Process Debt

Process Debt

by Chris Terrell
Business
Season 1
Your Simplest Processes Are Fine. It's the Invisible Ones That'll Sink You
Explicit
Time reporting is easy to fix. You entered your hours or you didn't, a manager approved them or didn't, and when something breaks you can find the exact spot in about thirty seconds. But try to figure out why a deal stalled between marketing and delivery, and suddenly nobody can even tell you where it went wrong. This week, Chris and Toby dig into why we treat every process as if it deserves the same worry and why that's the mistake. The simple ones broadcast their failures. The complicated ones hide them. So the process debt quietly collects exactly where you're least likely to be looking. They get into why a process is never simpler than the day you built it, how to actually gauge how complex a process is (the base it runs on, whether you can hand it off, whether anyone truly owns it), what The Checklist Manifesto gets right about guardrails, and why you can't manage the work if you can't see it. Plain English, no buzzwords, no methodology homework required.
S1 · E94
Jul 20, 2026
21:11
The World Cup Won't Care How Much You Want the U.S. to Win
Explicit
You already know France and Argentina are the better bet. You root for the U.S. anyway. That's harmless on a Saturday. It's expensive on Monday — because it's exactly how we run operations. We ignore the data and go with our emotional allegiance. I want clean master data. I want a smooth close. I want my timeline hit with full scope. Wanting it isn't a plan. This one uses the World Cup to explain the stuff nobody says out loud at work: — The formula for disappointment (it's just one subtraction, and it's brutal) — Why your soccer team is secretly an org chart: striker = sales, midfield = ops, defense = accounting, goalie = CFO — Why your best people fail in the wrong seats — excellence doesn't transfer — The real answer to "how do we get better," and why it's never a pep talk Good process isn't a secret. It's public. So why does it keep losing to the countries — and companies — that built a real system instead of hoping talent shows up? Read it before 2030. 👇
S1 · E93
Jul 10, 2026
23:49
Your Personal Process Has Debt Too
You spend your days diagnosing why nobody updates the board and why the dashboard tells three different stories. But when's the last time you audited your own process? This week, Chris and Toby turn the lens inward. Turns out the habits you run your life on — the reactivity, the phone-on-the-nightstand morning, the work-until-you're-empty grind — mostly aren't yours. They were trained into you by corporate environments that rewarded looking busy over being effective. And like every other kind of process debt, you never decided to take it on. It just accumulated. They get into BJ Fogg's behavior model and why most change fails on the prompt, not the motivation; the weekly retrospective that buys you permission to play hooky; the Hemingway trick for making hard work easier to return to; and the surprisingly short list of things you actually control. Same problem we always talk about. Just smaller scale.
S1 · E92
Jul 3, 2026
22:11
The Proximity Problem: Why the People Closest to the Fix Are the Last Ones Who Can Sell It
Explicit
The person closest to a broken process is usually the one least able to get it fixed. They've done the analysis, proven the solution, estimated the cost — and still can't get it on the sprint. Meanwhile, the executives who could act on it stopped feeling the pain three org chart levels ago. In this episode, Chris and Toby dig into the proximity problem: why operational pain loses signal as it travels up the chain, what that means for anyone trying to pitch a fix, and how the same dynamic plays out in SaaS rollouts when executive sponsors hand off a charter and disappear. Plus, what a garage door replacement taught Toby about what it actually looks like when front-line judgment is trusted and why that's rarer than it should be.
S1 · E91
Jun 26, 2026
24:58
An MoU isn't a finish line. It's a starting gun.
Everybody loves the announcement. Nobody talks about the 18 months that come after it. This week, Chris and Toby use the US-Iran memorandum of understanding as a case study in what agreements in principle actually are — and aren't. Spoiler: an MOU is a lot like agreeing to get divorced. You've decided it's over. You haven't figured out who moves out, who gets the joint accounts, or what happens to everything you've built together. The hard part is still ahead. Along the way: why you should always look up what the last attempt at this actually took before you promise a timeline, the PUMP framework for pressure-testing big decisions before you're already committed, and the Pollyanna problem — why organizations structurally reward confident forecasts over honest ones, and what that costs you later. If you've ever nodded along to a kickoff presentation and thought "there's no way this takes six months" — this one's for you.
S1 · E90
Jun 19, 2026
22:54
There's No I in Team, But There's a Big One in AI
AI is making individuals dramatically more productive. So why aren't teams getting better? Chris and Toby dig into the structural problem nobody's talking about: AI generates unique output every time by design, which makes it nearly impossible to operationalize across a group. They cover the confident intern problem, why code commits going up while QA debt piles up is a perfect metaphor, the MIT recall study that should give pause, and where AI is actually generating real team leverage versus where it's just making individuals faster in silos. No predictions. No hype. Just an honest look at where we are.
S1 · E89
Jun 12, 2026
23:18
The Waste That Doesn't Show Up on Any Report - with Peter Weiss
There's a concept in lean manufacturing called the gemba — the "real place" where value is actually created. You go to the gemba to see what's happening. You walk the floor. You watch the process. You find the waste. Peter Weiss spent years doing exactly that. Process engineer turned operations leader, he ran manufacturing businesses in Thailand, got his MBA, and walked into his first turnaround assignment armed with every tool he needed. The KPIs improved. The investors were happy. And every single person on the floor hated him. He lost the job after a year and a half. "Instead of looking to the outside and saying the others are all wrong," he told us, "I said it has something to do with me." What followed was a ten-day Vipassana retreat, a fundamental reorientation, and eventually a concept he now calls the inner gemba — the place inside us where information gets processed, emotions arise, decisions get made, and most of the real waste in knowledge work quietly accumulates.
S1 · E88
Jun 5, 2026
37:13
The Real Waste in Knowledge Work Isn't What You Think
In manufacturing, waste is measurable. In knowledge work, it's invisible until you start tracking it. This week, Chris and Toby get into the real cost of context-switching, why the standard office software suite is designed to distract you, and what a McDonald's fry factory can teach us about why knowledge work goes wrong. They also revisit a principle that shows up in every bad rollout: we change too fast, too confidently, and without ever going to the shop floor to see what's actually happening. If you've ever ended a busy week wondering what you actually shipped this one's for you.
S1 · E87
May 29, 2026
22:41
Coaching Trees, Corruption Trees, and the People Debt You Can't See on a Dashboard
Explicit
Why do some managers keep producing great leaders — and others just keep producing turnover? In this episode of Process Debt, Chris and Toby dig into the concept of the coaching tree: how legendary coaches (and managers) pass down not just skills, but standards, culture, and ways of moving through the work. They also explore the darker flip side — the corruption tree — and why most organizations accidentally reward the people who start fires over the people who quietly prevent them. If you've ever worked for someone who made you better, or for someone who made everyone around them worse, this one will name something you've felt but never had a word for. Topics include: why great managers are invisible until it's too late, the "arsonist" pattern in business leadership, psychological safety as a precondition for any real process improvement, and what a coaching tree actually has to do with process debt. Practical, honest, and zero Six Sigma required.
S1 · E86
May 22, 2026
21:40
AI in Your SaaS Tools: What's Actually Working (And What's Just Clippy in a Suit)
Explicit
AI is everywhere in your SaaS tools right now but is it actually helping, or just getting in the way? In this episode, Chris and Toby break down what good AI integration actually looks like ( Loom's auto-generated SOPs, Monday's document extraction, Jira's plain-English queries These versus what's just vendor noise dressed up as innovation. They also get into something most people aren't talking about yet: what happens when AI gives non-technical employees direct access to live business systems and nobody's built the guardrails yet. If you've ever had someone "just make a quick change" in your work management tool and spent the next hour figuring out what broke, this one's for you.
S1 · E85
May 15, 2026
24:19
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