WoT vs WoW
Way of Thinking vs Way of Work
Introduced in People Before Tech (Bloomsbury, 2021, ISBN 978-1-4729-8545-3), Chapter 2: "Process Versus People — Agile, WoW and WoT."
WoT is the mindset and psychological conditions — trust, permission to fail, genuine safety to speak up.
WoW is the processes and methodologies — Agile, Scrum, ceremonies, standups, retrospectives.
People Before Tech argues that WoT matters more: fixing processes without fixing thinking creates process theatre.
Why this distinction matters
Organisations invest billions in WoW — Agile transformations, DevOps pipelines, new ceremonies. But without WoT, these investments produce compliance theatre rather than real execution.
Human Debt™ lives in WoT, not WoW. You cannot process-fix your way out of a trust problem.
When WoT is strong — when people genuinely trust each other, speak up, and share information freely — even imperfect processes produce good outcomes. When WoT is weak, even perfect processes produce Execution Pods that look busy but deliver nothing.
Book Provenance
This concept was defined by Duena Blomstrom in People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury Business, 2021, ISBN 978-1-4729-8545-3). The term was developed as part of the broader Human Debt™ framework.