Many are familiar with the concept of technical debt: the debt accumulated by ignoring short cuts and work arounds for buggy tech stuff. However, this process of debt also applies when executing changes in the organisation. If you don't recognize or simply ignore work arounds when applying organisational changes, debt will accrue over time. As an example, if your teams start to work in short iterations but your budget allocations remains set for once a year, you're bound to feel some debt growth in those departments.

"We need budget to adapt to new customer insights and scope, please."
"Sorry, the budget is already set for the year so that doesn't work for us, apply for this next financial year."

Together with Martin van Soest, we started to research this phenomenon and have compiled our early insights into this topic. Here's a short (<3mins) video explaining organisational debt a bit further. Martin also wrote this great post if you want even more insights into this topic.

In our humble opinion organisational debt is a sneaky organisation killer and needs to be addressed in order to eliminate the debt.

What do you think? Is this topic worth exploring further? What would be great topics for us to deep dive into next that would answer your questions? Let us know: send us an e-mail at: organisationaldebt@gmail.com.