Stop hiring tools to "fix" processes. Tools don’t fix workflows; they amplify them.
- Chris Terrell
- Feb 27
- 2 min read
If a carpenter bought $3,000 worth of premium oak and left $2,000 of it in a scrap pile on your driveway, you’d fire him before lunch.
You can see the waste. You can trip over the offcuts. The inefficiency has a physical weight.
But in the world of knowledge work? We do this every single day. We just call it "Process Debt."
The conflict is simple: In the physical world, waste is visible. In the digital world, waste is invisible. It doesn't take up floor space; it just slowly erodes your team's sanity.
The Invisible Scrap Pile
Digital waste hides in the "ether" of our workflows. It’s the "zombie" systems we’ve become immune to:
The "Notification Trap": Muted Slack channels that provide zero signal and 100% noise.
The CRM Graveyard: Fields that nobody fills out, but everyone is "required" to click through.
The AI Rabbit Hole: Paying for $20/mo subscriptions that produce "wacky, useless caricatures" instead of solving a business problem.
We aren't hiring tools to do jobs; we’re hiring them to distract us from the fact that our process is broken.
The "Job to be Done" Framework
As Chris and Toby discussed, the shift happens when you stop looking at the tool and start looking at the verb.
Most people go to the hardware store for a 3/4 inch drill bit. They’re wrong. They don't want a bit; they want a hole.
If you want to kill the scrap pile, use the "Mad Libs" approach to business analysis:
[Action Verb] + [The Object] + [The Clarifier]
Bad Process: "We need a new Project Management tool to 'stay aligned'."
The Job: "Triggering + Status Updates + Automatically for Stakeholders."
If the tool doesn't perform that specific verb, it’s just more sawdust.
Don't Drag the Boat Anchor
When you migrate to a new system, you have a rare, golden opportunity to recalibrate.
Most teams fail because they try to "lift and shift" their old mess into a new interface. They drag the legacy assumptions—the "Black Swan" rules created five years ago for a problem that no longer exists—into their future.
The Solution? Embrace the "Rookie Mindset."
Being a rookie in a new tool forces you to find the most streamlined path to the outcome. It forces you to minimize the scrap because you don't have the "career capital" to waste on complexity.
The Bottom Line
Stop being a craftsman who is proud of a $2,000 pile of sawdust.
Continuous improvement isn't dead; it’s just harder to see when it’s hidden in an SAP instance or an email thread. Fight the entropy. Name the verb. Kill the zombie.
Process Debt Truth: You don’t lose to bad technology. You lose to skipping the boring foundations that make good technology usable.
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