The Poetic Fantasy of Assets
The webcam’s tiny white LED is glowing, a miniature interrogation lamp I didn’t invite to the party. I am sitting here in a sweatshirt that has seen better decades, staring at the 13th slide of our quarterly strategy deck, realizing that my entire team can see me realize how much I hate this slide. It says, in a font that screams ‘we paid a consultant $5003 for this branding,’ that our people are our greatest asset. It’s a beautiful sentiment. It’s poetic. It’s also, based on the spreadsheet I have open in another tab, a complete and total fantasy.
We love the language of growth. We decorate our LinkedIn banners with it. We talk about ‘resilience’ as if it’s a superpower we can summon with a catchy hashtag rather than a resource that needs to be replenished with actual time and money. But the moment the conversation shifts from the philosophy of growth to the cost of growth, the room goes silent. It’s a specific kind of silence, the kind that usually precedes someone asking for a 33 percent haircut on the annual training budget because ‘we need to be lean this quarter.’
Aiden: The Thread Calibrator
Aiden G. is the person I think of when this happens. Aiden is a thread tension calibrator-a title that sounds like it belongs in a textile mill but actually refers to his role in a tech firm where he manages the delicate balance between technical output and team cohesion. Aiden is the guy who has to tell the board that if they want the 23 percent increase in innovation they’ve been promised, they can’t also keep the team in 53 hours of status meetings every week. He’s the one who sees the threads fraying.
This is where we are. We treat human capability as if it’s a renewable resource that requires no maintenance, like a sturdy rock in a garden, rather than a precision engine that needs oil and calibration. We fund reporting systems that tell us how many hours people are working, but we balk at funding the systems that make those hours worth working.
The Obsession with the Map
Growth is not a speech; it is a line item.
We hire expensive talent, tell them they are our greatest asset, and then refuse to buy the ‘cleaning tablets’ of professional coaching, skill-building, and psychological safety. We wait for the machine to break, and then we have a meeting to discuss why the coffee tastes like burnt plastic.
The Operational Infrastructure
There is a fundamental misunderstanding of what ‘real’ work is. In the eyes of many institutions, ‘real’ work is anything that produces a PDF or a line of code. Development-the messy, slow, often invisible process of improving how humans interact and think-is seen as ‘overhead.’ But human capability is the operational infrastructure. If your infrastructure is crumbling, it doesn’t matter how many ‘North Star’ slides you have. You aren’t going anywhere. You are just a group of people standing in a collapsing building, talking about how great the view from the roof is going to be once you finally get there.
Friction is the True Cost
The real problem solved by true development is the removal of friction. Every time a team member doesn’t know how to give feedback, that’s friction. Every time a manager avoids a difficult conversation, that’s friction. Every time a lack of clarity leads to 83 emails instead of one 3-minute conversation, that’s friction.
This is why I respect the work being done at Empowermind.dk, where the focus is on the actual mechanics of the human mind and how it functions within these high-pressure systems. It’s about making the development budget as essential as the electricity bill.
The Calculus of Fear: Visible Loss vs. Invisible Gain
Seen as an UNCERTAIN COST
Seen as a CALCULATED INVESTMENT
We are comfortable losing money on things we can see, but we are terrified of spending money on things we have to feel.
The Comedy of Automation
Aiden G. once told me that he spent 3 days trying to explain to a CFO that a team’s ‘soft skills’ are actually their ‘hardest skills’ because they are the most difficult to replace and the most impactful on the bottom line. The CFO listened, nodded, and then asked if there was a way to automate those skills with an AI bot. It’s a tragic comedy. We want the wisdom of a 23-year veteran in the body of a 23-year-old intern who costs half as much.
The Impossible Equation
Family Loyalty
Gig Flexibility
Zero Investment
Liberation in Frustration
There is something liberating about being seen in your frustration. Maybe that’s the first step of development-dropping the facade of the ‘all-in’ corporate soldier and admitting that the system is broken. If an organization claims to value development but won’t budget for it, they value the image of development.
The Path Forward:
Conclusion: Paying for the Light
We need to start asking the uncomfortable questions. Honesty is the only thing that actually scales. If we can’t be honest about where the money goes, we can’t be honest about what we value. And if we don’t value the growth of the humans in our care, then we are just running a very expensive, very loud, and very temporary machine.
I finally reach over and click the camera off. The little white light dies. I’m left in the dim glow of the monitor, watching a man talk about a future that he hasn’t yet realized he’s unwilling to buy. How many more slides will it take before we realize that the most expensive thing an organization can do is nothing?