Pointing to the Light at the End of the Tunnel

Last week on our “The Future is Agile” Newsletter we spoke about reducing the HumanDebt? which I define my upcoming book “People Before Tech: The Importance of Teams and Psychological Safety in the Digital Age” as:

“HumanDebt? is the equivalent to Technical Debt but for people. All of the initiative, the projects, the intentions we (the organisation) had to do better by them, but we abandoned halfway. All of the missed opportunities to make their lives and their work easier and more joyful. All of the empty talk on equality, respect, lack of blame, courage and trust. All of the missing talk on teams. All of the lack of preoccupation or resources for building better team dynamics. All of the toxic culture that comes from it. That’s Human Debt.”

Despite how critical I am at times of anyone not seemingly invested in doing something about this debt that we all instinctively recognise we carry, I am also acutely aware of the reasons that prevent people from courageously attempting to move the needle right now as we are collectively running on fumes from all points of view.

Pre-pandemic, the reasons why this wasn’t getting sorted were confusion and complacency, whereas now, the focus on what matters is there, and the good-will to see change does exist, but for now, the energy is lacking. We’re all in a holding pattern, to put it mildly, and while we could find the humour in the fact that the blows kept on coming a few months ago, it definitely stopped being funny and it is now downright soul-destroyingly tiring. 

One of the hardest things to test our resilience reserves is the grating dichotomy of how everything simultaneously changed and nothing has and the persistent unknown we have to face every day. In the last, the part that’s hardest to consume and live with is the lack of finality. We think of endurance as withstanding adversity for a certain prolonged period of time but having a vague idea of what that amount of time is what powers it because it allows us to lean on mental projections of a future that’s bright as fuel for days when it feels impossible to carry on. The fact that 2021 started as atrociously as it did, the doomsday predictions in the various documentaries and sheer generalised exhaustion mean that we have less of the ability to presume a clear finish line to this.

Here are some things we can and should keep remembering as an obstinate mantra for resilience to keep the depression and temptation to give up, at bay: 

• We can all use an Agile mindset, in particular, the ability to split everything into sprints. For all the pre-pandemic chatter around Agile, not everyone is familiar with what it is, and, more importantly, “why” it is. The purpose of Agile is to apply a better way of work to complex projects to get faster and better results. Far from being a way to manage projects only but a way of thinking, whoever was already in an Agile mindset when this colossal challenge hit, fared infinitely better over this last period. This is for a myriad of reasons, including how much flexibility and resilience are inbuilt into the mentality and how used they were with the VUCA character of the world we live in, but it is also because sprints are by definition shorter bursts of effort and therefore easier to withstand and better at bringing results and with that temporary relief of even joy than extended marathons. In that respect, brushing up on why common backlogs with small tickets and thinking of most things in terms of sprints can help, will pay off for anyone ready to give it an honest try and will stay as a net win once we’re out of this.
• We can and should keep each other obsessively empathic. If there was ever a time to overdo it on trying to be compassionate and remembering the difficulty of the shared reality and how letting go would be dramatic, it is now. We’re all understandably jaded and tired of being sympathetic (just look at the number of deaths superseding the spring wave being announced to a blasé and disconnected audience every day) and we have had to close off for self-preservation, but keeping anchored in our commonalities instead of our differences, can only serve us well eventually. 
• We are -almost- guaranteed to beat it. Historically we know that and objectively we know that -in particular since this plague finds us better equipped from all points of view in terms of both science and resilience- but knowing it intellectually doesn’t stop us being overwhelmed by emotion and panicking at times. Nonetheless, to keep the panic to a minimum we can recall the intellectual certainty complete with examples as often as we can.
• We are objectively close. While the time frames are ridiculously extended and we can rightfully moan at the execution and lack of logistics magic, we have vaccines. It’s easy to get hedonistic adaptation at the joy that news brought us but the fact remains that we have that in the “Done” column and the new “Distribute” epic can’t last more than a finite number of sprints. 
• There is an incredible economic and social upturn at the end of this, judging by previous post-crisis patterns. This one is really important. In fact, in our video tomorrow we’ll go into more details and give some suggestions to anyone who is a team leader and should carry this message complete with examples, but if you look at the end of most of humanity’s dark periods, an equivalent period of resurgence always follows them so we definitely have fun, social connection and building new and exciting things ahead. 
• We collectively made net gains much as we may not like it both in terms of who we are and how we value each other in the workplace. In this newsletter, we often mention the 3 big gains we collectively made that intrinsically reduce the Human Debt: a deeper and much clearer focus on humans in the workplace, augmented with open societal dialogue on bigger issues; having proven the POC of remote work beyond a shadow of a doubt; and a focus on teams and their dynamic so implicitly a new understanding of data, resilience, openness, feedback and the importance of Psychological Safety. These three net gains alone are more valuable than years of sterile conversations we had been engaged in and they have the potential to propel us further than we dreamt possible.  

So we have lost a lot, but we have also won and it is about to start feeling like it. The finish line is subjectively maddeningly far, but objectively, tremendously close. 2021 may feel dishearteningly groundhog-day-like and we may feel exhausted and may be finding it hard to rally this dark -and spectacularly long!- January, but there’s a lot of light at the end of the tunnel - we’ll simply need to take turns pointing it out to each other till we can all see it blindingly clearly someday soon.

—————————————————————————————————

Don't send your teams home with a laptop, a Jira and Slack account and a prayer!

Get in touch at www.psychologicalsafety.works or reach out at [email protected] and let's help your teams become Psychologically Safe, healthy, happy and highly performant.