What Is Technical Debt?

If you’ve spent any time around software, you’ve probably heard the term ‘technical debt‘. It describes what happens when an expedient choice gets made early in setting up a system or a product, the quick way rather than the right way. The shortcut feels like a saving at the time. But the bill always comes due, and you end up spending far more later to fix what should have been done properly the first time.

The Second Debt: HR Debt

Right now, despite tools and resources being more available than they have ever been, I’m watching some Adventist organisations layer on technical debt with reckless abandon. And it is almost always well-intentioned.

The difficulty with HR debt is that it doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet. By the time it becomes visible, it’s usually already expensive. In my experience, there are a few early warning signs worth watching for:

  • Overtime is becoming normal. Late nights and weekend work are no longer exceptions but part of how the team keeps up.
  • Output is rising, but quality is slipping. More is being produced, but less of it is being reviewed, refined or done well.
  • Knowledge is concentrated in one person. If a single staff member leaving would leave a critical system or process stranded, that’s debt.
  • Good people are quietly leaving. Often the most capable staff are the first to burn out, because they’re the ones absorbing the gap.

Here’s how it happens: tools are improving all the time. AI is getting cheaper and more capable by the month. So the conclusion many leaders draw is that we should be able to do more with less, and budgets get adjusted accordingly. I understand how you arrive at that. But it produces two kinds of debt, not one.

The first is the technical debt we already know about. The second is something I’ve started calling HR debt, and it’s the one that worries me most, because no one is quantifying it.

The people in our technology and communications departments are being asked to achieve more with less, on the assumption that better tools make their work easier. But there is a missing piece to that equation.

The Hamster Wheel Effect

The tools do indeed increase the amount of output, but because the work is getting easier, everybody is increasing their output at the same time (albeit with dramatically variable levels of quality). This adjusts expectations and sets in place a vicious cycle. So our people end up on a hamster wheel, running faster and faster just to keep pace let alone get ahead.

We’ve quietly transferred the cost of the shortcut from the balance sheet onto the backs of the people doing the work, and that debt compounds the same way technical debt does. Eventually leading to unsustainable workloads, missed expectations, and the burnout of good people.

If you genuinely believe that technology is presenting a real opportunity to the work of the church and to your organisation in particular, then that conviction does not signal a time to pull back on spending. It signals exactly the opposite. It signals a time to invest intelligently.

What Investing Intelligently Could Look Like

Investing intelligently doesn’t mean spending more for the sake of it. It means making deliberate decisions so that new tools reduce your debt rather than add to it. A few principles I share with the leaders I work with:

  1. Measure before you cut. Find out where AI and new tools are genuinely saving time, and where they’re simply shifting the work somewhere else.
  2. Ask the people doing the work. Your team knows what the tools have actually changed. Their perspective is often missing from budget conversations.
  3. Reinvest the gains. When a tool does save time, put some of that back into training, better systems and paying down existing technical debt.
  4. Plan for maintenance, not just launch. Every new tool needs ongoing care. Budget for it from the start.

A significant part of the advisory work I do is advising organisations on the best place to invest in technology and tools based on this new wave of available technology. The pattern I continually see is that leaders make excellent decisions in their domain, but technology often sits outside it, so they’re deciding with an incomplete picture, and that gap is exactly where the debt accrues.

If you are a leader, I encourage you to think twice before adjusting your budgets and expectations, get some perspective from your team, or, if possible, engage someone to bring an external perspective. We are entering a window of opportunity like we saw in the dot-com boom, Web 2.0, and the rise of Bitcoin. It’s the time to invest, not the time to pull back.