Methodology Debt
An innovation team can have different kinds of shortages. For example, a high growth company might have a worker shortage or talent shortage. Software developers deal with a shortage called tech debt. Some employees might feel they experience a leadership void. This post follows a path of these shortages to a shortage that is not yet really discussed – a methodology debt.
Software is a great career. Over the past couple decades, more often than not, the business world has been starving for technology workers. I’m not an expert on the topics of talent shortage or worker shortage, but I believe that one result of this shortage is encouragement of young women to get interested in STEM / STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, math) careers. This shortage is a common topic.
Moving on to a less common topic, there is a kind of shortage in the software itself. This shortage occurs when a developer builds code that is short-sighted. They code something with convenience in mind in order to ship quickly that creates a disproportionate amount of work at a later time. This short-sightedness is called “tech debt.”
At a larger scale, if a team builds a new process or customer experience that is neglectful of documentation, this qualifies as “documentation debt.” Documentation debt …
increases tribal knowledge and reliance on time-consuming meetings
increases duration and effort for knowledge sharing and general collaboration
minimizes upfront cost of work and accepts high marginal cost of work
is not a common term, although the predicament is rampant.
Over time, documentation debt and tech debt slow work down.
Turning attention back toward workers, is the technology talent shortage specific to leaders or followers? I suspect the perceived problem is a shortage of junior employees, but the point I want to make is that a leadership void and a followership void are different things. You could even distinguish these from a management void. Leadership void is a more common term and a more common problem than the others.
Something that is an umbrella topic to documentation debt and the combination of voids of managers, leaders, and followers is the topic methodology debt. I believe the innovation world has methodology debt. It is straightforward to resolve, and it’s not difficult to see. Innovation methodologies have been in place two “plus” decades, and project failure rates are 50-70%. Waterfall and Agile leave us in a state of methodology debt. This needs to be a term and a topic of conversation. There is a lot of valuable innovation that sits idle. Once the world pays its methodology debt, it can turn attention to that idle work – not to methodology – to actual work. This idle work is a kind of innovation debt.
The world has shortages. Once we pay our methodology debt, we can pay our innovation debt. We need to innovate how we innovate.