In this BONUS episode, Alison Campbell, CEO of unBurnt, and researcher at Bentley University shares the research that reframes burnout as a measurable threat to a team’s ability to innovate. We learn why your most productive people may be your biggest innovation risk, how to spot capacity draining out of a team before the output drops, and where Scrum Masters have the leverage to protect the one thing that keeps teams building: the space to think.
From the ER to the Research
“I kept normalizing the stress, the exhaustion, eventually the stomach aches as, well, this is just the price of entry. This is part of being a busy, full-time executive and working mom.”
Alison spent nearly twenty years in corporate roles—moving from finance to e-commerce to HR tech, with analytics as the through line and a love for the building phase inside companies. The pandemic was the turning point. With two young kids at home and a global team to hold together, she pushed through eighteen months of warning signs she had normalized, until severe stomach pain landed her in the emergency room needing surgery.
That was the stop moment.
What started as private shame—the feeling that she alone had failed while everyone else “had it all figured out”—became a research question the moment she started talking about it and heard the same story mirrored back from colleague after colleague. This wasn’t one exhausted mom at a hard moment. It was a design and systems problem worth studying.
When Burnout Looks Like Productivity
“Even when that innovative work behavior was high, when burnout was high, that segment of our sample had the lowest innovation capacity of the entire group we surveyed.” Continue reading BONUS: When Burnout Looks Like Productivity—The Hidden Risk to Your Team’s Innovation Capacity
