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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

Explore how new hires—both eager juniors and seasoned leaders—expose hidden inefficiencies in your organization. Learn how to turn onboarding into a diagnostic tool that reduces process debt and builds a culture of clarity, ownership, and continuous improvement.

Process Debt hides in the seams between silos—not inside them. In this episode, Chris and Toby unpack how invisible inefficiencies form at organizational handoffs, why Conway’s Law predicts them, and how to design better rituals, handoffs, and outcomes to eliminate hidden drag on growth and employee satisfaction.

A candid look at how accountability gaps quietly create process debt in teams. Chris and Toby unpack why ownership gets fuzzy, how “perfect” processes backfire, and how small rituals can restore real accountability, from cleaning rooms to running scrums

In this episode of the Process Debt Podcast, Chris and Toby unpack why true knowledge work must be discoverable and transferable. From million-dollar consulting decks to one-person VBA scripts, they explore how hidden dependencies create process debt—and how giving work a “home” turns tribal know-how into scalable capability.

In this kickoff episode of The Process Debt Podcast, Chris and Toby unpack the idea of “process debt”—the everyday inefficiencies that slow teams down. From over-engineered metrics to missing rituals, they explore why discoverable, transferable work beats fancy dashboards every time, all in under 10 minutes.