to necessarily read more or just have one more report. We know what we know, and these things are common sense. These rules of don't be a dick with your humans are common sense, right? You don't need to have read more. You do need to make a stance.
Duena Blomstrom:You need to be more courageous. You need to be more, even more. And we know it's a big thing to ask of execs that have been consistently putting themselves out there. Let's face it, no one makes it, most people don't make it to the top of a company without having been super smart, super hardworking, super passionate at some point. But we are talking to the people that are tired.
Duena Blomstrom:They have fatigue. They don't care anymore. They don't care about this fluffy bit anymore. We are barely surviving. It's a recession.
Duena Blomstrom:We cannot be silly and talk about the fluff. Think about it because you know it's wrong and you know it's not the truth and have the courage to drive the right agenda.
Alessandria Polizzi:Yeah. I mean, one of the simple questions that I ask when I have these conversations with executives it doesn't really matter what level is when did you do your best work? When did you do your best work? And to the person, the answer is usually or uses the word I felt. I felt trusted.
Alessandria Polizzi:I felt empowered. I felt challenged. Is not I had a title. I got paid. Right?
Alessandria Polizzi:So, we know that, like you said, this is common sense. If we know that to be true, then what's in the way of preventing people from doing their best work? So, one of the things that we're focused on here, though, is helping people remove these barriers, not just pointing to them and leaving it at that. So what are some ways that you've seen organizations make that mental leap, executives make that mental leap to actually clicking in and seeing that this is a problem for their business.
Duena Blomstrom:I'll give you a couple of examples. Have seen, first of all, know you know, but maybe some of the listeners don't, I run a company making software for teams. And in these many years of doing research on how to do that most efficiently so that these teams are most performing and can build psychological safety, one of the things we've done consistently was attempt to always check whether this should be a product for the team leader or the team or them together or the individual versus the group. It's always a consideration to us. And we always wanted to give, and still very much want to give people resources, right?
Duena Blomstrom:So we're very keen on offering everything anyone would need so that they are in charge of their human work, right? And the reason I'm telling you this is because we've seen a couple of companies using it in very innovative ways. And when they have done that, I've always went back to say, what were you trying to achieve? And then I've found out things that would have otherwise not occurred to me. For instance, there's this one company that has bought a few licenses.
Duena Blomstrom:They were having, I don't know, few tens of teams. I'm not quite sure how many. And several of these teams were doing great and several were not. And our coaches went in, had a couple of sessions and conversations with them. And then I came into a couple of meetings and it then became, at some point, the parent was that some of these teams were always having the same scrum master or team leader leading the session, whereas three of these teams were always passing the button and changing the team leader position between them.
Duena Blomstrom:So the person that was sharing the screen and encouraging the conversation about the feelings and the emotions was always changing, no less because in our software, there's a step by step way of doing this that anyone could lead. So, my 12 year old son could be easily leading one of these team moments, right? So, we always wanted to make them easy, but it always never occurred to us that it's possible for them to be used in common. So, what they were doing when I went to ask why they were doing this was, this was an incredibly intelligent chief people officer who was attempting to show their top execs what the meaning of facilitation and servant leadership was, which was, I just want these people to take responsibility for moving a conversation, and I want them to have that experience shared between them. So nobody is necessarily in charge of the team.
Duena Blomstrom:We are all sharing this common accountability of doing something for ourselves. And that alone will show them what it means to do something for others, what it means to facilitate, what it means to be owner of that changing of behavior, and it will instill a sense of servant leadership. So they were using it in a completely different way that never occurred to me, but that is a person that had the mind, the eye to know what was missing deeply in their organization and find a way to show it. And story has it that when the execs saw it, they've asked that to continue. I see that happening.
Duena Blomstrom:Do we know that that has completely moved the needle? No, but we know it moved the needle of showing the execs what exactly they meant by participation, accountability, belonging, and moving the teamwork.
Alessandria Polizzi:I love that story. Thank you for that. So, as we ask people to join us on our weekly discussion, these are the kinds of stories we'll be sharing. We're sharing data. We share insights.
Alessandria Polizzi:And also, we just laugh a lot on our show.
Duena Blomstrom:Maybe not today because we didn't quite understand how this LinkedIn thing worked. If you guys try to talk to us live, clearly we haven't been quite able to respond. We'll do it afterwards. And we don't know if it was boring or not. And I'm sure it was a lot more boring for our poor listeners to listen about this live on LinkedIn.
Duena Blomstrom:But if you did listen and you would like to participate to the next one, maybe we'll even be able to keep to a certain hour. But if not, you can find us online as ever at ww.techleadculture.com/technology if you want to grab yourself a piece of software that will help you move faster or slash pods and ideas so that you read more about the ways in which we give free resources to human death fighters and human work advocates. Talk to you next week.
Alessandria Polizzi:Thanks, bye.
Duena Blomstrom:Bye.