Is Your Work Homeless?

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Is Your Work Homeless?

Podcast Episode · Process Debt · 06/27/2025 · 18m

If I asked, “Where does your work live?” would you point to a single address—or rattle off a scavenger hunt of apps, inboxes, and sticky notes?That’s the problem. In too many orgs, the work is basically couch-surfing. It shows up in Slack, naps in SharePoint, eats leftovers in PowerPoint, and vanishes when someone goes on vacation.

Think about cooking in someone else’s kitchen. You might be a great cook, but if you don’t know where the pans and spatulas are, dinner takes twice as long and tastes half as good. Knowledge work is the same. You can hire smart people, but if the “kitchen” is different in every team—or every head—they spend their prime thinking time just opening drawers.

Developers solved this ages ago. Code has a home: a repo with a README, branches, tests, and a predictable path from “idea” to “production” to “rollback.” Business work? We launch a new reporting ritual on Tuesday, discover a conflicting slide deck on Thursday, and six weeks later no one can find the decision we swore we’d “write down somewhere.”

That’s how work becomes homeless: it isn’t wrong, it’s just address-less. And when work has no address, two bad things happen. First, discoverability dies—no one can reuse what already exists, so we re-do it. Second, accountability blurs—if there’s no front door, there’s no owner.

Picture a fast-food line at lunch rush. Everything has a place; everything moves left to right. You can drop a new person into the fries because the station tells them how to succeed. In most knowledge teams, we drop a new hire into an Airbnb. The oven works. The knives are sharp. But the measuring cups live in a random basket next to the board games. It’s fine for a weekend. It’s chaos for a business.

So what do we do?

• Start by cleaning your own room. Pick one home for your artifacts and stick to it. Not perfect—predictable. If it’s analysis, it lives in /Projects/<Client>/<Project>/Analysis/. If it’s a decision, it lives in /Projects/<Client>/<Project>/Decisions/ with a date and one-line summary at the top. You don’t need a new tool; you need a visible, boring address.

• Name a landlord. Make a manager-level owner responsible for the team’s “organizational schema.” Not a corporate data cop—just the person who says where the spatulas go and checks once a week that they’re there. Their job is discoverability: can someone find the last good example in under 30 seconds without asking?

• Separate process from product. Two homes, two purposes. The process (how we do the work) lives in a single, versioned place: SOPs, checklists, playbooks. The product (the work itself) lives alongside the project: briefs, drafts, decisions, deliverables. New people should never have to guess which is which.

• Make the read-me mandatory. Every project folder gets a 90-second “read-me”: scope, current status, top links, owner. If you vanish (lottery win, not buses), someone else can cook dinner tonight.

• Ship rituals, not slides. A daily stand-up is great—until it becomes the only place knowledge exists. Use rituals to update the home, not replace it. “If you say it in a meeting, link it in the home.”

None of this is fancy. It’s the opposite: standard addresses, light ownership, and the discipline to put the pan back in the same drawer. The payoff isn’t just tidiness—it’s flow. Fewer decisions about where something lives means more energy for how we solve it.

Key takeaway: Give every type of work a single, boring, shared home—and a named owner for the map. Discoverability goes up, rework goes down, and your smartest people spend time cooking, not opening drawers.

Process Debt Truth: Work without a home becomes invisible—and invisible work rarely ships.