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The Process Debt Podcast - Year in Review


We started this podcast with a low bar. Record once a week. Ship it. Some weeks were midnight scrambles. Some weeks felt easy. But one year later, a pattern emerged that is worth writing down.


Early on we said process has to be discoverable and transferable. That wasn’t a catchphrase. It was a survival rule. If a new teammate cannot find the “how” and repeat it without us in the room, the organization is borrowing against tomorrow. That is process debt with interest.


Discoverable means there is a single, obvious place to look. Transferable means the instructions respect the reader. Most teams fail the second test. Someone smart builds something elegant for themselves, then assumes everyone reads, clicks, and thinks the same way. They don’t. That is how one-off PowerPoints become permanent operating manuals and why “temporary” spreadsheets show up in month-end reporting for years.


We also watched, in real time, how hype collides with bureaucracy. Remember the saga of “outsiders will fix government in a weekend”? The first steps always look simple from a distance. Then you meet the decades of safeguards, stakeholders, and data controls that exist for reasons everyone forgot. You can admire the builder’s courage and still see the process iceberg beneath the headlines. The plot twist was not technical. It was human. Two alpha narratives tried to hire each other. Marketing won a few news cycles. Process won the year.


Midyear we reframed an old debate. Not make versus buy. Try versus buy. Buying feels fast. You get a hero slide and a budget code. Then the executive sponsor moves to the next fire, and the people who must live with the tool are left to contort their work around it. Trying means we learn in public, involve the operators early, and earn ownership before launch. It is messier up front and cheaper in the long run.


We tugged on Six Sigma too. Three defects per million sounds great in a factory. In knowledge work, chasing 99.99% on day one is how projects stall. The useful lesson is the curve: getting from 97% to 99.9% is exponentially harder. Leaders who accept “sharp shovel” progress over “perfect axe” fantasies get to impact faster. They also reduce the quiet resentment that accumulates when teams are told to promise zero defects in systems full of ambiguity.


If there is one thing I would underline for our future selves, it is this: the most valuable people in your company are the ones who can turn ideas into repeatable practice that other people can actually use. They make the process easy to find and hard to misunderstand. They write like teachers. They leave breadcrumbs. They scale you without you being there. If you have them, protect them. If you don’t, hire and grow them on purpose.


Looking ahead, we set a modest goal: keep the weekly cadence and add four interviews. Not because guests are a growth hack, but because fresh perspectives force our ideas to be transferable beyond our own experience. If we cannot explain it to a peer who lives in a different system, it probably is not ready for primetime.


Process Debt Truth: Most teams do not drown in bad tools. They drown in good tools wrapped in invisible, un-transferable process. Fix that first.

 
 
 

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