Process Debt

Chris Terrell

What is Process Debt?

The hidden burden of inefficient processes that erode growth, employee satisfaction, and organizational success

We all have a little 'process debt' in our lives and careers. In our podcast, "Process Debt," we explore the daily challenges and frustrations with the hidden systems that steal joy from our work. From personal anecdotes to professional insights, join us for insights you can used to start changing those those broken business systems

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21 episodes
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Avg 24 min
English

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S1 · E103
Yesterday · 22 min
Why Peer Pressure is the Hidden Killer of Process Efficiency
The Process Debt Podcast: Improving knowledge work processes to help you reach One Peace Flow. Peer pressure is quietly hijacking your workflows. Learn how social friction creates process debt and discover strategies to build high-trust teams. How unmanaged peer pressure creates consensus loops and decision paralysis Why delegating tasks without decision-making authority drives underground workarounds How to build digital Andon Cord mechanisms that allow team members to safely flag broken processes Strategies for turning negative cultural pressure into positive momentum and team alignment Website: https://www.processdebt.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/process-debt/
S1 · E102
September 14 · 19 min
AI Doom and the Human Need to Go the Last Mile
Process Debt: Improving knowledge work processes to help you reach One Peace Flow. Unmonitored generative tools yield fragile architectures and unearned optimism. Discover how practical domain judgment eliminates process debt. Review internal systems to identify and remove over-engineered setups Counter cognitive biases and false sense of mastery from generative tools Establish strict human review mechanics prior to production deployment Partner with domain specialists to resolve critical last-mile details Website: https://www.processdebt.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/process-debt/
S1 · E101
September 7 · 22 min
Beyond Ignorance: Why We Fail in an Age of Expertise
The Process Debt Podcast: Improving knowledge work processes to help you reach One Peace Flow. In an age of infinite information, experts don't fail from ignorance—they fail from ineptitude. Discover how simple checklists stop operational failure. Understand the distinction between ignorance and operational ineptitude in knowledge work. Eliminate naked calendar invites by establishing brief alignment checks and clear agendas. Apply the cockpit rule to build focused, lightweight checklists that prevent major errors. Structure operational safety nets using Read-Do and Do-Confirm frameworks. Website: Process Debt Website LinkedIn: LinkedIn Page
S1 · E100
August 31 · 21 min
Facebook and the Distraction Economy
The Process Debt Podcast: Improving knowledge work processes to help you reach One Peace Flow. Uncover how the distraction economy drains 25% of your workday and learn how to break the cycle of digital interruptions to reclaim focus. Key Takeaways: Understand how platforms engineered for engagement create hidden process debt in knowledge work. Recognize the true cost of context switching—losing up to two hours daily and 24 minutes per interruption. Overcome cognitive friction during complex tasks rather than retreating into digital distractions. Implement practical focus guardrails and swap digital noise for meaningful real-world human connection. Website: Process Debt Website LinkedIn: LinkedIn Page
S1 · E99
August 24 · 16 min
From Signal to Value: Finding One-Peace Flow in Knowledge Work
In a world inundated with digital distractions and artificial noise, finding genuine contentment in your work can feel impossible. Join us as we explore the concept of "one peace flow," adapting classic manufacturing principles for modern knowledge workers to prioritize value over endless notifications. Cut through digital noise and AI overload. Discover how knowledge workers can transition to One Peace Flow and focus on real signal to value. Key Takeaways: Why knowledge workers need to shift from industrial piece flow to human-centered peace flow The impact of AI exuberance and how digital distraction dilutes signal-to-value delivery How to identify moments of true deep work and contentment in your daily routine Practical ways to insert a pause between incoming notifications and your reaction Connect & Resources Website: https://www.processdebt.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/process-debt/
S1 · E98
August 17 · 45 min
The Hidden Cost of Unsanctioned AI: How to Avoid "AI-Assisted Process Debt"
Are you building a smarter workflow, or just generating AI-assisted process debt? In Episode 98 of the Process Debt Podcast, hosts Toby and Terrill sit down with HubSpot expert Chris Carolan, co-author of Surviving the SaaSpocalypse and creator of the AI Native Shift Framework. As organizations rush to integrate artificial intelligence, many fall into the dangerous trap of unsanctioned AI use, multiplying waste in knowledge work rather than eliminating it. Chris shares his framework for moving away from rigid, industrial-age operating models and building AI-native systems that prioritize actual human connection and smooth value flow. In this episode, we cover: Stop Getting in the Way of Value Flow: Why your internal processes shouldn't act as a dam blocking buyers from your subject-matter experts. Retiring the Word "Lead": Why it’s time to ditch industrial acronyms like MQLs and SQLs for human-centric language (Audience, Researcher, Hand-Raiser, Buyer). The Unified Customer View: How to break down internal data silos to respond to buyer signals in the moment. The AI Orchestrator Model: Why aiming for 100% AI autonomy is a disaster, and how humans can use AI to automate 95% of the heavy lifting while focusing on relationships. Finding your "One Peace Flow": Chris’s strategy for peacefully pulling work through the system in a chaotic digital world. To learn more about identifying and eliminating waste in knowledge work, visit processdebt.com! Find Chris Carolan on LinkedIn or visit valuefirstteam.com.
S1 · E97
August 10 · 20 min
Bad Process Kills Good People
The factory floor was brutal, but it was legible: you assembled ten cars or you didn't, and you could see the waste piling up on the floor. Knowledge work took the clear verdict away and replaced it with constant ambiguity—no reel pops up at 4 p.m. to tell you that you hit "good enough." In this episode, Chris and Toby dig into how the systems we work in aren't neutral. They carry judgment. Email is a machine for transferring stress and rendering a verdict on your day; throughput reporting measures motion, not progress; and a process that judges you is exactly the one you can't fix, because judgment is where creativity goes to die. They talk about why bad process kills good people, why layoffs have become the reflexive lever even at healthy companies, and the surprisingly small move out: separating the observation ("I have 500 emails") from the verdict ("I got 500 unread emails"). Plus practical ways to lower the load—adding friction without dropping balls, getting up to walk and why the goal is to own the work without grading yourself on every log. Chop wood, carry water.
S1 · E96
August 3 · 22 min
You Didn't Lose Your Attention Span. The Friction Moved
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and someone figured that out back in 1971, before the internet existed to prove it. This week, Chris and Toby dig into why you end so many days exhausted but unable to say what you actually got done. The culprit isn't your willpower or your phone. It's that reaching another person used to be expensive — you walked to their desk, you got a busy signal, you waited on a report. That friction quietly rationed interruptions. Now connecting is free, and all of it lands on you: forty apps, endless pings, a quarter of the workday lost to context-switching. We get into why the productivity hacks never stick (nobody's out of shape from a lack of diet information), what Toyota's factory floor solved sixty years ago that knowledge work still hasn't, and the one move worth trying tomorrow: stop reacting to every distraction the instant it fires, and be intentionally distracted instead. No frameworks to memorize. Just a clearer way to see why your attention keeps disappearing and how to take some of it back. ✍️ Blog - https://www.processdebt.com/blog
S1 · E95
July 27 · 37 min
The Task Got Done. Nothing Happened.
Corey Blumenfeld built an outsourcing company by accident—and learned the hard way that finishing the task isn't the same as doing the job. In this episode, Chris and Toby talk with Corey, founder of Blumoso, about why teams stay busy on work that stopped mattering, how a casual comment from the boss turns into a phantom marching order, and why "is this actually urgent?" might be the most useful question in your company. Along the way: leading from the front instead of the back seat, where to run tight and where to leave slack, and the uncomfortable truth that when a process breaks, you probably built the part that let it happen. No frameworks, no buzzwords—just a plain look at how process debt piles up while everyone's busy checking boxes. ✍️ Blog Connect with Cory Bluemoso.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/coryblumenfeld/ https://takingmytimeback.substack.com/
S1 · E94
July 20 · 21 min
Your Simplest Processes Are Fine. It's the Invisible Ones That'll Sink You
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 · E93
July 10 · 23 min
The World Cup Won't Care How Much You Want the U.S. to Win
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 · E92
July 3 · 22 min
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 · E91
June 26 · 24 min
The Proximity Problem: Why the People Closest to the Fix Are the Last Ones Who Can Sell It
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 · E90
June 19 · 22 min
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 · E89
June 12 · 23 min
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 · E88
June 5 · 37 min
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 · E87
May 29 · 22 min
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 · E86
May 22 · 21 min
Coaching Trees, Corruption Trees, and the People Debt You Can't See on a Dashboard
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 · E85
May 15 · 24 min
AI in Your SaaS Tools: What's Actually Working (And What's Just Clippy in a Suit)
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 · E84
May 8 · 20 min
AI Didn't Get Rolled Out. It Seeped In (And That's the Problem)
AI showed up in your tools without a kickoff meeting, a training plan, or anyone's approval. And now it's quietly changing how your team works whether you've sanctioned it or not. In this episode, we dig into what makes this adoption moment different from every SaaS rollout you've survived before. We look at a dead-simple three-gate framework from change management researchers at Prosci — should this task be done by a human, by a human with AI, or by AI alone — and why that question is harder to answer than it sounds. We also get into the economics nobody in consulting wants to discuss out loud: when AI compresses a 10-hour job into one hour, where does that value actually go? And what happens to the organizations quietly accumulating AI-assisted process debt while nobody's watching? No hype. No predictions about AGI. Just an honest conversation about what it looks like when a technology seeps into your organization before you've decided what to do with it.

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