What If Your Biggest Technical Debt Is Social?

We talk a lot about technical debt — postponed refactorings, shortcuts we promise to clean up later. But what if some of our hardest problems aren’t caused by code at all? What if our biggest technical debt is social?

Every line of code carries traces of the conversations, misunderstandings, constraints, and compromises that shaped it. Unspoken tensions, misaligned expectations, and collaboration rituals that look healthy on the surface can reinforce power imbalances and leave people unseen or unheard. Social debt shows up as misaligned language, slow decisions, repeated misunderstandings, brittle commitments, and fragile trust. Like technical debt, it accrues interest — but unlike code, there is no git revert, and no ADR that can magically fix it.

This session explores sociotechnical architecture beyond Inverse Conway. When design ideals like decoupling and autonomy collide with human interdependence, what actually breaks first — the architecture, or the relationships that sustain it? Can we really treat “social” and “technical” concerns as two separate bounded contexts, or is that separation itself part of the problem?

As we accelerate software delivery and delegate more work to AI, this session asks an uncomfortable question: how can we scale productivity without scaling debt?