Narrator: You're listening to the humans of DevOps podcast, a

podcast focused on advancing the humans of DevOps through skills,

knowledge, ideas and learning, or the SK il framework.

Duena Blomstrom: Essentially, it's a concept I've arrived at

what is keeping big incumbent institutions in that case, banks

from doing the right thing we all knew a giant is needed, we

would all appear more human centered design, what seemed to

be the problem.

Jason Baum: Hey, everyone, it's Jason Baum, Director of Member

experience at DevOps Institute. And this is the humans of DevOps

podcast. Welcome back. I hope you've had a great week. On

today's episode, we're going to just jump right in, because we

need all the time we can to talk about this, we're going to focus

on psychological safety today. psychological safety to me is

something that I feel is as a human right, I feel like we have

the right to be psychologically safe in the workplace. That

being said, it's a little more complicated to that. It's a

group dynamic in teams. It's a concept defined by academics in

particular Professor Amy Edmondson of Harvard and studied

by Google. In their project Aristotle. It's been proven to

be the cornerstone of any team's productivity. Teams that have

high psychological safety are up to 40% more productive. In 2019.

state of DevOps report found that this culture of

psychological safety is predictive of software delivery

performance, organizational performance and productivity.

Here to discuss the topic with me is Dwayne a Blum strim.

Dwayne is the co founder CPO and CEO of people not tech, and the

author of people before tech, a book about the importance of

psychological safety and teamwork in the digital age.

She's also a speaker writer, publishes weekly LinkedIn

newsletters on chasing psychological safety. And the

future is agile a Forbes as well as being a Forbes contributor.

She's the creator of the emotional banking and human debt

concepts, and authored a book titled emotional banking about

fixing culture in the FinTech world, and listening to

customers feelings about money. I have a lot of feelings about

money. So Dana, welcome to the podcast. Are you ready to get

human?

Duena Blomstrom: Yes, yes, very, very excited to be here, a big

fan of the DevOps Institute have always been awesome. This is

this is a treat for me. So thank you for having me.

Jason Baum: It's very exciting to have you I'm really

appreciative of you coming on to talk about this. This is this is

a topic that's pretty deep. I will say,

Duena Blomstrom: the mother lode of all topics,

Jason Baum: it really is, when you talk psychological safety.

You're the creator of the human debt concept. Perhaps our

listeners have heard about psychological safety. I think

it'd be great to start with human debt and talk about that.

So maybe if you could explain it, maybe just kind of define it

and explain what what that means.

Duena Blomstrom: The easiest definition I've got because I

wrote it, so I can kind of change it as I give it back to

you. But as long as we all agree and understand what the core of

it, I'm happy. But essentially, it's a concept I've arrived at,

as I was studying, in short, what is keeping big incumbent

institutions in that case, banks from doing the right thing,

doing the right thing by their consumers is what I didn't quite

understand what the holdup was, we all knew Agile is needed, we

were all clear on on human centered design, we all kind of

knew all the buzzwords, we we even all of us were able to tell

you what the perfect digital experience was. So what seemed

to be the problem. So as I was accepting that it occurred to me

that much as I don't want that to be the answer, it is a

organizational issue. And everyone has essentially too big

of a cultural problem to be accessing the new mindset that

we need for agile and to be accessing the speed we need to

deliver and the kind of the type of collaboration that that needs

out of our people. So when I was figuring out why they couldn't

do by better by their consumers, the answer really was it's

because they can't do better by their own people. And really

what that means to me or or to the definition of human that is

that just the same way that we acquire technical debt and

everyone listening to this knows full well what I'm on about is

the same way that we've we've acquired human that which is the

equivalent for people, practically anytime that we have

started something to fix something in the workplace and

kind of dropped it. Anytime that a problem that we were trying

entreprise became a second hand citizen or forgotten or got

funding called or the management change, or people fought and

there was tension or there was a toxicity or there was no, just

hundreds of examples in which we create human that is, we as

humans, we as organizations, and it's, unfortunately, if you

start looking at it that way, you start seeing it everywhere.

And there's no real organization that doesn't have any human

that, the only thing you can do is start without it. And the big

digital winners have done that they started from no human that.

And then with that in mind, they tried not to get any. But for

the rest of us who didn't even know why it was weren't quite

that concerned, we didn't put people first we put people as an

afterthought, we created human data, and we are creating it

every day that we don't do human work. And if you look at the

human work being done in the workplace today, you'll be able

to start hoping that that is because we don't do any, we

don't even let people express the idea that they might have

any kind of feelings at work that they're meant to come in

there, do some code and disappear and not bother us in

any unprofessional way. That cannot continue, obviously. And

we're creating more and more of this human that. So in short

human that is all the wrongs we have been righted by our people,

your DNI or when we don't pay them well, when we don't respect

them, or we don't like them or when they don't have

psychological safety. And because of that human that we

cannot be winning like the guys that don't have it.

Jason Baum: I'm still fascinated by companies that are like, we

give seven PTO days and our work from home policy is, you know,

when the can be done on something that's very wishy

washy or, or parental leave, you get two weeks, something like

that. And they and they float it like this is a good thing. Yeah,

there is a lot of human debt out there. And I guess we're

starting to see companies recognize that. But as someone

who talks to people like yourself, or companies who are

incorporating a lot of these positive things to focus on the

human, why is it forgotten? Pretty much all the time, and

was the norm, right? How we operated prior to, obviously,

it's still going on. But I think this big shift, obviously caused

by the pandemic, probably the, the one of the if not the only

positive to come out of it? Is this recognition because

everyone paused and said, Hey, wait a minute. But why was it

the norm? And why do we still sometimes forget about it? I

think it's worse,

Duena Blomstrom: then we forget about it, I think collectively,

we don't want to admit it exists. When we do it feels too

big to tackle. When we do tackle it, we then end up in print and

the bigger the organization, the less providers you're gonna have

to superheroes that have, or you're gonna have superheroes

and people with their hearts in the right place is what I call

is what I call these people that have already putting themselves

on the line to make do the right thing by other humans in their

organizations. But so I think what's happening really is we

were operating in an incorrect structure that wasn't fit for

purpose, the way the business was, was trying to shoehorn a

completely different way of doing things into an existing

very corseted way of doing things was never going to work.

We all knew in the industry, that kind of by the industry, I

mean, all of us that knew what Agile was, knew that something

big will have to happen. And that there's no way we can

continuously come. We can have it here in this corner, while

command and control are happening. While teams are not

teams, while people don't discuss the dynamics inside

them, why we don't allow humans to be humans at all, we cannot

do that which is not happening. And we knew this all of us, but

we just thought essentially, hopefully, eventually the the

other shoe will drop and dinner will just come along, that would

have happened. But in my view without COVID It would have been

a much longer process. So I think in the wake of COVID Like

you say the biggest win is this we have we can everyone that

claimed it cannot be done has to shut up it can be done. And now

that it is being done, how do we function? What do we do we you

don't have line of sight? You can be sure that this developer

is not on Facebook, what do you do instead? And more so from an

organizational perspective, I'd like to be clear about this. I

hate the term organization and I normally very rarely ever touch

it because to me organizations are it's really Santa Claus,

right? What is an organization if we wait for Have the

organization to fix anything, it's never gonna happen at all

right? So we can't be talking about it, it gets my goat every

time I see these hundreds of, of LinkedIn posts about the

organization should do this. Don't we agree that the

organization is that it's nice and lovely to have a common

enemy. And if we just wanted to do a bit over beer, we should

keep it. But if I want to change anything we just stop talking

about and then I mean, even like the big thinkers and stuff,

everyone. So I Oh,

Jason Baum: you're so right. I love it. I like I'm like preach,

preach, do it. Because you're so right with this organization,

Mitt Romney who like I don't whatever your feel about pod

politics had this line about company or organizations are

people like that that line? And it's like, and that was stuck

with me? Because it's like, yeah, because no kidding, like,

who makes up the organization, one of the newest titles that I

heard that I really love. And I know it's it's probably maybe

now it's a couple of years old as the chief culture officer,

someone whose job is purely to focus on,

Duena Blomstrom: I take great joy in asking why that position

exists in most cases. And as you can imagine, that doesn't land

very well. People are not their favorite. I've liked to be the

kind of human being who is smart enough to be strategic and

diplomatic about this, because the size of the issue requires

people who are strategic and diplomatic and know how to

slowly and calmly seep into the consciousness of these sapient

risk adverse execs and go, I'm serious. Now we've got to do

this human work thing. Now this is now the time maybe there's a

way to do that. No, me I cannot, I just cannot comprehend how we

can reliably just go to sleep and wake up knowing we are not

doing the best we can. And the things we should be doing are

not hard to do. We are simply for whatever reason have entered

or collectively as humans, this denial of things are going to be

the way things are going to be and I can't really affect this

because it's too big. And it's too complicated. It's absolute

bollocks to use an English word. I don't know if it's allowed on

your podcast or not.

Jason Baum: But it's absolutely allowed for there's no filter

here. Appreciate that.

Duena Blomstrom: And it's kind of it's borderline, I think even

the BBC allows bollocks. But it is absolutely poppycock. Because

we can do these things, there's, there is no to do about the

human that that isn't breakable into an a list on a backlog and

then into tickets that you can move on your to do it. If you're

not doing that, it's just you don't want to and in quite

honestly, we're going back to the organization thing. Now.

There are now topics that are organizational, much of the

organization itself is useless in terms of changing anything,

it does exist as a post facto entity that fucks up everything

for us if you stop to think about it, because most

organizations and we're touching now on the crux of the issue,

have gone through this, like you're asking, why is that? How

did we end up that we ended up there because we made business,

the business world respond to a different kind of to do than we

were doing now. Right? We'd like in the industrial era, that was

fine, the accountancy of the 90s, we could do that we can

have people come into the office, and we'll look at the

screens, that's going to be that's going to work, she's not

going to work if we're trying to write agile pair programming

Dojo things, that's just not going to work for us. So the

reason it was old and needed shaking up wasn't necessarily

evil. But what that brought are structures that are now firmly

in place, and no one will question them at most

enterprises, and you're going to have like these as if they're

coming from Moses scriptures or something we cannot touch the

idea that we have this one department we cannot question

what this person is doing, we cannot discuss and like concrete

things like what is Why do you have a culture officer? And why

do you have someone in charge of engagement? What does engagement

mean to you? For instance, I'll give you an example. You as an

organization, what does it mean? What engagement because if it is

calculating your NPS score, then you should scrap it and stop

doing that did this ridiculous you have an entire department of

people that are buying NPS quarter measuring, and then you

have an entire workforce? It's going off for God's sake again,

why are we doing this? Nobody cares. And if they care, they

punish me for it. So there's no real reason for us to even be

concerning ourselves with the topic of engagement. It's not

that we don't want our employees engaged. It's just that we're

going about everything the wrong way. Because finally coming back

to we were operating on these old structures in the new

structures that we have to go about everything a completely

different way.

Jason Baum: How my gosh, as you're talking to so many things

that are coming into my head, I love what you're saying. I bang

my head sometimes because you said you're right. It needs to

come from the employees right the organization as a whole is

never going There's there's no change that's going to happen if

you rely on the organization. Why is it and there are a few

things I want to ask you. But why is it that there seems to be

those who who recognize this, they recognize those issues and

are like, screaming about it right for for change? Let's do

this. Not only that, there's studies that prove, right? I

mean, look at what I had read the 40%. There are so many

studies that prove that if you improve culture, if you give

more time, if you help four day workweeks, I've been saying this

on the podcast, the the it's amazing, the productivity that

the productivity improvement, so and even work from home. So I

question these, these decisions are not necessarily based on

hey, we're going to make money, because that's actually not

proven. It's proven the opposite. So it's purely these

are decisions based on I just want to, it's better for I don't

know, maybe they want to be in the office, for example, I don't

know why these decisions are being made.

Duena Blomstrom: It's really important point, you've touched

on something amazing, which is why if we have this much clarity

on the numbers, and we all know, you can wake up any CEO of any

bank atonium. And they'll tell you, I Yes. Active disengagement

cost me 3 billion a year. I know that obviously for like everyone

told me right, McKinsey told me must be true. So we they know,

right? They know it costs money to have people that are in it

stands to reason you've employed an army of people, some of which

you don't even need by nobody's going to question who you do and

do not need. And then you've mistreated them to the point

that they're now half useful. So obviously, it costs you twice

the money, if not more, that you're doing this, but it seems

to be Why are you doing this? Why are you affording the luxury

of having people this engage not at their best of their ability?

Not high performing? What Why? Why is this happening to you as

as an exec? Right? And I think the answer to that is, it's this

complete paralysis at the level that people are at, where

nobody's going to point when the emperor is butt naked. They're

not going to be there's no psychological safety at the top.

There's no teams at the top. So who all is going to say, right,

guys, this is bad. Let's scrap everything and think of

everything. Let's look at the human diet. Let's question why

we have 500. Let's question if we need HR, because maybe these

guys in DevOps have gotten their heads around collaboration, team

dynamics better, let's let them do it for a while. Or let's

question why we have worked with to begin with why don't people

just produce outcomes that we need out of them? Let's have

those conversations, who all is supposed to have that? Who what

exact thing do you know, that is a true team has a terrible Jira,

but I don't care what has a board has a physical board, or

at least a shared email list of backlogs and they work off of it

to make their enterprise better. None. They don't exist. teams

don't exist at the top. We have work groups at the top where

every exec comes in and tells you how great they are. They do

a first of impression management, which is the dark

side of psychological safety. And they tell you how amazing

they are. No one looks incompetent, no one looks like

they made any mistakes. There's no one to blame or anything,

everyone goes home is fine. There's no themes at the top

they are not psychologically safe. No one can point when we

have these fundamental issues. And one of those issues finally

we get to it is, like I was saying earlier, the topic of

people is now falling through a major crack that major crack is

the difference between HR and IT. Unfortunately for HR, they,

for whatever reason, I can't quite comprehend what happened

to them. It's tragedy but probably think about it. They

lost the ability of advocating and helping people in the

enterprise they have now reduced themselves I should say this I

apologize to anyone listening to this who is HR and is woke and

is a superhero and is trying really hard is no you guys it's

everyone else. But the everyone else has kind of shortened

themselves to only do illegal things to only employ and

unemployed people and send them a paper at home. It's an admin

job one we will replace with machines tomorrow. We don't need

you to do that. We need you to sit next to the CEO and tell him

be counselor Troy and go like ah, I read the mind of these

developers what they really need is another Dodger, that and

Africa. That's okay, it can't be that. It you know who is doing

that job these days. We make software that would help them

you think when we made our software we thought silly years

ago, we thought when we produce this and we let it out and we

tell the world and Amy Edmondson has seen it and it measures

psychological safety and he brings all this to the

enterprise. People are gonna love it what all HR breaking out

doors down in all of our clients. asked me how many of

them started from an HR perspective, it's a negligible

amount. The vast majority of our of our of our of our clients are

CTOs and CEOs who went like, Okay, I've ignored this people

problem long enough, if I really want to be producing these KPIs,

I'm gonna have to make these people have psychological safety

have teams have an ability to work from anywhere, not because

I like them a lot more, or I'm an advocate, but because I'm

trying to make this thing happen, and nobody else is

coming to help me. So our clients are people who just need

the human bit to work, which is dramatic, it should be HR only

if anything, we are a nuisance to HR, anytime we show up, they

can immediately tell that the topic we're fixing is so deep,

and it's so big that it was throw up all the other

organizational issues, and they immediately dislike us and they

would like us to go away and come back with an NPS score

measure.

Jason Baum: Yeah, the shutdown.

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Jason Baum: Yeah, it's, you know, I do have mixed feelings

here. Because I don't want to totally call out HR as a, as a

field. However, I will say like when you're talking about

psychological safety, you know, my wife, and I always joke, it's

like, you have HR and they always tell you, Oh, you have a

problem, go talk to HR, go talk to HR, you're like, I'm talking

to HR there. That's the mouthpiece of the company, their

their best interest, a, like you said is don't sue us, right? I

mean, that's their vested interest is protection of the

company, and not necessarily the individual. And so how do you

feel set, you don't feel safe? That's my site that's not

endorsing psychological safety. So who then do you turn to who

can you trust? How do you build that trust? Where's it coming

from? Is it coming from DevOps? Is it coming from your team,

hopefully, your manager, they're the ones have to push it

through, right? But then you have the people and I, and some

of them, they can be great people, but it's like, for

whatever reason, like you said, they're so turned off to the

idea of potential change. Or it's just like, that's not your

job. And it's no one's job, right? It's it's never anyone's

job. We need to do this. Don't focus on that that stuff.

That's, that's a waste of time.

Duena Blomstrom: Yeah, no, I like I love this question,

because it touches on so many things. And I think your

comment, not a question, but I think it's super important that

we all go at the very minimum, we all go yes. For all our sins.

If these are things that are making up human that we have

some, what do we do about it? And by the way, there's

organizational level human that. And then there's team level

human that and one of the last ones that I always caught to my

mind is when teams go, one of the things that create more that

is when teams go, they blame the organization. So like, they'll

come fix it. This is known as this is them. That alone creates

human that because no a lot of this work is and should be at

your level. And I'm a humongous advocate that if we if we agree,

yes, we have human that, then we have to do something about doing

something about it has to be distributed at the team level.

That's the answer with the answer. It is not your managers,

not your leadership team, not your programs that are led by I

don't even care about the HR, not HR conversation now. And

again, for the record, there are amazing HR people out there,

undoubtedly, obviously, just the vast majority of them have let

themselves be not utilized that the best is what. But again,

this is not about HR or not HR, this isn't too big of a job for

any magically to even if HR retain their ability to really

kill it and do all these things, they would still not be the ones

to have to run a fixing of the human that just because it is

too big at this point. So at this point, the only thing we

can do with all of these things we haven't done is to distribute

them to give them to the team to say to the team, look, I need

your help. I know you we've been telling you you need to write

this code and these are your tickets, but I clean some of

your schedule. That's what indeed servant leadership can do

for them. And that's what a good scrum master will do or a

product owner or whoever they're gonna write follow better. And

everyone completely connects to that. The problem is everyone

has overflowing agendas, is being the principles of agile

that say, you have personal responsibility, you grab this

ticket if you know you can't afford the time frame and so on.

So those agencies don't exist, people don't feel empowered to

say no, I have way too much on my plate. And I want to have a

team action with you guys and and understand about your kids,

I can't take this other coding ticket. People don't do that.

They're not empowered, the nobody makes time for them. So

they're overwhelmed. So they have what I call human work

resistance. They immediately immediately go even people

people get on our on our product. All developers have a

first No, not for me, this is not what they hired me for. I am

not a psychologist, I don't know what they want. I am not put

here to talk about AI, me, you're asking me to talk about

feelings. I am not the guy to be talking about this. So there's a

lot of that plus, developers are not we everyone in the workplace

has spent a good 1020 30 years, being asked to come in and be

professional tenant of being professional is number one thing

is do not have any emotion. Do not bring your personal life

over here. Do not be a human to sit here and write code or

answer the phone, whatever it is that we hired before. So now

we're telling them sorry about that, that was kind of dumb,

looking at these guys that are doing it right? Could you be

doing some of the other stuff where you recognize your

emotions and understand the emotions of others and work with

them better? Could you be doing that? But could you also be

doing some other hours because these hours that I'm paying you

for you still have to finish these tasks. That's what where

we're at today.

Jason Baum: It's I think I've referenced this show on on this

podcast, but there's a show on Apple called severance. And it's

about how they split the human mind, essentially. So that there

is your work self. And then you have no memories of your home of

your personal life when you're at work. And then there's

another self that is your home life with no memories of work.

So you have no idea what's going on your work life exists in work

only your brain you never leave, and then your home, you'll never

leave. So it's so fascinating, because that just the concept

alone of the show is brilliant.

Duena Blomstrom: I can't wait to go check it out. It's a good

comment, depending on how they want to how they took it. But

yeah,

Jason Baum: right. And it's, it's just kind of what you're

talking about. It's like for whatever reason, that the norm,

right? Yeah, you are, you're your professional self. And then

you're, you're everything else your personal and you have to

separate them. And it's like, well, it's not as easy as just

turning off who you are. When you're at work. I've always I

always struggled with it. Now it's great. But it has because

it's more accepted.

Duena Blomstrom: No one should have done, the reality of it is

no one should have presumed we only pay people for physical

output. If we don't, we always did pay them for I mean, you

know, kind of if you take with a grain of salt, the incredible

shambles, that performance appraisals of all kinds are

right. And if you kind of in from that if you ignore the fact

that the reality of it is because we didn't ask them to be

human at work, we don't pay them for any of the human work. So

that's the second part of the resistance when people finally

go like, Oh my God, this could make my life better. But wait a

minute, do I really want to do this as an extracurricular

activity? Because no one is paying me for this stuff, right?

Time is valuable. Until that time, we go back and go like,

right, this was wrong, we're really sorry. He took half your

time on your team stuff, and then half your time on your work

stuff. And here's all your money. And the more time you

spend learning, the more we pay you, the more time you spend

considering the emotions of your teammates, and that translates

into psychological safety and collaboration, the more we pay

you, that's what we need to get to and the gap between not even

admitting we have a problem to changing the way we work

completely. And I don't mean whether it comes to the office

or not. But the structures in which we work is huge. But the

show you're describing is exactly what we have copious

copiously ridiculously expected out of people. So far, it was

never viable. But we'll never stop to it wasn't clear how

unviable it was, in the old world when you didn't have a

choice when you didn't have this extreme need for speed and

collaboration. It is blatantly clear today. And if we want it

solved, we have to help our people start to do this work for

us.

Jason Baum: And we didn't I don't even know if we really do

touched on psychological safety that much. And this covered I

mean, we did we didn't I'm not going to necessarily ask you to

define it, because I think we defined it early on. But what is

the difference between? Or is there a difference between

psychological safety and trust? And then how do you build it

amongst your teams?

Duena Blomstrom: Love that question. Absolutely. And all

that was the most all encompassing of questions are

tried to be successful, not always successful. definition

wise, and you touched on it initially, it's been studied by

other academics, but the person has done most work on it has

been Amy Edmondson, and she has this amazing body of research,

what but that research comes from the medical field and the

aviation field. And it wasn't until like you said, Google,

published project is total that the term psychological safety

kind of entered the vocabulary of the DevOps community and

became a thing to the business world through the IT side of

things. So the definition that she uses, and it's quite clear

is, psychological safety is a state in which you are not

afraid to take interpersonal risks in your team. And it

sounds like so what if you are afraid of risks and so on, is

the humongous difference between a team that is psychologically

safe, and one that isn't, is their ability to truly bring

themselves to work and be their authentic selves, they can raise

points, they always speak up, they're never afraid to say

what's on their mind. And all of that, obviously just translate

into a lot better outcomes. It's quite that simple. We took that

definition and kind of worked on it quite a lot over the last few

years, because this is all we do. If people don't like

psychological safety, this is our day job, right? So we very

early on workout, right? We have loads of human Dad, how are we

going to fix it, we need something that fixes it quick.

And if you look at Google's findings, in project I started

psychological safety is at the top. And then there are four

other topics that they found are crucial if teams want to

succeed, right? And those are dependability. And we thought to

ourselves, when making software, how is our software going to

affect the dependent dependability of any other

software shop? No chance, we don't even know what they're

measuring half of them? No, 90% of them are not measuring

anything anyways. And it just depends on how they're doing it.

So we can't really touch that, then structure and clarity,

which is a huge one is probably the crux of why organizations

are is as they are, which essentially just says, Are these

people crystal clear whether there is or not? And that

question is no, for most teams. So it's also equally not

something we could have affected. So we were like, we

completely get how important it is the only thing the

organization needs to give you other than money and resources.

But you know what, we can't help with that? Because that's a very

organizational thing. And then the other two topics are purpose

and impact. Do you feel as a team that you have a purpose?

And do you feel you're making an impact, great things, but we

couldn't really directly affect those. That's why we've really

laser focused on psychological safety, when like, right, there

is one thing is a team dynamic. And we can then separate it into

behaviors and start working on each of those behaviors, then we

have an empowered team that can do this for themselves, we no

longer throw it on the manager, we no longer expect someone to

modal vulnerability, which is, you know, I sound overly

critical of that, because it's nice to have in the vernacular.

But the next step above that has to be No, everyone has to do

things and those things are recognized my feelings,

recognize my behavior, recognize the behavior of the people

around me, and together want to work to change those things for

the better. That is literally your only answer. And it's

doable. If you start splitting it, it's absolutely doable. What

stops us has been a lack of tools, things like the things

we're making are very, very new. To be fair, it didn't exist

whatsoever. So even if you wanted to measure psychological

safety, you'd be like, Oh, I think we have some of it. People

say they kind of do

Jason Baum: that. Yeah, you I mean, you were critical of the

NPS score. What are Are there tools to measure psychological

safety?

Duena Blomstrom: Well, you know, it's really difficult for me to

talk about because I really hate to sounding salesy, because we

make it but when we went to the market to try and make a tool to

measure it, we didn't find anything. There was Amy's

question. Uh, there was a sportive, obviously, the Spotify

questions. And then there were, there was it other than that

there were engagement surveys completely not the thing that we

needed at all. And then there were, you know, kind of

performance surveys and KPI measurements and stuff, none of

which were quite what we wanted. And when we went to the market,

the reason we looked is because I thought let's find what we the

many psychological safety measuring tours and incorporate

them into a platform. To my surprise, there were no many

there were no none. So we had to make it from scratch. But the

changes we hardware. What is it? Right? And it's the question

we're having this right now. What is it really, I mean, we

all get it instinctively. Right? As I was saying, we have a

different definition. As people know, tech, it's that moment

that we all can relate to. When we were in a team, when we were

literally making magic, we were going fast. Everyone knew what

what everyone was at the best of their abilities. No one ever

didn't say something, there were no awkward, there may have been

awkward moments, we were embracing them. People were

saying freely when they something was wrong. We all know

what it's like to be in a magical psychological safety.

But how rare is that? And some people have to think all the way

back to kindergarten to remember one of those. And so if we all

know that, what is it though, we cannot measure my developers,

we're like, okay, but we got we need titles for these, like, for

the you know, we're under the database, we cannot just call it

the magical thing we can kind of feel so to, to, to actually

define our algorithm, we had to undertake a very serious piece

of research to separate the behaviors in psychological

safety. And we ended up with six things that we're mentioning

today, which are is that inflexible? Is the team

resilient? Because they can be flexible, but break over time?

Is the team engaged? And our engagement means is the team

emotionally connected? not engaged in PS code? Like but do

they know each other's kids names? Do they? Are they aware

that this? Do they care about this other guy or not? That's

engagement in the team? And not? Would they recommend the

manager? Nobody cares? And then we measure? are they learning

together? Are they courageous? And are they speaking up and

those things those each of those behaviors, you can work on it

and you should work on it. And so we've created essentially

what is like a CBT for teams, if that makes sense. So now that

you know how you're doing, and you've seen it in this

particular this particular behavior is where you have

issues, let's work on it together, just us at this level,

at this bubble level. And the fact that you see the data and

the fact that you work on your team health together is

transformational. Those same people that were telling us, not

my job, I don't have the time for this, I'm not a

psychologist, those same people you give them some time with

with the tool and the right empowerment and you tell them

they can do it. They are transformed. They ask can I do

more? Can I do more team actions? Can I spend more time

with my colleagues, because they see the designs of that it's

like they're happier, they do better one of the code is

cleaner, they produce things faster. So they know that that

transformation and they take up to it like you wouldn't believe

it. I've seen developers cry a bit. I've seen people go, Oh, my

God, like, we don't need to wait for the organization to come fix

us. We don't need to wait for HR to come fix us, we can and

should do this thing ourselves. And I think that's the key

there. It doesn't have to be only all tool or only

psychological safety. There are other bits that need working on

right, the ability of human beings to have self respect

enough to be self caring, or making sure that they have the

space to think of their well being fine. All those things

need working on. But you can work on them. T Mobile, that is

what I'm saying that we need to distribute it and distributed

fast.

Jason Baum: It's amazing what happens when you can invest in

the employee, right, and the employee experience and their

personal psychological safety and making sure that they can

produce and be comfortable in the team and like the team.

Gosh, that sounds nice, right? I mean, it's

Duena Blomstrom: fun or anything good happening.

Jason Baum: You know, I gotta say, this is just me just just

like putting myself outside a little bit. I'm new, relatively

new to the tech industry. You know, this is in the second

year. And I have to say how much I love it. Because ironically,

the tech industry I feel is becoming the most progressive

towards the human. And I think that's so at first it's there's

so much irony in that. But it's it's amazing, and it is

refreshing.

Duena Blomstrom: It is there's, you're right, that is the irony

of it. But the reason for that is what should keep execs awake

is does not work any other way. We cannot have HR if we don't do

this paperwork, we cannot make things fast. If we don't do this

paperwork, we cannot do this paperwork just by kind of

sending a program or asking people to look at a TEDTalk

these are a ticket that has to exist in everyone's like,

exactly what we line every week every team should have what in

the hell are they doing about x behavior? Like, if you really

want to know why your code wants some type of way, then you need

to have your your JIRA in a retro on this side. And your

water had happened with the human work on this other side.

So you can kind of start seeing patterns and work on the

behavior and people want to they just haven't been given the

tools to do that and the permission to do that. Yeah,

Yeah,

Jason Baum: I think we could talk about this all day. I love

talking to you doing it. It's it's very refreshing to hear you

speak. And and the authenticity just comes out. I think you you

are very passionate about this topic and and I think I would

love to talk to you and continue the conversation and have you

back because I think we covered maybe one of my questions and we

just ended up just going on our on our own here in this

conversation. But it was it was wonderful and so great to have

you as a guest.

Duena Blomstrom: Thank you so much. It was a meeting. You're

right, we have it always feels this is the size of the human

that it always feels unfinished.

Jason Baum: Because it is right. Okay, so we always finish the

podcast by asking a more personal question. So here's

yours. If you could be remembered for one thing, what

would it be?

Duena Blomstrom: Wow. It's, you said that we could edit if we

wanted to.

Jason Baum: Yeah, there's no right answers just however you

feel.

Duena Blomstrom: But I would have loved to have believed that

I have made some type of difference in terms of people

getting a little less of the dread and a little less of my

life is not worth it, if that makes sense. So I would just

hope that there are some developers somewhere, I don't

want them to ever have seen my face or read my book or heard

about me whatsoever, or that exactly. I just want us to

finally get to a place where we have we are consistently doing

human work at every level of the organization. And it's a natural

normal part of our vernacular, if I could have done anything to

move that needle. That would have been amazing.

Jason Baum: I love it. I think we are 100% on the same page

with all this, obviously, the humans of DevOps, this is what

we're all about. And yeah, like I said, I think I could listen

to you speak all day. So well, happy

Duena Blomstrom: to come back and be up in arms about this

anytime you like, because I feel like we have this lifting work.

We're going to be doing almost the same conversations,

hopefully just as annoyed. Because the day we don't, we're

not annoyed anymore. We don't care enough anymore. So I'm

happy to come back anytime you like.

Jason Baum: Awesome. Thank you so much. Join it, it was

absolute pleasure. And thank you for listening to this episode of

the humans of DevOps Podcast. I'm going to end this episode

the same way I always do, encouraging you to become a

member of DevOps Institute to get access to even more great

resources just like this one. Until next time, stay safe, stay

healthy, and most of all, stay human, live long and prosper.

Narrator: Thanks for listening to this episode of the humans of

DevOps podcast. Don't forget to join our global community to get

access to even more great resources like this. Until next

time, remember, you are part of something bigger than yourself.

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