S1E5 — The New Human and Tech Debt: Where Execution Risk Really Lives
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to our recording that is now live of our podcast, People and Tech. Why did you laugh at it? How is that intro too bad? What is the problem with it? So I'm Duena Blomstrom, and this is Dave Ballantyne.
Duena:And I very happily and Dave Ballantyne, very reluctantly, both of us are fighting human death so that engineering grows up and so that we create value in software creation. No. In software delivery, in agile delivery, in value delivery. I don't know what we wanna call what, but we know what we mean. Think it's an interesting way to start today's maybe.
Dave:Yeah. What are
Duena:those four things? No.
Dave:So are we gonna dive straight into McKinsey go part two?
Duena:I mean, we have much to speak of, but we can do that or we can dive into my choice of words that's been slightly policed this week on LinkedIn.
Dave:Yeah, I know we had a robust discussion again, should we say?
Duena:Did. All of our team has been invested in different ways. We've had various ideas, and that was great. We loved that, didn't we? That was good value we got from it.
Duena:Yeah. So we're going to get a little bit into that. And then we're going to talk about, of course, McKinsey Gate and the effects of it because we were slightly earlier than everyone else in the market, taking a more, what we thought was a call approach to it, but ended up being a quite let's just say that the community then crafted responses towards the same ideas. We thankfully all reacted to the fact that we can't measure an individual and we can't just do away with the things we've learned about performance and teams. We all reacted to that.
Duena:I think we've also reacted to a perversion of the idea of agile that kind of infiltrates itself when we attack the idea of team. I think it would be interesting to discuss that. And then I think it brought us to a bigger conversation on what's value and what's the value of language, and value creation in general of ideas and so on. So that would be a good one for us to take on.
Dave:So those are the a rollercoaster fun trip of agile McKinsey swearing should we utterly?
Duena:I don't promise any swearing. I'm not necessarily
Dave:I'm never going be talking about swearing.
Duena:We are going to be talking about the idea of swearing.
Dave:The idea of swearing
Duena:and the what preferred language for Yeah.
Dave:And is LinkedIn a good professional environment? Or is it a social media? Or should we just treat it the same as we should Twitter, Facebook?
Duena:What is the professional environment?
Dave:That's a very
Duena:good Let's start there.
Dave:Is the question?
Duena:Should we start there? I'll take No, let's not dive in. Let's get some context to this, right? Because not everyone's listening to our every adventure, much as we'd like that to not be true.
Dave:Yeah, true.
Duena:True. Not everyone's like waking up in the morning checking, have we had a stand up? How do we feel about McKinsey? What else has been said by us on
Dave:different To keep
Duena:up with
Dave:With what our opinions are.
Duena:With what our opinions Yes, He does. This is the reluctant DB at work here. Yeah. Right. I don't know.
Duena:Do people wanna hear our, essentially, scoreboards. So let's get back to the idea of this report. We'll let you guys in on what the scoreboard is in a second. I mean, do you know me? I overshare everything in every corner and I'm on all the channels wearing all the things I'm telling you about our love, children, not our children, our life's work and why I'm battling windmills.
Duena:And yes, some of the times those windmills are in the form of my formerly techie husband. It does happen. We're gonna tell you when those happen. I will not gonna keep them away from you. And this was one of them to be fair.
Duena:Okay? Now, meanwhile, was how did you see from the perspective of a super busy company building techie that was also writing code, evaluating some companies, doing some due diligence and re productizing some bits in PeopleNotek with our How eminent did it feel to you to see this conversation on developer productivity and how much of it did you internalize and what are your normal channels? Let's start there. Because I feel like our channels are
Dave:No, think it's fair enough to say from the regular JoBlo developer. I think they are quite dislocated from this sort of conversation, right?
Duena:Why? You ask, Because
Dave:they've got other things to do. No,
Duena:no, I have things, I have big good things. No, no. I'm sorry, carry don't know that he should be laughing, I don't think we're in the shot, it doesn't matter. Doesn't
Dave:matter. They
Duena:have bigger important things to do.
Dave:Not just things they've got more important things to do, they've got more immediate
Duena:It's bigger, they're More more
Dave:urgent in front
Duena:No, of things that they feel more urgent to them.
Dave:Yeah, exactly.
Duena:Exist. These developers you're talking about, they do not exist. They cannot spare. I don't believe this. You are lying to me.
Duena:These developers that will not spare half an hour to figure out what has happened this week in the world of of technology, the world of agile, in the world of let me bloody peruse through LinkedIn, let me see what David Farley said, let me see what the guys in the DevOps community have been putting out, what is on Twitter. I do not buy that there are disconnected code monkeys out there because if there are, they should be measured.
Dave:They should be measured by logic.
Duena:They should be measured by marketing methods, if that's what we have. Because the people I was fighting for, that I was ready to kind of have a fight with my entire team for, are the people who are not like that. They have put their assets on the line, they've been thirsty for knowledge, they've been continuously pushing themselves learning shit when others weren't doing any of that work. They know that this competition is happening. They know that there are some twenty, thirty, 40 names that they should trust.
Duena:They know that there's a fountain of knowledge and the source of this is the thing that I want all the best. Where do we keep a system of reference? Where do we keep that?
Dave:Right. So when you say a system of reference, we're just saying that, Dave Farley said this, Alice has come and said that, and here we go putting us the other story of what happened on a day by day, week by week basis.
Duena:No, I wanted a system of reference, the basics of everything. I want no developer to claim. I didn't know what the hell this Agile Manifesto crap was. All I hear is that there's a conversation between the mindset and the work and how many fucking clients. And I don't believe these people exist.
Duena:You have to convince me otherwise. I don't think they do.
Dave:I think they do. And I bet a lot of them.
Duena:Yes. Completely disengage and disconnect, and they don't give a fly. They show up, they write some shit, they go home.
Dave:Yeah. No. Yes.
Duena:They don't. Then they lost them somewhere. Then that's a tragedy. They weren't in it, they wanted to, and somehow they lost them.
Dave:Exactly. These are horses. You can bring them to water, but you can't force them to drink.
Duena:But did they bring them to water? Because there's enough human death in all of your organizations, and no one brought them to any water.
Dave:Yeah. What they might have done is brought them to the bridge, but not the water itself. Because the bridge is a process, if you like. It's a crap analogy, but there isn't even an analogy.
Duena:It was, but it's stuck up to wind. I think you guys are going to find that our new speaking of nothing, absolutely not sequitur and just to interrupt this man who actually had an amazing point, but give him time to maybe untangle his analogy. We are before date night. We decided to do our podcast before date night because we are in the most amenable tone to each other. We closed laptops.
Duena:We've already told people what our team shouldn't expect out of us tonight. So we might as well have this conversation and then go finish it by the sea or in a restaurant with friends, which typically happens.
Dave:Yes. Go back to the analogy. I think where we differ, and not my mindset, but I do know that there are two definitions of agile. Now some people think moving tickets on a board is being agile.
Duena:No. No. No. Yes. Some people think that.
Duena:Yes. Yes. No. The people that tell you that are people who in their heart of hearts know they're lying, and they haven't done the work to really read and comprehend and internalize the shit. So they should do it someday.
Duena:They postponed it. And where they are at now is that they are faking it and at least go into the process. That's what you have. You have people fearful to tell you, I didn't quite get it. I was afraid of it.
Duena:I don't really know what the mindset is. So I'm just gonna do your crap, but I don't believe you. You're talking to me in 2018, you said you were gonna tell people. I was telling people that I've seen with my own eyes, doing stand ups and wishing them to eat faster so that they can go back to their waterfall moving tickets one after another. And it doesn't even matter if they do that at their best.
Duena:If they do it in their head, which is what I say when I say mentality, which is why I say it matters that these developers and everyone else has these basics comprehend what we mean by agile, comprehend what it means by clinical. But they should, they This
Dave:is the Gartner hype cycle again. Yeah? Yes. This is it, right? And you're assuming that everyone is always at the end of plateau productivity.
Dave:I'm saying that people have a new piece of inflated expectations.
Duena:I am telling you that the reason they're not going anywhere is because they are stuck, they are suicidal, and now they're gonna be Literally, they're
Dave:gonna be
Duena:I know. Measure now we are
Dave:And fantasy continues.
Duena:It is really bad. So not only are these people useless to us and disconnected and about to off themselves, but we will find a way to continue the beatings, right as Chris Worf said it himself.
Dave:Continue beatings.
Duena:Continue the beatings until the morale improves. Yeah. And and it's just
Dave:Wouldn't you just be fucking happier?
Duena:But it's abominable. And look, I have to admit, we do have two very different I have much more idealized view of this No. I know. Know we are somewhere in the middle. I don't know though enough negative examples of developers.
Duena:I tell you that. Right? In my experience, I've only met people that were I genuinely think this is the truth and that we never discussed this before. I've only ever met people in technology that I loved and liked and adored working with. And I think the commonalities there were very clear to me.
Duena:They were a lot more able to be direct. They were a lot more able to operate with facts and data. They were all a lot more able to be flexible. They were learning like crazy. These things were there already, right?
Duena:This was never the different case. Except all of those great attributes are bloody and absolute bollocks, since I am now going to TM this. They're human dead bollocks, I should TM this. They are human dead bollocks because when you have these things in order but you don't also have that platform of humanity and you've only focused on tech on this side and on some fake business mechanisms on this other side. What you now have is a sandwich of nothing.
Duena:So we have this non done work in the middle that's for the humans to do that you push against, I push against, or you're fucking push against because no one wants to do the shit because it's it's hard. It's repetitive. It's uncomfortable. And you
Dave:know what? Not
Duena:only do they not pay us for it, but it's more uncomfortable. Once you know how to take care of your of your fellow beings, you're going be even more fucked up.
Dave:Yeah, and you know, this budget season, when something else comes around, there's going be, Oh, change, we'll throw that out and we'll do this again. Do something new.
Duena:So why should you, right? Look, there are hundreds. I've talked about this to you last week, and I know that now we're jumping around. But I'd like you to start working with the people you know, that you've worked over the last fifty thousand years on like a library of, we haven't started one because we worked on something called developer insights. We wanted to understand what developers saw as an insight in that organization We ages should look at that and wonder there is, I wonder if there's something that we can do so the developers communicate with you and tell you the pattern I see most often now the anti patterns since we love it so much in the DevOps community, I don't fucking know why we're so crazy about anti patterns.
Duena:Please forgive me DevOps Institute and wherever else.
Dave:We don't love anti patterns, we hate anti patterns, which is why they're anti patterns.
Duena:I want to know whether the word anti patterns, we shouldn't be talking about any of that.
Dave:Should just be talking
Duena:about human dead bollocks and tech dead bollocks. That's what we have in life. That's one of two things. Stop moving my camera just so people don't take my point. Right.
Duena:So what were we saying?
Dave:Patterns and anti patterns.
Duena:Right. Before then, we were talking about the fact that we need to try and find again, I've talked about this in my last book, right? And I've noticed because
Dave:I mean, the last book or the new book?
Duena:The last, the one that's already out, the one that's more to that side of it, right. People Before Tech. And I know I've now realized not a lot of people read it. I've even had, I'll be honest on this podcast and I hope she doesn't take it the wrong way. I even had a close friend who has written an amazing article and yet she's never quoted the book.
Duena:And that's kind of left me thinking, do they not rate it? I don't think that's the case. They've given me advice and contributed to it. I think I just literally slipped her mind. And the reason I slipped her mind, I'll be honest with you, is because as we know not.
Duena:Easily, easily. Remember what our team has has brought to us, what they showed How how I forgot that we had the medium? How I forgot that's how I slip people's minds. I've made so much shit. I don't remember it myself.
Duena:I've over dropped And people in one of the shit was this book we're talking about, right? Called People Before Tech. It's not just this book, it's done quite well in its category, would say. And apparently the Japanese, the Chinese and a bunch of other Asian countries adore it and it's a big thing and they teach it in universities and stuff, but maybe we shouldn't make a big deal out of it over But what it says essentially is, look, the only lever of change for organizations at the team level is psychological safety, or not the only, the first lever of change for teams at a team level is psychological safety, start there. You start seeing some amazing improvements in teams and when your teams work well, they make amazingly well working organisations.
Duena:A simple principle. The reason we can't get to that principle is this shit in the middle. It's not the messy middle, it's the human dead and take that bollock. That's what it is.
Dave:This means it will clog
Duena:a bit and it will create more, won't it?
Dave:It will, it will if people take it to heart. Now, will a CEO just try and enforce this on people or will it stop at some point with engineering leads going, This is all crap. Can't You can't get me me yeah, And then Mr. CTO has got to fill on its way to CEO, but we can't do that. And that's the language that needs to be addressed, right?
Duena:Do you know what, why we can't do that? Maybe you're right, maybe we should do, okay, listen to this insanity, taken from the fiercest capitalist and most meritologetic you've ever heard, but maybe we should have a unionized real technologist sort of play, may Tracy hear us, because at the end of the day, what is happening against some developers right now is abominable. The rhetoric that is changing against them is abominable. Another category that is actually under attack and we should wonder who those people are, are agile coaches and scrum masters and the like or DevOps people who have been too involved with the principles of Agile. They are seen as too reductionist.
Duena:Is that it? Oh no, I'm sorry, that's bad term in this context. They are seen as too doctrine marriage, right. I'm probably one of them now. Look, that's horrendous.
Duena:If you then stop having essentially the people, you're gonna There's a lever we've already burnt out with the need to learn all this technology, the need to move faster, with the need to produce some feature that the product owner promised business manager, otherwise he was gonna get his balls cut. All those needs have burnt out this layer of developers. These are people who were ill equipped anyways for the demands of technology, which are collaborate, talk to people, have some human interaction. They were ill equipped and then you plastered on that or you coupled on that, your bloody COVID, you know, and then the entire situation that we're going through now, and they're being called back. Being measured.
Duena:They're being told that they should do better. And they're being told that their entire agility thing where they have to be involved in all the things is crap. So they should sit back down in their box. A reduction of the tech knowledge, sphere, all of it. It's dangerous because the people that are moving in this space, they're not technologists that care only about the real value of something, not about the human.
Duena:No, not about the human, not about the human politics like the other guys. They are people that are coming from the middle manager layer of consultancies who are now either going independent or have caught some contracts here and there, or are claiming they've written 190 books because they've been translated more than twice on an e book somewhere in some corner.
Dave:That really got you.
Duena:I mean, yes, it really got me. I'm gonna go through examples, but I think I should keep those examples for what is keeping Dwena's goat on fire, as a slight series on TikTok and such. But yeah, that really got me. Why wouldn't they? There are people who take a lifetime to take out the book.
Duena:It's a big endeavor. It means something, right?
Dave:And to
Duena:diminish those people to say, well, I have 150 because I've written one with AI and the other 149 have been delivered in the same day by a beautiful copying software, they've been somehow gotten on Amazon.
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's face it. Amazon self published stuff. Anyone can churn it out.
Dave:Amazon doesn't care. It doesn't care about quality. It doesn't care about proofreading. Great. I did an article, there was a sequel book I read many, many, many years ago, that it was a free kindle book.
Dave:It was appalling. The advice in there was hideous. And it was just like, there you go, it's now the book and it's truth.
Duena:Maybe this is a bigger problem, maybe you're touching on something extremely important, maybe we have to have some type of international body, I cannot believe I'm promoting more regulation instead of less. Look, do not, I don't think are equipped to have the rational thinking capacity to drive themselves through this next period. And by people I mean children, education, business, all of these bits are going to change tremendously. There is a complete change of paradigm thanks to this shift because of AI and thanks to the shift because of this era of humanity and thanks to the shift because humans pushed it real hard like I do and are now deflating. They're in an era of So when all of these are coming together
Dave:You're coming down to the heart, not the You're hype coming down the heart of the hype cycle now, aren't you?
Duena:I'm not, I'm coming right up the hype cycle because what's going to hit us is this climate change. This thing has implications everywhere.
Dave:You're on the plateau of an island now.
Duena:I'm not on a plateau. I'm on a let's go right up the mountain with the Sisyphus task and land that we have human debt and we have to fix it with technology. And the more we let these developers get in a corner instead of saying, step up, read the shit, come tell me how you feel, be a human at work. Instead of asking out of our developers to do the human work, we tell them they're a monkey that can only write code.
Dave:The thing is when you get that enforced to be a human as well, right? It's just like
Duena:Not at all. No one's influencing anything. No one's saying that. These
Dave:guys and this team are not talking up. And they're not speaking up, they need to speak up, need to hear them, we need to know they're listening, we need to know they're involved, we need to know their ideas. Don't do that. So you say to person X, These guys, they're not talking. We've heard a word with them, they didn't talk more.
Dave:You're
Duena:not even delivering it as well as you should. So what really happened is that the porn Let's be honest, right? It was, Can I tell people the story of what really happened? It's more pervasive and more perverse than you are saying. I'm not going to name names, obviously.
Duena:But this is from Dave's past where he has been attempting to bring some engineering teams up. He had been attempting to move them towards kind of performance from a ridiculously distributed in no architectured way organization, if you wish, and kind of, how people grow by mistake with a lot of human debt, one of
Dave:those normal can't deny any company is doing well by just doing organic growth. You have to celebrate that sometimes.
Duena:We do, why do never? I would never put it down. That's what people on tech does.
Dave:But you come to the point where these boulders which are dragging people back are dragging the company back.
Duena:And the boulders in this case, because we didn't say to people who are listening to us, we just know the topic to ourselves and that's not good enough, were the fact that the culture was appalling really. It was non existent, there was no culture, but there was a perception of an existence of culture that was stopping anyone from even discussing it. And it had become a taboo subject that was making people kick off and explain how well intentioned everyone is and how this should not be discussed. There were various communication embargoes, the information flow as shown by Ron Westrum was clearly stuck in the exact type of organization that it was. And unfortunately Dave wanted to be a much bigger hero maybe that he could have imagined he can be and he at one point attempted to even fix the outsourced teams is what this story is really referring to and he started by trying to bring the complete inability of picking up at all and forget psychological safety, they would just genuinely not engage in some things and he spoke to them people and the response he got was we'll have over them which you can imagine is the absolute opposite of what we're attempting to achieve.
Duena:Almost like from
Dave:a tech leader in that respect, if people are sitting there, everything's remote obviously, if people don't even have their cameras turned on, how do you know they'll actually engaged?
Duena:Yeah, well you see that, but that's a tough one that's being discussed in even the more well intentioned, and this is the key of it, it needs discussing, right? Because it's not a one size fits all. Cannot tell them turn on your camera, because you're going to have all of these autistic people that are gonna tell you to go fuck yourself or not. They will show up and they will mask the crap out of it for you. And let me tell you, in their minds and in their fingers they will be doing something the fuck else.
Duena:If you want them engaged, you get them engaged in a way that works for them. You come to them. So find out who the fuck your people are first and then talk about how we bring them in, right? But when you attempted to talk to them, the conversation was I don't know what with them, they'll show up for you, they'll tell you how many words would you like in this next session sir,
Dave:like 25%,
Duena:like a smile.
Dave:Yeah, by the nod.
Duena:Everyone again who doesn't know, you should go to Brian Finstas, what is it called? We should share screens. Can you find You it meanwhile, you bring my LSUnder please, and you find that there are people entertained.
Dave:Oh, okay. What is this job?
Duena:Well, what's it called? Good work distribution. I know about this because I was born in a country where we talked about work distribution quite a lot. Would you like me to tell you about it, so that I bring some of those principles in our team?
Dave:Yeah.
Duena:I believe not, is what. This dearly beloved was an inside communism versus rich capitalist joke. You don't need to know more about what we can tell you about in our members area. So keep us to it if you're interested. We've also promised you something that if I get a smiling picture or something of you, what was it that you promised?
Dave:A smiling picture of me.
Duena:You don't remember, right? One, were ten minutes drop in and we have been incapable of lining up our guests like we would have liked to, but by next week we'll have something in, I would like to say. We have been in capable of bringing in the CTO back corner, but you know what? Let's do a CEO back corner for this episode and let me be the one that's absolutely bragging about both my CTO slash CIO slash chief data officers because they are the people that have done the most miraculous mob of of tech bad and and and jump in in a code ability that we are going to announce next week. But as a as a teaser, today, it even goes out before the weekend.
Duena:Because of this man here and his heroics and with our team obviously, and because of the CTO of People Not Tech, you can find out the information if you try, but I'm not going see his name in case the algorithm picks him up and he still has a day job. Because of the heroics of these two people, people in our tech will be able to with the help of tech led culture, will be able to announce something to the industry next week that is again us putting our money and our time and our everything, our blood and tears, where our works are, and we're giving something to the industry that we never give before, which is each team can actually start sorting out their human debt if they want to at the team level by getting the software in, because we've made it cost level £50 a month for any team up to 12 people. I was gonna announce this probably on Monday, obviously, there's the entire campaign, but you guys, if you're listening to this, this is literally the only thing we can think to do, which is here's the software for practically free, so that you can start making some shifts.
Duena:Because if you allow this human dead to commit to your team at that level, because of these things that are happening, because of these cases, because of this storm death, let's just work, let's not agile, you are going to be, sorry for the French girl, fucking screwed. So prevent that, get it at your Tip and if you want to save your cost at Tip click on the button instead and make an introduction, let us fight the fight for you with your company.
Dave:Yep, okay, so cycling back around the site, Brian, it took me so long to find it. Scaled Agile DevOps. Do you
Duena:want to share your screen for a second so people see how incredibly funny and such it is? And then we leave people with that fun view of it. Do you remember when we share screens at all?
Dave:I don't know. Will it even come out? If I
Duena:share a screen, not? Your screen. Share Everything's fine. Remember we do this in our other podcast quite often.
Dave:Okay, well, this is first for me. So
Duena:What a good joke, that was.
Dave:We can't actually just play this video.
Duena:No. We can't. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be able to give them. But what we do have to say is that you have to listen to it. Go to go to Google.
Dave:Let's go through measurement of making don't measure. Then we really don't
Duena:I don't know. No. No. That's halfway through. You cannot do that.
Duena:Your people need to understand from the beginning how one arrives Yeah. To be a 35.
Dave:The sadness. The sad sad NF. Core principles in the
Duena:Please go look at it. If you let me tell you something. This is such a business test. I use this with my team. If someone you give this to someone and they come tell it satire, you know you don't want them in your team.
Duena:And I will advise people an anti burnout thing. I'll be honest with this. Yeah. I'll put a marker here. It's how big it is.
Duena:This is a big thing. Right? I'll be I'll be a 100 with everyone. Cut your losses. Get out.
Duena:Get out now. If you're gonna get stuck in an enterprise that's tone deaf, that wants you back, that measures you, and you're gonna get stuck there in a downturn of the market where your value is impossible to demonstrate because there's AI all around you and you haven't gone fast enough and far enough to be a 100% honest and a 100% holding your balls like I have, you will be fucked. Get out now.
Dave:Genuinely So Very easy to say that, Lauren.
Duena:No. I don't super
Dave:super easy to say that. Get out.
Duena:No. I think old dickies can get out. They can get out by at least they can get out in their in their in their plans. They can get out in their minds. They can start building a brand.
Duena:The get out is start writing. So that
Dave:one should get
Duena:yourself out there.
Dave:Mean, that's that's a completely different subject. Right? Everyone
Duena:should Completely be a different subject. The subject I was making, get out by building a brand. Not get out by changing your job, get out by putting yourself out there, get out there, get on TikTok, get on maintaining the stock.
Dave:Think, well, we've had this conversation. Maybe this is a conversation of a different point as well. But the value of influencers in this day and age does seem to have been greatly diminished since it was five, ten years ago. When I was blogging, then there was, I don't know, you'd go onto Twitter every morning and there'd be thirty, forty different blogs from thirty, forty with respect to different technical people.
Duena:Who you were looking forward to?
Dave:Yeah, yeah, some of those become personal friends. But then it seems to have just stopped.
Duena:So people didn't have this learning habit you're saying anymore?
Dave:I'm not sure they've the learning habit on their list of learning, but it's just not out there. Maybe it's me, maybe this is all me.
Duena:I mean, it is all you.
Dave:There are people who are blogging, I do know that.
Duena:Let me tell you my perspective, as an example Let from the last five
Dave:me just finish a sentence. The quality of good technical blogs seems to be about 20% of what it was five years back. That's it. That's my statement.
Duena:Okay, but your senior statement is utterly wrong. The quality is not lower. Your consistency in following them is lower and your ability to find them in the knowledge you've allowed in your stream is lower. So you have only yourself relating for how little you've curated your content and you have allowed yourself to get noise and crap in and or most likely sources of dopamine in like politics or cars or sport or in my case DevOps or Agile or You do
Dave:have to have an escape.
Duena:Okay, again I'm not even joking. If you haven't been able to hyper interest on things, I just mean anyone. I know you played the Versailles for credit. We all know how much you read, how much you curate and so on. Even in the midst of building companies, which I know is not easy, so I'm really No, whatever.
Duena:We don't want to go there, but we can have a proper other conversation about what we've learned while learning, while changing engines in flight. Right? But in this particular episode, I think what I'd like to say, because it's important is, over the last week or so, we have come to ideological blows. I have come to ideological blows with people on LinkedIn who believe frankly that the word bollocks is horrible. And they unfortunately believe that the word bollocks is horrible for me.
Duena:It's coming from me, when I said that someone saying that agile is not a mindset and they must stop saying that was bollocks, which I thought was a non contentious substantiated it with an article from twenty eighteen-nineteen that said Agile, you can't have the 'Wow' without the 'WHAT', which is the way of working, without the way of thinking.
Dave:I'm very glad asked who it is.
Duena:Very much. Don't worry, no one's going to click on it even if we were to put the link anywhere because no one does. Okay? And I know this because I put that link there, the views went through the roof, people made it a big deal, that how very dare I call this important influencers that has made himself an Insta influencer by adding some water in a corner from after he's decided that Agile is he's went he saw the light and then he dropped the light something stupid. Anyways, I don't wanna go into the personalities of this person that had five followers and now he has 8,000,000,000 because we've reached with him.
Duena:So we shouldn't have really done that with
Dave:people
Duena:in But the I understand that. So people were around me trying to pull me back from engaging with the person, but I wasn't accusing the person the same way that I never accused the consultancy itself. I don't think McKinsey is any shittier than any other consulting company. I'm just anytime that any other ones are gonna put out a horrible report that actually would damage people's lives and their understanding of execs of what the fuck human death is, I would go with their throat as well. You show it to me, please send them to me, and we'll do them one by one, because it is time we all call it out.
Duena:I will call you out, you can call me out, we'll all call each other out.
Dave:You're always calling me out.
Duena:You're always calling me out as well. That's the whole the whole point of it. The whole reason we have psychological safety is because one way or another, we get to say this is what I genuinely believe, and I believe it to be right. And I have to tell you because it's for the good of what we're making. Yeah.
Duena:Right? Yeah.
Dave:I'm with you.
Duena:So with that entire out of the way, the reason with control of this is because we we this look. Let's face it, Dave, is a newer addition to the PeopleNotek fans listening to this, right? Anyone who's been on this journey for as long as we have been, at least last six years of making free software, doing research, investing millions of dollars,
Dave:changes I'm very late in the game, I'll give you that.
Duena:Late coming in, not take as an organization. But what he is in late to is finding out that I'm very proud of us not having one ounce of human debt. And I'm very proud of us, despite working through super pressure over the last few months while we built this new proposition that has both a method and the way of giving back to the entire community and the way of helping people out of human debt for free and in some way to actually get some money for ourselves not to die. So we've created this thing which is complicated. We've done it together.
Duena:It's nearly killed us. But more importantly, what I'm proud of is we didn't compromise on one of the things that matter to us. This is our team, this is what the mother of all psychological safety, we will not move. And asking, when did we have that? I did not move.
Duena:I as a team leader do not move one inch until my people are in lockstep. I just don't. Because when the vision is in question, and it will be when you're tired, when you're fucked off, My only job, literally, if I stop doing all of my other jobs, would be to be there and go like, we can't do it today. If you're really dying, then we shouldn't be doing it today. In fact, I insist that you don't do it today.
Duena:We don't need to be doing this. Let me reorder the backlog for two seconds because I have the vision backlog. Let us all figure this out. You know what? Fuck it.
Duena:Let's go drink beer tonight. And then equally though, there will be times when people will want to drink more beer or spend more time researching something and you're gonna have to go, no, motherfucker, this is not gonna work. We promised x in the next ten minutes, and ten minutes have passed ten minutes ago. So we do both things. We do all those things, but we do them together.
Dave:Yeah. Yes. This stuff isn't just pulled out of anyone's ass. There's certainly been dog food in here.
Duena:Dog food everywhere, this is why he looked like he'd been through a war, I think.
Dave:I just feel like I've been through a war because it's, 40 degrees outside it feels like it today. I'm sweating, I'm hungry, it's date night.
Duena:No one's putting you here, look. No one's kidding me. Okay, well with that one, we lost one of our co hosts. He's gone on a date night. I don't know with who I should figure this out.
Duena:Anyways, let's wrap it up because we've went well over our thirty minutes and people have lives to leave. Next time we're going to do these mythical little segments that we've been trying to do. And we are trying to get all kinds of big people to come talk to us about the Mackenzie gate on this podcast. I want them to come swear here, if nothing else. And on part three, we'll talk about swearing.
Duena:I have some surprises for Dave and some blind reacts to some sites he's never heard of. I know he hasn't. And so we'll do that live. I can't wait. And also, listen to our other podcast called The Secret Society for Human Work Advocates and Humans that Finds Us.
Duena:We know it's a long title, but it's a long title for a reason. Go there, hear me have an even bigger fit of R. M. MacKenzie and why they stole all our shit in ebooks. Because in short, they did in one of their literally books.
Duena:They literally just went through my almost patented flow, which I think was one of the first people to If I'm going to blow my trumpet about anything, it's not even going be books. It's going to be the fact that was one of the first people that came to an industry that was fragmented, had 800 sources of information and went like, right. What you're looking at here, people, is psychological safety is the fastest way to move a team. You have to move a team if you want to move an organization. And let's face it, this is true because this is what Google found and this is what report found again.
Duena:Let's face it, these people know what they're talking about. Okay, business world. No one is talking about these things in the way that they should have done today. That's to me.
Dave:Absolutely.
Duena:So I'm happy to that. No, it's not my mission statement. I'm happy to leave that as a step in my life because that's not important. What's important is psychological safety is, let's say, the thing that has landed. It's not a thing that has landed.
Duena:It's a thing that they're going to use to make another ebook out of, to make another report that will make an exact thing otherwise. So save for developers by getting the software, the help,
Dave:the So tips they keep an eye on all the channels, the LinkedIn, the Twitters, The TikToks, yes. There will be Yeah. So coming next week, pounds 15 per month per team. Give it a try. Your people will love it and will love you.
Duena:That's the best one. So thank you for listening to us again and find us on all the channels whether you like it or not. Please keep thinking that human debt out there. Talk to you soon. Bye.
Dave:Thanks all. Bye.
