Overcoming cultural and technical debt

Just as the ghost of Jacob Marley was bound to drag the weight of his sins for all eternity, so too are organizations burdened by the weight of their debts — and we’re not just talking about the monetary kind. Companies take on other forms of debt, too, and these can be just as heavy as the greatest financial liabilities. Two of the most nefarious forms are technical and cultural debt, which accrue as a by-product of the decisions and investments companies make along their growth journeys.

In this week’s episode of Three Big Points, Stanford’s Bob Sutton takes us inside ride-sharing giant Uber, which offers an ideal case study. With its hard-charging “break things” culture and a desire to scale the business as quickly as possible, Uber’s leadership team made (and perhaps failed to make) any number of technical and organizational decisions that would ultimately threaten its continued growth and path to sustainability as a business. These choices led to the departure of cofounder and CEO Travis Kalanick and created a tangled mess of a technology platform and an equally disjointed organizational culture — both of which required robust and doubtlessly painful processes of disassembling and rebuilding, lest the company’s progress get stopped in its tracks.

While Uber represents an extreme example of how the choices leaders make to fuel their company’s growth can come back to haunt them, the lessons hold for all companies.

In this week’s episode, Bob Sutton drives home these three big points:

1.     Some organizational and technical debt not only is a good thing, it’s often required.

2.     You need to be aware that you’re accruing these debts and watch for the signs that it’s getting to the point where you need to address them.

3.     As a leader, you may need to create a situation, a burning platform, in order to mobilize people toward paying down the debts.