Technical debt is the accumulated cost of choosing a quick or easy solution in software development instead of a cleaner, more maintainable one. Like financial debt, it can help you move faster in the short term, but it usually requires “interest” later in the form of extra work.
Organizational growth can create a similar kind of debt. I will call it process debt.
As an organization grows, all sorts of small improvements become necessary. But they are easy to ignore. A process doesn’t work quite right, so someone creates a workaround. A system doesn’t provide what people need, so someone creates a spreadsheet. A decision takes too long, so people add another meeting.
Individually, none of these problems seem important enough to stop and fix. People just deal with them.
But they accumulate.
Eventually, a significant amount of effort goes into simply keeping the organization’s processes working. People spend more and more of their day coordinating, fixing problems, finding information, maintaining spreadsheets, sitting in meetings, and escalating decisions.
The organization is paying interest on its process debt.
Microsoft has described a related problem as “digital debt.” In its 2023 Work Trend Index, based on a survey of 31,000 people in 31 countries along with Microsoft 365 activity, Microsoft found that the average employee in its data spent 57% of their time communicating and only 43% creating. Sixty-eight percent of respondents said they didn’t have enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday.
More recent Microsoft research uses another useful term: “coordination tax.” People may be hired to do a particular job, but an increasing amount of their time gets consumed by meetings, emails, administrative work, and coordinating with other people just so the work can happen.
That sounds a lot like interest on process debt.
Here are some possible indicators that an organization has accumulated too much process debt:
- Too much firefighting
- Hidden factories and unofficial workarounds
- Processes that don’t work as they are supposed to
- Too many meetings
- Too many people involved in making decisions
- Processes that aren’t documented
- Managers spending too much time coordinating
- More communication than output
- Spreadsheets created to make up for shortcomings in official systems
- Problems that routinely require escalation to leadership
Some of these indicators are easier to see than others.
Meetings, for example, are visible. In Microsoft’s 2023 research, inefficient meetings were the number-one productivity disruptor reported by respondents, while having too many meetings ranked third.
But the meeting itself may not be the actual problem.
The meeting may exist because the process for making a decision doesn’t work. Or because responsibilities aren’t clear. Or because the systems don’t provide the information people need. Adding the meeting solves the immediate problem without fixing the underlying one.
Then the meeting becomes permanent.
Other forms of process debt are much harder to see.
Manufacturing has a useful concept called the hidden factory. The term describes all the work happening outside the intended production process to compensate for problems: rework, corrections, extra inspections, workarounds, and other activities necessary to get the expected output.
Quality pioneer Armand Feigenbaum is often associated with the idea that these hidden activities can consume a substantial amount of an organization’s productive capacity.
I think knowledge-work organizations can develop their own hidden factories.
They just look different.
Instead of reworking a defective part, someone manually fixes data before sending a report. Someone maintains a spreadsheet because the official system doesn’t provide what the team needs. Someone spends an hour figuring out who needs to approve something. A manager spends part of every morning coordinating between teams because the normal process doesn’t work.
Practitioners writing about hidden factories often describe exactly this kind of invisible work: informal rework, compensating processes, and experienced employees quietly stepping in to keep things moving.
The work gets done.
The extra work required to make it happen is mostly invisible.
This may be one reason process debt can survive for so long.
People compensate.
Good employees become very good at navigating bad processes. Managers coordinate around problems. Someone knows which spreadsheet actually has the right information. Someone else knows who you really need to call to get something approved.
The organization sees the output and assumes the system is working.
In reality, people may be holding the system together.
Communication itself can become part of this hidden factory. Microsoft’s 2025 analysis of Microsoft 365 usage found that the average employee in its dataset receives more than 100 emails and 150 Teams messages per day.
Of course, communication is necessary. The question is how much of it exists because the organization’s processes require constant coordination to function.
The same is true of meetings, spreadsheets, approvals, and escalations. None of these things are inherently bad.
They become interesting when they are compensating for something else that doesn’t work.
That is where I think the analogy to technical debt becomes useful.
Technical debt doesn’t necessarily mean the original decision was wrong. Sometimes taking on debt is the right choice because you need to move quickly. You know the solution isn’t ideal, but fixing it properly isn’t worth delaying everything else.
Process debt can work the same way.
A spreadsheet may be exactly what you need right now. An extra meeting may solve an immediate coordination problem. Having a manager personally approve something may make sense while an organization is small.
The problem isn’t taking on the debt.
The problem is forgetting that you took it on.
A temporary workaround becomes a permanent process. The spreadsheet becomes a system. The weekly coordination meeting stays on the calendar for five years. The manager who originally knew every detail now has 50 people waiting for decisions.
And the organization keeps paying the interest.
I believe there is eventually a point where process debt becomes extremely expensive. But I’m less certain that organizations always reach a clean tipping point where they are forced to fix it.
They may simply add more people. Managers may spend more time coordinating. Employees may work longer hours. Prices may rise. Delivery may get slower. The organization may become less competitive.
Or good employees may continue compensating for the problems.
That may actually be the more dangerous outcome.
Because process debt is easiest to ignore when people are still successfully paying the interest.
The question isn’t whether your organization has workarounds, spreadsheets, meetings, escalations, or inefficient processes. Every organization probably does.
The better question might be:
How much of your organization’s capacity is being spent making the organization work instead of doing the work the organization exists to do?