Most organisations don’t slow down because people stopped caring. They slow down because the  design of work  structures, decision rights, interfaces, and rituals falls out of sync with how value is created. That gap is  design debt : the compounding cost of yesterday’s org choices on today’s execution. The term borrows from  technical debt  (Ward Cunningham’s metaphor for the “interest” you pay when you defer refactoring), a framing the software community has used for decade