Process Debt

Process Ailments - Try vs. Buy


Listen Later

Welcome to Process Ailments – Try vs. Buy, where we explore the aches and pains of business processes through the lens of personal wear and tear. This week, Toby's battle with "old man knee" becomes the perfect metaphor for what happens when organizations ignore their process health.

We kick things off with a laugh — is it a blood clot or just tight quads? — then dive into the deeper lesson: not every pain means disaster. Some are compound fractures (urgent breakdowns), but most are soft tissue injuries — nagging issues that worsen when ignored.

From there, we explore a core tension in modern organizations:

  • Buy: The flashy, top-down push for new systems like SAP — expensive, visible, and often effective, but loaded with hidden rehab work that rarely gets addressed.
  • Try: The gritty, everyday work of process rehab — subtle, high-value, and cheap, but often invisible and undervalued.

Why do we replace when we could repair? Why do we glorify the new while neglecting the maintenance? This episode is a call to rethink our instincts — in both our bodies and our businesses — and make space for the slower, less glamorous work that leads to long-term strength.

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

Process DebtBy Chris Terrell