We all accrue intellectual debt: notebook records instead of detailed logs, updated spreadsheets rather than new databases, four different systems instead of a single streamlined one. We justify these little shortcuts in the name of time and money, hoping they won’t snowball into bigger problems.

But they often do, affecting our employees and customers who then must find workarounds for our cheap solutions and must pay the hefty interests on our ballooning debts.

The Origin And Evolution Of Intellectual Debt: Technical Debt

To understand how to avoid intellectual debt, we must first look to its older sibling, technical debt, a software development term coined in the early 1990s by Ward Cunningham, the founder of Wikis: “A little debt speeds development, so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite.”

The analogy has had legs because, ultimately, it’s applicable to all walks of business. As Ben Horowitz wrote in his 2014 book The Hard Thing About Hard Things: “Like technical debt, management debt is incurred when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive, long-term consequence. Like technical debt, the trade-off sometimes makes sense, but often does not.”

As a fundamental part of software development, technical debt must be precisely monitored. Burning holes in an operating system to show proof of value can save time and money by quickly getting a product into customer hands, where bugs can be discovered and functionality can be refined.

But the speed is the price. As Cunningham first wrote, the irony of technical debt is that the product that initially made the debt tolerable eventually makes paying the debt with a prompt rewriting intolerable.

How Data Management Creates Intellectual Debt