GUEST COLUMN.

Organizational debt isn’t just a buzzword—it’s something I’ve lived.

Several years ago, I started a new job in a government agency and sat in on the training for a process I’d overseen in multiple other organizations. As the trainer went over each process, I found myself asking, “Why are we doing it this way?”

Each time, the answer was essentially the same: “Because once, years ago, someone made a mistake—and we added this step to make sure it never happens again.”

Each of those added steps may have made sense when they occurred. But over time, these extra steps accumulated into a rigid, overly complex system—one that slowed us down, frustrated staff, and diverted energy away from meaningful work.

That’s organizational debt. And in local government—probably any bureaucracy, really—we’re drowning in it.But what we don’t often do is consider its cost.

Every time we build a process around preventing a mistake from happening again, we create waste in the form of over-processing. When you consider how many staff are involved in the work, and the number of extra tasks added, these “safeguards” quietly consume massive amounts of time. What should have been a coaching conversation or additional training becomes a permanent policy requiring duplicative steps, documentation, and approvals.

Over time, when people are consistently told “This is just how we do it” or “We’ve always done it this way”, they internalize that message. Eventually, they stop asking questions.

They disengage from improving their work. They become reliant on a 15-step process to know what tasks need to be performed in which order and fail to appreciate the nuance that occurs.

They have difficulties adapting when the work doesn’t follow the expected flow and rely on a supervisor to direct their next step at each turn. This creates a culture where critical thinking and innovation go to die.

That bright new hire you were excited about? They stop thinking for themselves because they’re being taught to follow a script, not to solve problems. When you’re frustrated as a leader that you’re getting bogged down in questions your team should be able to answer, you need to look at your training and procedures.

Those complicated SOPs aren’t ensuring consistency – they are enshrining learned helplessness. It’s become something of an epidemic – the lack of critical thinking skills in the professional workforce limits the available staff to take on more complex leadership roles. We wonder why we don’t have enough people ready to step into leadership roles—but we’ve trained folks to follow, not lead.

High performers thrive on autonomy, mastery, and purpose. When they’re forced to spend their energy navigating convoluted processes or redoing tasks to comply with prescribed procedures, they feel undervalued and underutilized. It sends the message that compliance is more important than creativity, learning, or results. Over time, these employees either burn out, disengage, or leave. A former manager of mine used to say she learned to let her racehorses run. But if you’re carrying a lot of organizational debt, they aren’t even going to make it out of the starting gate.

I first read the “Simple Sabotage Manual” in the book Brave New Work, by Aaron Dignan. The manual, created by the US Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA), includes a section on ways that ordinary people could destabilize and undermine the businesses and governments operating in enemy states. The manual included instructions like, “Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.’ Never permit short-cuts to be taken to expedite decisions,” and “Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, paychecks, and so on. See that three people must approve everything where one would do.” (If you haven’t read it before, you should! You can access the declassified PDF on the CIA website, and start reading the list on page 28.) Dignan says, “Somehow, in less than a lifetime, modern work has become indistinguishable from sabotage.”

 We should be just as intentional about retiring outdated processes as we are about creating new ones. Otherwise, we’re not preventing failure—we’re institutionalizing it.

If we want to build resilient, adaptive organizations, we’ve got to stop outdated processes —and start trusting our people again. That means routinely asking:

• Does this process still serve us? Does it add value?

• Are we solving a problem that exists today—or reacting to a mistake from five years ago?

• What would we do if we trusted our people more than our procedures?

How can we set appropriate guardrails around what’s safe to try, instead of boxing people into rigid processes that stifle innovation? Organizational debt doesn’t show up on a balance sheet—but it’s paid for every day, in morale, missed opportunities, and talent lost to burnout or bureaucracy.

I’ve seen what happens when we let organizational debt pile up—and I’ve also seen what’s possible when we start clearing it out. It takes courage, a little mess, and a lot of trust. But if we want the government to work better—for the people doing the work and the communities we serve—it’s work worth doing.

The contents of this Guest Column are those of the author, and not necessarily Barrett and Greene, Inc. 

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