Leadership Debt Compounds

Tech debt gets a backlog and a budget. Leadership debt gets a shrug, and it compounds faster.

Joe Reis has been writing about compounding debts beyond the technical kind, and it matches what I walk into at clients. The pipeline sprawl is downstream. Upstream sits a stack of unmade decisions: who owns the platform, what the data team is actually for, which of the two feuding definitions of “revenue” wins.

Leadership debt compounds through people. An undefined ownership question becomes a turf pattern. A tolerated ambiguity becomes 2 teams building the same thing. A postponed “what are we for” conversation becomes a hiring plan for the wrong roles. Each quarter of deferral adds interest, paid in coordination meetings.

The contrarian part: most “data architecture” engagements should start with a decision list, and often mine do. A page of open organizational questions, each with an owner and a date.

Paying it down is unglamorous: one deferred decision per week, made explicitly, written down, communicated. In most cases the decision itself matters less than it finally existing.

Disciplined teams pull ahead quietly this way. The gap, at the root, is a stack of decisions made on time.

What’s the oldest unmade decision your data team is still paying interest on?