Avoiding Organizational Debt

Leaders who can’t make tough decisions cause teams to accumulate “organizational debt.” Steve Blank, who first coined the term, described…

Leaders who can’t make tough decisions cause teams to accumulate “organizational debt.” Steve Blank, who first coined the term, described how “all the compromises made to ‘just get it done’ in the early stages of a startup…can turn a growing company into a chaotic nightmare.” But a lot of these compromises are less about the pursuit of lean productivity and more about avoiding conflict. Like the notion of “technical debt,” which is the accumulation of old code and short-term solutions that collectively burden the performance of a digital product over time, organizational debt is the accumulation of changes that leaders should have made but didn’t.

The consequence of delayed optimization adds up over time. Image by O.R.Orozco — 99U

The consequences of this kind of organizational debt were abundantly clear during my tenure at Adobe and experiences working with other companies. In large companies that pride themselves on having a friendly culture and comfortable work environment, leaders a…