Last updated on July 17th, 2021 at 06:54 am
During policy debates, some advocates take positions that offer short-term advantages in exchange for long-term disadvantages. The long-term disadvantages are often in the form of new technical debt. Or they might advocate allowing legacy technical debt to remain in place. Some of these decisions can be strategic, and they can benefit the enterprise. But when the primary beneficiary of the strategy is the decision maker or the advocate, a dominant contributing factor can be organizational psychopathy. This risk is higher when he or she intends knowingly to move on to a new position or to employment elsewhere before the true cost of the technical debt becomes evident.
Such decisions can be counterproductive for the enterprise in the long term. But decision makers or advocates nevertheless favor these decisions, because they plan to take credit for the short-term benefits. They then move on to new career positions elsewhere to escape the technical debt problems they created. In effect, the decision maker or advocate plans to “surf the debt tsunami.”
The organizational psychopath
People who adopt strategies of this kind might be following the pattern of organizational psychopathy [Babiak 2007] [Morse 2004]. Organizational psychopaths compulsively seek power and control over others. They use a vast array of tactics, but the tactic of greatest relevance to this discussion is the use of enterprise resources to advance the psychopath’s career. Technical debt provides a mechanism for borrowing future resources to enhance present performance, thus advancing the career of the psychopath. It’s especially attractive to the psychopath because the harmful consequences of technical debt can remain hidden until the psychopath has long ago moved on.
Psychopaths are better equipped than most to execute such strategies. They can be exceedingly charming, intelligent, charismatic, and adept at deception. They’re willing to conceal the truth about the technical debt they create, misrepresenting its costs and consequences, or concealing it altogether. Most important, organizational psychopaths seem to lack the internal regulators of conscience and compunction that limit the actions of non-psychopaths. For example, in a debate about a specific technical decision, the psychopath is willing to use any tools available to win the point, including using deception to destroy the career of anyone who challenges the psychopath’s position.
Last words
Babiak and Hare estimate that the incidence of psychopathy in senior positions in business is about 3-4%—between 1/30 and 1/25. However, I’m unaware of any studies of the strategic use of technical debt by these individuals. It’s reasonable to suppose that technical debt has been so employed, but the significance of this phenomenon is unknown. Serious investigation is in order.
References
[Babiak 2007] Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. ISBN:978-0-06-114789-0
An accessible and authoritative overview of organizational psychopathy. Order from Amazon
- Organizational psychopathy: career advancement by surfing the debt tsunami
- Malfeasance can be a source of technical debt
[Morse 2004] Gardiner Morse. “Executive psychopaths,” Harvard Business Review, 82:10, 20-22, 2004.
Available: here; Retrieved: April 25, 2018
- Organizational psychopathy: career advancement by surfing the debt tsunami
- Malfeasance can be a source of technical debt
Other posts in this thread
- Nontechnical precursors of nonstrategic technical debt
- Failure to communicate long-term business strategy
- Failure to communicate the technical debt concept
- Technological communication risk
- Team composition volatility
- The Dunning-Kruger effect can lead to technical debt
- Self-sustaining technical knowledge deficits during contract negotiations
- Performance management systems and technical debt
- Zero tolerance and work-to-rule create adversarial cultures
- Stovepiping can lead to technical debt
- Unrealistic definition of done
- Separating responsibility for maintenance and acquisition
- The fundamental attribution error
- Feature bias: unbalanced concern for capability vs. sustainability
- Unrealistic optimism: the planning fallacy and the n-person prisoner’s dilemma
- Confirmation bias and technical debt
- How outsourcing leads to increasing technical debt
- How budget depletion leads to technical debt
- Contract restrictions can lead to technical debt
- The Tragedy of the Commons is a distraction
- The Broken Windows theory of technical debt is broken
- Malfeasance can lead to new technical debt
