S1E6 — Tech-Led Culture: Designing Organisations That Don’t Burn People Out
Hello ladies and gentlemen.
Duena:Hello and welcome.
Dave:Welcome to the People AND Tech Podcast .
Duena:Right, a special edition from the island.
Dave:The lovely beautiful Spanish island music.
Duena:It is indeed what we are doing and what we have been trying to say once or twice before but we don't know how well it landed. We never had the time to have a long protracted honeymoon when we were first married so we decided that we will from then on always have a yearly honeymoon instalment we're going to pay back to ourselves and this is this year. Well I don't know if you should quite advertise for that, but we have gone through all kinds of theoretical discussions anywhere from what the universe stands for to what
Dave:the workplace needs in its new paradigm and how to really land change that will make people's lives perfect. So we've got a few ideas coming up. We've got a few projects and pieces in the workplace
Duena:Do we not, when we have those plans a little bit more, and let me tell you when we do come on to that, all of those were some for the end the day, yes they were. So yes, we have done a lot of thinking, we have looked at data, sobering data, some of which is surprising us in negative ways, some of which is giving us hope.
Dave:But there are signals from the market in various ways and we have seen them in the wake of this book coming out. And I suspect this is
Duena:what we should spend some time talking about today.
Dave:We wrote a book. Some of us wrote a book. You need. Right.
Duena:Tied down the efforts and made sure kids are being fed and shown the appropriate TV show. So the book is called Tech led Culture, you guys referred about it quite a number of times. There are different bitterness that are interesting for different people and for the purpose of this podcast, I let Dave come up with a list of things that he thinks would be interesting for the case that I have to double check. This is this is news to me. It will go either way.
Duena:For all we know, this could very well not record very well. We we know we're capable of destroying whole episodes.
Dave:So we're
Duena:thinking of this as a as a as an interview as
Dave:an interview format, right? You just have
Duena:some stuff about the book and I'll say, just don't ask me into much details about the book, I don't remember those, as you know. I
Dave:wish I would not. Okay. Fair enough. Your third book.
Duena:That's fine.
Dave:Thank you. Nice, thank you, I like that.
Duena:Okay, so let me go through the titles of these. Don't know the full titles, which is hilarious. Publishers always want to have subtitles, no less because if you are walking through an airport you are less likely to kind of guess what the meaning behind human death, peoples not like us. But I tend to not remember the full name, Mrs. Vampire.
Duena:Book number one was emotional bank, it was practically my passing gift to the fintech industry where I was just saying, this is all I know, do what you will with it or ignore it as you always have. But are forces keeping you from, agility that are forces keeping you from moving fast enough technology wise to be competitive with technology houses elsewhere. That was circa 2018 as well and then there was a good few years of trying to kind of go here's the book, don't ask me anymore and I don't want to discuss it, to kind of extricate myself from that topic because it occurred to me while writing it that human debt is a lot bigger than just as it pertains to the banking industry. And then as I moved away from it and into what is human data and where are we going with this whole and let's look at people, let's look at technology, I then stepped into what looked like a combined world of agility and DevOps and technology and HR and product management and performance and human IQ and you name it, and it very quickly worked out that I was in many industries instead of one.
Duena:So I had left Fintech, which was a bizarre Frankenstein type of industry that we had sprung in a good tenure, And then ended up in these many other ones which were indisputably super fragmented and super away from each other and super incapable of growing on the back of each other. So very disparate entities, industry seem to me, the DevOps community, the Agile community, the product community, the data community, developer community, insane what amount of communities there need to be when what we mean is technology. So when I saw that and I combined that with human debt, that is the essence of what People Not Take My Second book is about, which is essentially saying we, one, have human death, which is defined as the equivalent of sex debt, the amount of things that we have left on the table, undone, unsolved, unfixed in terms of crisis, in terms of needs, in terms of lack of respect in the workplace, in terms of projects that haven't been worked out, in terms of leadership that hasn't pipeline, the messages they need to, in terms of all the big mistakes people are doing. Those are human deaths and I saw human death and I thought it's no wonder we have this.
Duena:We have monumental costs between it wasn't an epiphany, it was a sad growing realisation that as you see lands on us every day.
Dave:It's no
Duena:wonder we have human rights if we have
Dave:these big gaps between HR and business, between tech and business, between HR and the CEO, between yeah, it wasn't creeping, it was as usual sobering and sad.
Duena:I think everyone knows that. I don't think anything I've come up with is original. I genuinely believe nothing I've ever come up with is original. I'm just a lack of self preservationist fucker who is willing to just say like it. I don't want to go in-depth into those, you know now from having been on this journey for long enough that it's it's a saintless journey even when you do
Dave:well if you're to accumulate effort and emotional spend to gain,
Duena:we will invariably have lost rather than gained.
Dave:So you know, we're sort of face to a lot, ways of, you know, ways of thinking. Gonna just hang on then.
Duena:Know anytime that anyone invites me on a podcast and asks me and I am your guest today right, it's the launch of my book, thank you very much for hitting me on this podcast, I want to talk about agility and how culture is tech led and motivated by culture and now you're being asked to a question saying did you not write several years ago that you cannot have the ways of work without the ways of thinking and did you not publish that in Forbes and did that not become a bit of a scandal in the industry and a good 10,000 to 15,000 people read it and had the comments about it and so on. Then the answer to all of that
Dave:is yes, it didn't happen. Hilariously it also didn't leave a mark, any mark.
Duena:Well not enough of a mark, let me put it that way. Yes, I don't see
Dave:progress. This is not the sort of
Duena:thing, oh I should be able to move mountains.
Dave:It's rather more modest if that was the time when someone like me understood something like that, why wasn't that solved? It's a longer modest proposition, which is why is it still there? And I think a
Duena:lot of people that are saying, I
Dave:have been saying this fifteen years, are losing the context of how that makes them old, unimportant, potentially outdated, possibly wrong, clearly unproven right, and that adds to the
Duena:fact that they are never part of that perceived thing that rises to the crop of the execs listening to these things
Dave:we said. So that was, we are now with my second book called People Before Death. The importance of psychological safety and teamwork in the digital age. Good title, also really good content,
Duena:It's let me tell all about what the hell, why do we have this gap, why don't we come together, why doesn't DevOps hold hands with the human people and make learning part of our DNA in enterprises so we win, so we can be the humans who go back to the caves and retreat from the ridiculous sci fi scenario we are in today where machines are coming together after we can get them back there in a second. But that was my thesis even back then. We won't be able to do this unless we give each other a hand and we close again.
Dave:Ask me if that book made the mark.
Speaker 3:Did that make more of a mark or less of a mark?
Dave:Yeah, a It's good translated in Japanese and simplified Chinese in tens of thousands of
Duena:numbers of booklets. So I have to wonder, did it make a difference? Why would there be thousands? Do they just get old in a library and no one really wants to read it, or have they read it and have they understood where we're going? Has that resonated differently in different cultures.
Duena:And I would have to fall back on my sword and say cultural differences do matter when it comes to human rights, which
Dave:I have always confessed is never the case, because I have always wanted to go to an equivalation state rather than a differentiation state. And with that said, I haven't heard of as much of European students looking at people before tech and
Duena:the importance of psychological safety and teamwork. Let me tell you all
Dave:that book says don't be stupid, things matter most. Don't be ridiculous, psychological safety is the only difference thing. The stuff you hear every day and it's cheaper value. And it holds nuggets of here are 10 ways to do Agile, here are five ways to not be addicted with your subordinates, you name it. Ask me how much money I've made off that book in the last few months.
Dave:Or shall I ask you, how much money has your wife made off a book called People before tech, the importance of psychological safety and teamwork in the digital age, just by the name of it. How about what would she have made, a yak? Nah, come on, we all know she doesn't make much money off books. So it wouldn't have
Duena:been a yak, right? No.
Dave:It would have been what about a small Fiat Panda? Would you have written that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure. Not a Yeah. Little of secondhand
Duena:Oh, Fiat
Dave:Panda. I contribute fuck state we need to change the world of work and culture. They give me back Fiat Panda in that book, right? Would make sense. Let me ask you something.
Dave:Do you
Duena:know many economies where you can buy a Fiat Panda for under a £100?
Dave:Because if you can't, then I can't afford one. I can't afford it, because that's what this book has made over the last So the book is shit. Maybe it is. But if it is,
Duena:then why aren't there more reactions to it, to turn this off? And if the book isn't, is So
Dave:what's for them? Why aren't they reading it? And they're not reading it because we dissuccess. They don't read. Put on.
Dave:Put in. Put in, who read? They might listen, they won't read. So because
Duena:of that, I want to
Dave:do something on my phone, then I feel pathetic, and I would
Duena:have hated it if I heard it on my pod. So I am not upset if all of you listening to this just turn it off and go assist, because yes, both this pod and the Secret Society of Human Works advocate and human death fight us and prevent us, yes we know it's a long time ago,
Dave:have had to listen to this because I think humanity is coming to a point where nothing is going to give us a common understanding of these things but an Amazon memo.
Duena:The Amazon memo around the human work we need to keep being culture led, culture driven, culture successful, culture innovative. And that long document and memo, maybe manifesto, needs to start with all of us shutting up and listening and then all of us giving our most honest opinions.
Dave:So I'll be annoying first. The table of contents of secular culture is as follows: I am going to read it to you, it's annoying, get off this podcast, I'm telling you now. But if you listen to it, promise to me that you'll at least listen to the topic and if any of them makes you go, fuck yeah, that
Duena:one I need to check out, Check it the hell out because it means you have human death you could overcome.
Dave:That's all I have. Anyway, the titles are as follows: At first we attack what is the new paradigm of the modern
Duena:workplace. We contend that the modern workplace is a very different base than the one we've had in the 60s, in the 70s and the 50s. And in the history of the workplace, we are coming at a time where it's composure and its methodology and its intrinsic nature has to change. So we started with the story of the workplace so far, a very modest and popularised type of story. I'm not contending my work on the research has been as thorough as I would have liked or as good as a PhD.
Duena:It simply tries to set up the stage of where in the hell are we when it comes to knowledge play. And then the second bit was, let's think of this culture, this notion of culture, business culture, why not precise that culture, because it is important that we make the difference.
Dave:What is business structure? Is it accidental? Is it an
Duena:effect or is it by design? Funny you should say that because you can find that out on page 16 as soon as you started this talk. There's a whole chapter over there called defining culture. And then it goes straight into being honest and saying, is it maybe just a collection of good behaviour? Which is my best definition, to be honest with you, giving the punchline away.
Duena:And then go further, is it accidental or intentional? Can we design? Can we decide that it would be a certain way and then have it grow that way? And then if not, how does human death relate to culture? Do we all have human death?
Duena:If you do have it and you need to change something, you need something called culture and believe it or not, culture change probably says in this book, culture change is hard, it's page 23, but it's obviously the most minor of minor statements ever. Culture change is damn near bloody impossible these days and I don't want to even go there. But then it says, who is the keeper of culture in your organisation? Who is it? I am asking you now, who is the keeper of culture?
Dave:I will ask you each of these questions from the book. Chapter
Duena:It slipped the net. Who is the keeper of culture in an organization, in your opinion? Page 25. Who is the keeper of culture in a tech organization? Let me know.
Duena:Quick, shot fire, everyone. Nice one. I think most people would say the HR director, fucking bullshit, it's not, or the CEO also it's not. It's all of us, yes you're right, good answer. Good culture versus toxic culture, what's one or the other?
Duena:Can you feel it? You can feel it, we can all feel it, we
Dave:can all absolutely feel it. How about how do you measure good culture and who does? How many companies measure good culture? Very surprising answers at page 30. What is the human audit method?
Dave:That's a surprising one.
Duena:And let's take two seconds. If we agree there is human debt, every organisation has some good happening. He'll mute himself and don't get off foot while I tell you
Dave:about this. He did? Yes.
Duena:He did, excellent. So what do we believe is human debt? What's all this method? If we believe we have it, we know we are all behind on various topics, we know there are better things we should do in the way of humans at work and we haven't done them, that we can lock them in to be catched or move on. If we believe that to be the case, well you heard that didn't you, if you believe that to be
Dave:the case, then where do
Duena:we take this? How do we do it? What's the next to do? And then if you're going to figure out what your to do is are, you have to start from a place of honest. You have to go all the way back and figure out what is it that you think is of value.
Duena:What is it that you think you're trying to build? What is it that you're attempting to to get to in your enterprise. Because if you step back and you go, yes, I'll be honest, we have this thing, that human death galore over here, I might not want to sell it to my colleagues, I might not know where to catch it from, but if I sit down and I do an I do an audit between all of us, then I know what the real truth is. I can be honest with my guys, and my guys going to this rock bottom, going to this place of this is our human dad, this is the reality of what we do and do not have, are going to then become an actual team.
Dave:And when
Duena:they become a team, when they become they they need the same thing. Hold up a second. And then the book goes, at page 31, it talks about something called what is the human best audit method?' and I want to take a second about this, know it's self serving and all of the people that are sketching to this podcast they want me to just be real and bash McKinsey but I also want
Dave:to be real enough to just be honest about our journey, right?
Duena:We created
Dave:a human that audit matters. What it is essentially our way of saying, if
Duena:you have the intelligence, the emotional intelligence, the courage, the passion and the resiliency to be the leader you need to be and to be honest about your human diet, then we are here to help you look at it.
Dave:To look at it, the things to do are and then the book goes on to actually list the steps that
Duena:are detailed enough that you could nail a year strategy off of them. If I look at page 31, you will
Dave:see that there are 10 steps that aren't even an audit, there are human death healing methods. The audit is only the checking out part, It's only the beginning of it, maybe steps one to four. And then everything else is, elect the correct constellation of frameworks and software and philosophies to lay out your human world. That's not an audit, that's a death, it's all that has to do. So very short,
Duena:the blueprint of what to do to eliminate human death is neither unthinkable to anyone else but us, nor difficult. It is made impossible by the waves of fear in every organisation. Anyway, let's just continue. And then we go through the organisational crisis, right, we just touched on it a little bit. We have a leadership crisis, we have a mental health crisis, a lack of engagement crisis and an IQ crisis.
Duena:And if you're listening to this from the technology sphere, please pick up the book to just look at the definitions of these, because I think they will resonate. When you look at the crisis of leadership, these are leaders that have been trained to be command and control and they are unfortunately incapable to do the servant leadership, which you might not like the title of it because it annoys some politically correct people and it might get Jeff Sutherland up enough to extract it from the guidebook we can find absolutely insane. Sorry for the French, but it is insane. Why do we extract expectations instead of pulling people through them? Don't even get, let me get there, but if you see the reason why you need to have better leadership, more empathic leadership, more acute leadership, more adaptive leadership that knows when to step it up, when to step it down, when to ask you to pull yourself and to give you a flow.
Duena:Those are unquestionable things. I don't know anyone who has understood I've said
Dave:this for the last forty years, it's the most fundamental thing that I thought I don't know any exact who understood the point of human work, psychological safety, Google's Aristotle, performance by having good human relationships and regular self work and teamwork as well
Duena:as organisational and societal work and understood all that and went, don't want to do it. I don't. I want my people to be horribly pained, I want them to be suicidal, I want them to feel it horribly. There is no person that does that. We are all good humans, we are all decent enough of humans.
Duena:Some of us might be consumed by fears where we don't know how to help.
Dave:Many of us, most of us. I don't know how many of us, but for the most part, we just want
Duena:to do good, but we
Dave:don't know. Anyway, back to the book.
Duena:There's a chapter in the record of redefining engagement. Is it satisfaction, is it happiness, is it thriving? Oh, to the crisis, really quickly for techies listening to us, there's a press of leadership like we defined it, but there's also a crisis of engagement, you heard about it a million times, Dialog told you that billions of five offence every year in lack of engagement, we know this is common sense but no execs can understand it
Dave:in the flip. But
Duena:you also have a crisis of mental health, has been kind of aggravated by COVID obviously and our landing on these more traumatic times, but you also have lastly a crisis of EQ, which is probably the biggest crisis. If you fixed your crisis of EQ, you're likely to have fixed your crisis of leadership, your crisis of mental health,
Dave:your crisis of engagement, because what you need in that workplace is to stop being stupid, to stop pretending, to stop faking. I don't know why I'm sounding bizarre, we can't be who we promised we would be at work, to quote Tom Allen.
Duena:Exactly. There is something out of us that humans should not be able to offer. Humans have lied about their capabilities to offer, this intellectual ability only. And let me tell you, if they could,
Dave:if what they offer the workplace were their most illustrious acute skills. That is what they have done for the past fifty years. In the next ten years, that amazing skill of theirs, it will be utterly and absolutely worthless.
Duena:Because we are coming to a time when your intellectual skill, what you knew, what you brought from school, what you learned from a book, what you eat mathematically correct, is fucking worthless. You will never be better than the machine that can do that same calculation. You'll never be a smarter coder. You'll never outcode the clean code AI that's going to
Dave:eventually happen. All you can
Duena:do is outhuman them. You can't outcode them, you can't outright them, you can't outtranslate them, you can't outrestore them,
Dave:you can't outemploy them. You can out human machines. Anyway, back to this. Then the book goes into what is the psychology of thinking? You will
Duena:be surprised to hear and this is something that you and I want
Dave:to spend a lot more time on. We been talking about this in light of of
Duena:Kent Beck having found Aristair Kopfan the other day by saying the science of joy is a thing. And by the community having kind of a little bit woken up to this might be a thing, if we don't agree that the human work is a thing, we'll all be forced back and we'll all be made to write shit we know is no good. So I
Dave:think people with good moral and I want to be careful but people with good professionals will have taken this time in the technology sphere growth to go, much is changing, a lot is being asked of us that is unnatural, illogical, not needed by the enterprise, and I am not going to do that. I as a professional will not put my life through the demands that are I still are
Duena:illogical, uncomfortable, unprofitable,
Dave:you know. If these tenants are against what I believe is right, I can't work with it. The age is coming of people going, we are not a match for each other. You are
Duena:not doing me a favor giving me a job. I am doing you a favor coming in with my humanity to it, because you already have all of your machines. If you want my humanity,
Dave:you appreciate my humanity. Right, so part two
Duena:of this book is called Making the New Ways of Working Work, I know you are in this podcast. And this one starts with Agility and the New Ways to Run a Team, because those of us that are listening to this need to be told what is agile,
Dave:what is agility, what is agile management, but the vast majority of humanity does. Don't know. They can't tell what the difference is. They don't understand that the non sequential, non linear thinking that agility and that the ever experimenting open for failure of the non vulnerability that Agile demands
Duena:is either at DNA level or know a recall. So that's why this chapter is here. Then there's a chapter called On belonging, diversity and inclusion, because we can't go the topic of DNI. But this is attacking DNI from different perspectives. Instead of just DNI in general, should we all be diverse and inclusive?
Duena:Let's separate into what the big part. What's D and I and psychological safety? How psychologically safe should people be to feel included and diverse and hurt?
Dave:Analyse that. And then what's DNI in belonging? Very trendy term. What's DNI in surprising or healthy employees? And then
Duena:I spend some time talking about DNI in neurodivergence where you know that it's a topic newly close to my heart that I would like to spend a lot more time on in
Dave:the future, for various reasons.
Duena:And then the second part of the book is dealing entirely with remote flexibility, office based versus anywhere based versus understanding outcomes versus understanding performance, versus comprehending the stress and burnout and level of effort versus flow. They're all connected in such intrinsic ways we can't think of them separate. Then it's discussing all of these new things that have come in after COVID in the way of types of knowledge work, burnout, the way that the work life balance and the Amazon notion of there is no work life balance. That's what it's often saying, there shouldn't be a delimitation. There should just be what feeds your soul and what feeds your being as a human being and what you
Dave:find sustainable and acceptable. It should not be what's worth and what's personal. That's one of the philosophy types of structure but not everyone has to. And then there's a lot of discussion on breaking time of versus non linear work and for satisfying work, because I think that's where the key is. Then we're discussing the forty eight week, which in The UK and New Zealand, if
Duena:I remember correctly, has seemed to have been an experiment and has absolutely landed it. And then we
Dave:spent quite some time on the bits that matter I would say which is what's servant leadership, how in the hell do you do this checking of your human dad and what will make the biggest change which is leads with purpose, start with not lead with. Everyone heard this. It's a shitty kind of lead with purpose, with flow, paid the impact. It means nothing. What we mean is, if you want to spend somewhere that people go, It makes a difference.
Dave:I'm feeling some magic here. I'm getting there. I'm caring about this shit again. Start with perfect. Start with passion.
Dave:Start with slow. Start with the shit that makes people go, this feels good. I'm worthwhile. I'm a professional that brought something. Life is not bad.
Duena:If you're a developer, Yes. Dave is hesitant to give you
Dave:the big point of our finale, but before then I'll just wrap up and say the book goes into saying you can change behaviour to increase EQ. It's that simple. Change the behaviour of your team, change the behaviour of your people, change the behaviour of your modern reader, teach them slightly, easily, calmly what's an emotion, how to tackle it, things they've never been taught before, how to human, how to be a new
Duena:inspirational or not inspirational, just a genuine human being, right?
Dave:Teach them that, how to do that fearlessly and you're good. You already have inspirational leadership, right? So a lot
Duena:of this is about feedback loops, changing behaviour, how do we do the homework, how does it become a habit, what's empathy, how do you overcome resistance
Dave:and entrenched attitudes? Foiler, most of this book should have been about that. And then how do you nail flexibility? How do you nail this new
Duena:paradigm of work where let everyone be their best selves so they can put it together and make the flowy, tidy, performance y thing that others were so pleased to see in effective teams. It starts with psychological safety, it might go through either state if you listen
Dave:to their latest research, but it definitely ends up where these teams are performing in a way that consistently churns out agile instances of their technological dreams. And those. Wow. Exciting.
Duena:One would hope.
Dave:How many minutes of this has
Duena:it been? I've been, you know, in a a flow. A little bit. Yeah. In the flow.
Duena:Yeah. I wish That's fine.
Dave:As a developer, when you've been in this slow state of
Duena:I can't take you anymore.
Dave:What
Duena:time is it? Time is it? Where are we? This is a
Speaker 3:book. And
Duena:the reason we rate you all this, genuinely, is because you don't have the time to read all of it. But if you have the £19 or whatever the flip it costs to buy it and wrap it up and put it in your back pocket and from time to time go to the chapter that will show your exec what was, then do me only one favor please, if you've never done me any. Leave a review, even if it's bad, even if you think it's shit, even in particular if you think it's shit, if
Dave:you think this is wrong, technology will not change us,
Duena:we won't need to do anything, there's not going to be pair programming, no TDD, no special humanity happening because you're a wrong lady. Leave it and then tell us. And if you tell Dave or you tell me that you've left the review, we will give you a link to all of the results you have ever seen. Everything we have ever done, more of the crap you hated. The ads, the videos, just take them all and disagree to your heart's content.
Duena:Make yourself a Google Doc out of how shit I am, why don't you? So let's debate it, let's go there, let's all be honest, there is way too much fatality, insanity and unlovingness in the world and this fact is going to give you a couple of ways to get further along as a human dead fighter or a human dead preventer and we can't ask for anything more. Oh no, I lied, we can ask for more. Go buy the software, go at least download the free shit we've given you, because let me tell you, when hear this, there's going to be some reference rather to an article that we both wrote as to how many people wanted to have the free shit we've been giving out for the last few weeks?
Dave:Surprising number.
Duena:Come check us out to find out what that number is. But so far thank you for listening to me, no thoughts, poor things has been said there looking at me.
Dave:Unfortunately. Admiringly, which I have to
Duena:be very, very grateful here. You know we did tell everyone that they can come to this podcast to hear how you've become a human that fights out instead of techie and they heard none of that. So maybe they should come into the next episode, we promise that they will bear his soul as to how difficult it has been, hopefully you take something out of that and meanwhile buy the broad libre review so you get this free membership and come talk to us, there's loads you can do and we don't hope for anyone but the ones listening for this. Bye. Bye.
