Duena Blomstrom, People Not Tech

Trac Bannon: 

To be honest, I don’t remember when or how I was introduced to Duena Blomstrom. I do know that throughout the lockdowns, we began randomly hopping on calls together and chatting. It really helped us navigate the seeming melees that embrace the globe during the lockdowns. 

We are constantly finding strong deep topics that focus on humans. We’ve debated gender affirming care, child rearing, and the joys of having a partner. And if I can be totally honest, I’d consider her a friend and a crush. That’s right, a crush. This is not a romantic crush. This is when you connect with someone’s message and their ways of expressing themselves. Hang on and you’ll understand why.

One of the topics Duena and I come back to again and again is the idea of cognitive overload and human debt. Human debt is the kissing cousin of technical debt. Tech debt accrues Based on the decisions we make and possibly shortcuts we take that we will need to address or fix over time. As we make decisions, debt accumulates just like financial debt. The longer you wait to pay down the debt, generally, the bigger the debt grows and the greater the effort needed to fix it. 

Human debt follows the same pattern. Human debt accrues when people’s issues are not addressed and needs not met. When you ignore people’s needs, human debts accrue at the team level, and even at the enterprise. Teams can be empowered to reduce their human debt by learning to measure and improve their behaviors to become happier, to feel a sense of psychological safety and to experience high performing dynamics. 

 I can talk to Duena about the human element of the technical world and she just gets it. 

She’s also wildly independent and authentic. When we got together to record her episode of Real Technologists, she showed up in beautiful colors, perfectly applied vibrant makeup, nifty earrings, and vaping… all this to record audio. 

Duena Blomstrom: 

If I were to puff on this… Will you hear it and destroy your audio? 

Trac Bannon: 

There’s raw authenticity for you. She was savvy enough to ask if the mics and recording equipment would pick up the sound of her vaping…

Of course Bob, our recording engineer, popped on screen and told her to hit the vape and he would check the sound levels. Duena was cleared to vape and be her normal self. It was midday US and Duena dialed in from her office in the UK. 

Duena Blomstrom: 

I’m just tired, babe. I’ve been awake since 5:00 AM. 

 

Trac Bannon: 

You are listening to Real Technologists. I’m your host, Trac Bannon, coming to you from Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. Each week we choose a unique guest behind leading Edge Tech innovation to explore their genuine stories, their true journeys. Technology touches nearly every aspect of our lives. It’s being driven by diverse perspectives and experiences of real humans.

You’re in the right spot to hear about the real technologists reshaping our world. Stay tuned for stories that will give you something to noodle on.

Each conversation and recording for Real Technologists includes doing research and homework about the guest. It sometimes includes a few hours of Google searches and social media detective work. 

I normally start with LinkedIn and then begin tracking the tags by the potential guest. By tags, I mean the hashtags of the meta words that you use to make your message more searchable and identifiable. What words make up Duena’s word cloud? Agile, Human debt, Psychological Safety, and Humans First. 

When you look at Duena’s online presence, she is wildly prolific with 265,000 LinkedIn followers. Her newest newsletter, “Chasing Psychological Safety” has surpassed 65,000 subscribers and she has tens of thousands more for her other newsletters on FinTech and Agile.

This is one of the reasons I have a crash. She is vibrant. She’s technical and she is prolific in pouring out excellent guidance. She’s authentic and unapologetic for following her gut. 

Duena Blomstrom: 

I find momentary ideals in people I fall in love with. It’s been a really good habit to have crushes on humans and then just genuinely burn with admiration for one or two of their qualities. And then it passes.

Trac Bannon: 

Duena and I discussed the idea of an intellectual crush in the context of discussing her grandfather that she calls a “renaissance man”.

He was a big character who wrote stories and music as well as painting. This man wanted to express himself artistically as much as he could because his job wouldn’t allow him. He was a doctor and even had a brief role with Romania’s Ministry of Health when Romania was a one party socialist state. When he decided to renounce all of his Ministry of Health riches because of communism, he stood at odds with much of his family though he did what he felt he must.

This man helped raise Duena. She feels compelled to act on her gut and has strong opinions of what she believes is right and wrong. She credits him with this. She also credits her family with gifting her a family lineage of educators and scientists. 

Duena Blomstrom: 

I’m staying away from sounding too ridiculous if I can.

If you put it on paper, I was born under an oppressive regime. I was born in Bucharest, Romania. And from, a kind of a combination of quite erudite parents and grandparents that had been all through the world and we had a tradition of academia in the family and so on.

 

Trac Bannon: 

Romania was a Marxist-Leninist one party social state that existed officially from 1947 to 1989.

Duena was born into this political climate. Duena’s wild success is in part, due to the opportunities that came as a result of the revolutions that spread across several countries around the world in 1989. 

The Romanian Revolution, also known as the Christmas Revolution was a period of violent civil unrest in Romania during December of 1989.

It would be rude to say that she was in the right place at the right time. She was born before the revolution was an adolescent as Romania struggled to be a new nation. 

 The eyes of the world were on these emerging nations. The political world positioned itself quickly to infuse Western political science and philosophies. Interestingly, one of the most influential methods to impact the emerging nation was not limited to economic investment, but through student scholarships that included those for high school students. 

Duena got one of those precious spots. 

Duena Blomstrom:

Once I had a close up scholarship, probably some of my happiest days in the US… I don’t even know if it still exists or not, but at the time it was this big program where… kids from all over the world were selected to come see how the administration of the US works.

And so for someone who was so interested in politics and organizational things and stuff, I was so excited. 

Trac Bannon: 

Along with meeting other bright students from around the world, Duena had the opportunity to meet Madeline Albright and in the same dinner, saw the Clintons. And it was a big deal… not because she was in the presence of world leaders, but because of the events that kindled a question in her: What is it about American politics and economics that are so vastly different from us in Europe and so on?

Duena Blomstrom: 

So I think that’s kind of what sprung me to really wanna pursue more of the studies in high school. 

Trac Bannon: 

Back in Romania, it was time to work in addition to finishing high school. As high school graduation approached, Duena entered into the very competitive Romanian college placement exams. It was the mid 1990s, she was in an emerging economy and had been abroad exposed to political and economic systems. 

She was personally drawn to political science…

Duena Blomstrom: 

I’ll be honest, I didn’t pick it. You know how it is where sometimes education picks you? Back in the day in Romania, if you wanted to go to university, you had to pass your baccalaureate exam… kind of like an equivalent to, I don’t know, GCSE and A levels. And then you also had to pass an entry exam for the respective specialty, whatever it was that you had chosen. And those were quite difficult exams, and you would usually have a couple hundred kids battling for the same spot.  What I wanted to do was political science. I passed exam and I got in, but I hadn’t declared it at home.

Trac Bannon: 

Duena passed exams, then went home to share with her family that she would major in political studies. In a family of doctors and lawyers, her announcement struck them as clearly ridiculous. Romania was still growing and struggling with its new identity as an independent nation. Political studies and political science was a new and growing area of study.

Duena Blomstrom:  

If you are coming from a place where politics was taboo before. They thought it was just a fancy and a silly thing. So,  what we compromised on was eventually social science and psychology. And so I passed that exam as well. 

Trac Bannon: 

Duena graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in International studies in 1999 and headed back to the us. Her first stop was NYU where she worked on a master’s degree in psychology before hopping to Georgetown University. By 2003, she had an MBA in International Commerce and business. 

Duena Blomstrom:  

It was just a taste of everything. And I had to unfortunately return to Europe quite hastily because of family issues.  In a way it’s good because I would’ve went very deep academically, I would’ve loved a doctorate in organizational, psychology or in couples therapy or in something of the sort. 

But practically it wasn’t my time. I had to get back to work.

Trac Bannon: 

Duena says that she’s not really using her education as it was formally taught though I’d argued that she infuses her blend of psychology and social sciences into every step of her career… After the revolution, there was a massive vacuum of technology and consulting needed. During her collegiate studies. ENA pulled together a team of college students to start a business. 

Together, they started a digital transformation mentoring business. It focused on helping companies set up their initial systems, including their ERPs, their enterprise resource planning systems. 

The business provided handholding for digital issues in the enterprise, and there was a serious need for this service at the time, which meant they had loads of volumes. Duena almost seems to downplay the importance and success of that first business, saying, “I won’t claim its genius work, but, there was a serious need at the time” 

Duena Blomstrom: 

What we started doing was kind of handholding for digital issues in enterprises. Just because it was very clear that we are a lot more comfortable with tech than other people… not because we knew more, but for whatever reason we just felt more comfortable. So we thought there was a need there.

And then very soon there was still that a time where a lot of Bucharest was just practically raving up for business. 

Trac Bannon: 

They were, however, wildly successful and eventually, they sold the company to a large business consultancy for a very large sum.

Remember that what had brought Duena back to Romania was a need to care for her mother and her younger brother. By this time, however, it was 2007 and there was a heavy weight on her shoulders. 

Duena Blomstrom: 

So I had a rather unpleasant situation at home where I became the practically breadwinner of the family very early…

And so I had stop a number of things and start other things that would be more… kind ofcatches faster. And my mother got very sick very fast. I was her only carer. My young brother ended up in my care. So it meant that I had to make some shorter term decisions, if you wish.

I’ve famously sold some Apple share at the worst possible time. I have then started a nail salon and one other consultancy with the money I got from them. I sold my consultancy, and then I tried investing in a couple of other things that didn’t quite work out. Long story short, built and sold the company made and lost close to a million bucks in a period of, I think two or three years. And then, end it up being practically the person in charge of this entire family, in between moving to other countries and trying to build another business.  

Trac Bannon: 

Nearing 30 years old and having built and sold a business for a million dollars, she made a series of decisions that one can only look back on and say she made the best decision she could in the situation where she found herself.

 Part of the reason she sold RC Consulting in 2007 was that she fell in love with a Swedish man who, for whatever reason had difficulties in Romania and with European culture. Duena sold the business, the house, and packed her dog, her mother, and her brother to move to Sweden with him. 

This was a sobering time for her. From the leader of her company to starting over in a new country. It was not long until the relationship fizzled. 

She ran out of all of her savings at one point, far before she learned Swedish in a fashion that she could use in business. In Sweden, speaking the language is crucial and scenic to getting a job. She bounced between jobs until she landed a position with a Swedish tech firm called Weird Solutions. The business was international and her command of the English language was strong. 

Duena Blomstrom: 

That was my real, true, real job in Sweden… my first real job in Sweden, but that practically started, I think, a good two years into my being there. So for that period, it’s been a very serious struggle.

Trac Bannon: 

This is where she realized she was becoming a technologist without writing a single line of code. Weird Solutions supplied carrier grade internet software solutions. Her role as head of sales and partnerships meant that she needed to learn the trade.

Duena Blomstrom: 

So… I very quickly had to understand DHCP protocols and where IPV 6 is going to come into the whole thing, and kind of what happens in between hardware and software and all the politics in between… I love that though, and I understood very quickly that can be a technologist without I writing a line of code. That’s kind of when it clicked for me. 

Trac Bannon: 

Her time in Sweden had its ups and downs. One of the bright spots was meeting and dating a Swedish technologist. This relationship became pivotal. 

Duena Blomstrom: 

When I met the father of my child, him being a developer and .net programmer… that was a pool to be fair at the time. And we ended up in this situation where we were building a family…. I think it was maybe 2009 or so, 2008, 7… When I had my first trello board… there were my household chores with the child’s father were in a Trello board or they were not getting done.

Trac Bannon: 

Duena was recruited by a UK startup Manga. She was employee number 5, and her role was to establish an international presence. The focus was financial services and personal financial management for banks. She knew nothing about financial services, though that did not dissuade her. She knew she could quickly learn. 

At the time in 2010, the term FinTech didn’t really exist. Duena found herself in a new company in a new and morphing industry. Digital banking was just taking off as well. She was essentially at ground zero for the birth of FinTech as we know it today. It was not without its challenges. There was a need to learn an entirely new and different technology set, learn banking and learn all the bits and parts of why consumers matter to banks. Maniga is actually a software development firm focused on digital engagement and digital sales for banks. 

What a fantastic blending of her education and experience: International Business, Psychology and tech. And in a roundabout way, she had been adopting agile principles first at home and then, incrementally in her work. 

Her role and responsibilities exploded and her strategic thinking bloomed. At that point, banks were not figuring out what consumers really wanted. With her background in psychology, this completely blew her mind. How could this be? 

Duena Blomstrom: 

I was selling two banks a way to completely revamp their proposition, to give their consumers something they needed. And these were banks who are like, well, fuck my consumers what they need… if I flash a dollar, how do you feel? How do we feel about finances? Why isn’t this studied? That was my first piece of… what the hell is wrong with your people in banking? Right? So I had this, I got up in arms and I coined this concept of emotional banking. Why do we not know people’s emotions about their banking? 

Trac Bannon: 

She was loud, she was passionate, and she kept educating herself. She recommended pairing human center design with agile and DevOps. These were terms that few in banking understood. She bought copies of the DevOps Handbook and the Unicorn Project for every banker maniga Corporation sat down with. If they could transform those folks to be at the level of a chief digital officer that understood agile and understood why they had to change their customer proposition, then they could be successful in putting Meniga’s products into practice. 

Duena had to instill an agile mindset into these leaders before they would even take a look at the company and its technology.

This is where her prolific writing was born. 

 Duena began traveling more and more. For a period of two or three years after her baby was born, she practically lived on a plane due to her work in financial technology. She took a bold move and put her kid into the arms of the baby’s father, the Swedish programmer and asked him to take care of their child while she traveled.

That pace has not necessarily slowed with Duena traveling over 2 million kilometers in the air. It was not without a heart wrenching trade-off. 

Duena Blomstrom: 

So here’s a child, put the camera on top of the child. So that I can see him sleeping from all over the world, which I then ended up doing for the next two years. Because this was a company that was just taking up, digital banking was just taking up, I was building FinTech practically from the very middle of the industry. All of the things quickly and at once. And all of that while the little one was still very tiny, which was kind of tough… so quickly learned, I can’t look at baby pictures on a plane or I’ll cry all the way to the destination. Very good travel tip for mothers and have to work with tiny babies. Don’t look at your kids.

Trac Bannon: 

We each make choices on what works for us and our families. This is what worked for Duena and her family. 

Around 2014, she moved her family unit to London. It has served as her home base ever since.

The past nine years have been a blur of mentoring, strategic advising, and writing. She has continued on with Meniga as a board advisor and began volunteering with Techstars. It is a group that mentors entrepreneurs when they’re engaging with venture capitalists. 

Her first book was Emotional Banking named after the term she coined while she was with Meniga. Published in 2017, she bundled up all of the executive briefings and research into one volume. It contains information on fixing culture, leveraging FinTech and transforming retail banks into brands. 

Her next book, “People Before Tech”, was published in 2020. This book spells out the importance of psychological safety and teams in the digital age.

She has a new book about to be released in October of 2023 called “Tech-Led Culture: Unlocked the Full Potential of Your Business And People”. 

Clearly Duena cares about people, clearly she’s passionate to reduce human debt in business and help others succeed. 

Self-diagnosed with ADHD, she has an evolving personal theory that agile clicks faster with people who are on the spectrum, ADHD people, and people who have always been forced to think out of the box and assemble bits and pieces of what they could into something functional. She fully admits she is early in evolving her viewpoint and research.

Duena Blomstrom: 

I think agile clicks faster with people who are on the spectrum. It’s a completely personal theory and I can imagine hundreds of research scholars there going… what the fuck? I think it clicks and I think it clicks with ADHD people. And I think it clicks with people who have always been forced to think out of the box, who have always been forced to take bits and pieces of what they could and assemble it together into something that’s functional.

It’s not news to us. We have to separate things and then still, kind of presume a concept together. So I genuinely think that to me, when I first realized what we mean, I was like, of course, why would we ever do anything any other way?

Trac Bannon: 

She has a very interesting point. Many people are not linear or sequential thinkers so perhaps, in those situations regardless as to spectrums, gender, education, perhaps agility just makes sense to some.

I think that will need to be the topic of one of our next phone calls… in fact, I will calendar that invite right now. Duena is still one of the top crushes on my intellectual crush list, and boy, that list is way too long. 

What does the future hold for the colorful and unabashedly authentic Duena Blomstrom? She is newly married and is all in championing for the reduction of human debt.

Duena Blomstrom: 

One of the things that have happened over the last few years is outside of writing books and these newsletters and stuff… I also happen to have a day job, which is… I run a product in the technology company. The technology company is trying to make one of these artifacts that stay with people to change their team lives and is trying to make one of these things that actually make a physical change in people’s lives by making a dashboard that allows them to think of how they’re reacting to each other and what their emotions are and what their behavior is. So we make that product. 

My future, I think. Could have been much more variety than it was when I first thought of this product, because this product has now… shown me the size of the human debt.

Trac Bannon: 

And that’s a wrap for today’s episode of Real Technologists. I want to thank my guest, Duena Blomstrom for sharing her story. Your insights and experiences are truly inspiring. I’m grateful for the opportunity to share them with the audience. This podcast is a Sourced Network production and updates are available weekly on your favorite audio streaming platform. Just search for real technologists and consider subscribing. Special thanks to our executive producer, Mark Miller, for making this show possible. Our editor and sound engineer, Pokie Huang has done an amazing job bringing this story to life. Thank you both. The music for today’s episode was provided by Blue Dot Sessions, and we use Descript for spoken text editing and audacity for the soundscaping. The show distribution platform is provided by CaptivateFM making it easy for our listeners to find and enjoy the show. 

That’s all for today, folks. This is Trac Bannon. Don’t forget to tune in next week for another intriguing episode of Real Technologists and something new to noodle on.