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When a community bank replaces people with phone trees and chatbots, it doesn’t just save money—it breaks trust. Somewhere, a spreadsheet looks great while a 30-year member gives up on trying to talk to a human. This is what happens when technology is installed without purpose: efficiency replaces empathy, and relationships become metrics.

RACI fails when truth lives in email. Make a single system of record per domain, separate reports from one-off analysis, and wire RACI to the tool that actually changes state, not the meeting.

We don’t need fewer notifications, we need fewer promises. When responsiveness becomes the definition of value, we trade depth for dings. Reclaim your attention, set boundaries, and remember: calm isn’t laziness, it’s where the real work happens.

Most teams don’t lack delegation, they lack visible outcomes. Attach a simple “report” (what we’ll see, by when, and where) to every handoff, and watch accountability snap into place.

Layoffs and reorganizations don’t just remove people, they remove the living memory of how “good” gets delivered. To keep outcomes predictable amid uncertainty, design processes that are discoverable and transferable, anchor rituals to proof, and make precision explicit. If your system only works when a specific person is in the room, you don’t have a process, you have a liability.

Silos chase speed; systems chase balance. When you optimize one piece without seeing the whole, you build hidden process debt, burning people, trust, and time along the way. The Fabletics fiasco proves it: great marketing can’t fix a broken system.

Most process debt doesn’t live inside silos; it piles up in the voids between them. Systems can be green while the customer experience is red. Escape the Dunning-Kruger trap by going to see the work, inspecting handoffs, and embedding a report inside every ritual so motion turns into measurable outcomes.

When management becomes a PowerPoint competition, clarity loses. In this episode, Chris explores how constant presentation changes, shifting formats, and “pretty deck syndrome” create invisible process debt, the kind that burns time, erodes focus, and kills adoption. The solution? Standardize before you strategize.

Practical playbook for your first weeks in a new job. Learn how prescriptive steps, tight rituals, and visible reports build momentum and prevent process debt.

Generative AI is fluent and fast, but if we over-delegate our thinking, we’ll ship more and understand less. This piece shows how to keep humans “generative” by staying close to customers, designing rituals with embedded proof, and using AI between us and our repositories, not between us and our relationships. Accelerate good process, not polished waste.

If you’ve ever set a New Year’s resolution you didn’t intend to keep, you already understand the hidden economics of meetings. We tell ourselves the ritual will make us better. Then we realize the ritual mostly made us feel better. I see it every January. We vow to be healthier, write daily, get organized. Then life sneezes on us during a flight and the plan stalls. That’s fine for personal goals, but in business we do the same thing with meetings. We schedule them to relieve

Trade fragile resolutions for repeatable practice. Use daily wins, weekly status, and monthly focus to cut process debt and make outcomes predictable.

New year, same inbox hydra. Admin isn’t the villain, it’s admin without an outcome. This year, turn (S)ADministrative work into rituals with receipts: shorter meetings, clear owners, faster drafts, and decisions that actually move work forward. If it doesn’t change a decision, it’s just process debt.

Lean only works when trust is built into the process. Use AXS and CARE to create community-owned, safe-to-learn systems that actually move the work.

Design zero-trust processes for knowledge work using the ACTS framework—Absorb, Choose, Take, Status to reduce micromanagement, close loops, and grow a stronger team community.

Trust is the invisible “buffer stock” of knowledge work. We unpack how blind trust hides bad processes, why low trust kills momentum, and how to design zero-trust workflows alongside high-trust communities.

Elon vs. bureaucracy: we unpack Musk’s 5-step playbook, remove dumb process, delete steps, simplify, accelerate, automate, and why it collides with U.S. government.

Mixed signals create unvirtuous cycles of control and rework. Here’s how to build virtuous cycles with grounded templates, exception-led insight, and prediction hygiene

In this episode of the Process Debt Podcast, Chris and Toby unpack how over-communication and endless meetings have become the hidden drain on productivity. They explore why low-friction tools like Slack and Zoom make it easy to interrupt but hard to decide, and share practical ways to create healthier communication rituals that drive clarity instead of chaos.

Let’s admit it: some of our best work happens while the wheels are a little wobbly. If that sounds reckless, think about debt in the everyday sense. A mortgage isn’t a moral failure. It’s a tool. Same with credit cards—useful if you pay them off monthly. Process debt works the same way. Not all of it is bad. Sometimes the smartest move is to take on a little mess to reach something you couldn’t otherwise touch. Here’s the tension. If you lock everything down too early—every s