Collaboration in the modern workplace frequently falters before actual work starts. This week’s Process Debt story highlights how a simple profile update request turned into a 20-minute ordeal of password resets and confusion. It demonstrates how invisible process friction can disrupt even the simplest tasks, not due to individual failure, but because our systems impose unnecessary obstacles.

Most orgs polish their silos and ignore the white space between them—the handoffs. This Fix-It Friday argues the real gains come from mapping seams, aligning incentives to system outcomes, codifying the handshake (“If you give me X…I deliver Y”), and automating guardrails so it’s hard to do the wrong thing and easy to do the right one.

When your customer’s process is messy, don’t chase perfection, ship an early draft, prime with a “chef’s recommendation,” and lock the success sentence first. Clarity beats speed, then enables it.

Why do so many change programs flop? Because we launch them without a clear game, ignore our cohort reality, and underfund the “soft” work that makes adoption real.

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.

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.