Bad Process Kills Good People

Bad process doesn’t just waste time — sometimes it creates outcomes no one intended, and no one can control.

This week on the Process Debt Podcast, Chris and Toby step away from partisan politics and look at something far more uncomfortable: the processes that quietly produce extreme outcomes.

Using everything from the Stanford Prison Experiment to learned helplessness, budgets, hiring incentives, uniforms, anonymity, and “protected status,” they unpack how systems — not individuals — shape behavior at scale.

This isn’t a political episode. It’s a process episode.

And it asks a simple but dangerous question: What happens when authority, incentives, and identity are misaligned — and no one owns the outcome?