Interpretive Debt: How Organisations Accumulate Hidden Liabilities When Humans Defer Sensemaking to Automated Systems

A new theory article introduces 'interpretive debt,' a latent organisational liability that accumulates when employees defer sensemaking to automated decision-support systems, eroding the collective capacity to understand and correct those systems until a crisis forces repayment. The article, grounded in Weickian sensemaking theory, warns that each deferral is locally rational but compounds over time, leaving organisations unable to reconstruct decisions or train new members substantively.

Does deferring decision-making to automated systems degrade our ability to understand our own organisations? This Weickian sensemaking theory article argues ‘Perhaps’ – what they call interpretive debt. E.g. a loan officer dets a ‘decline’ flag from an AI tool but accepts the recommendation without reviewing the applicant’s bank statements, or a manager relies on a green dashboard without checking the operational data beneath it. In other words, accepting a system’s output risk scores, dash indicators, AI drafts etc without doing the mental work to figure out why. PS. Check out my YouTube and recent Critical Control / barrier vid: https://youtube.com/@safe as pod?si=iUaDPJynPemQRZhY Shout a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/benhutchinson Extracts: · “Interpretive debt is a latent organisational liability that accumulates when human members of an organisation systematically defer sensemaking work to automated decision-support systems” · “Interpretive debt remains invisible until a repayment event an audit, crisis, system failure, or generational turnover forces it due at once” · “Each deferral is locally rational and immediately efficient, yet erodes the collective interpretive capacity required to notice when systems are wrong” · “The decision was reached efficiently. The justification has evaporated” · “Automation simultaneously requires high skill for rare crucial interventions while destroying it because operators no longer practise ” · “Interpretive debt is not directly observable in routine operations. It manifests only when an external trigger… forces the organisation to perform interpretation it has not been performing” · “Interpretive debt names an accumulating organisational property whose effects compound over time” · “Each unexercised interpretive practice makes the next interpretive demand harder to meet, because the supporting tacit knowledge thins” · “Interpretive debt has a characteristic temporal signature: long periods of routine operation… punctuated by short, expensive periods in which the organisation is asked to do interpretive work it can no longer do” · “Opacity thus compounds the deferral mechanism: even an organisation that wishes to re-perform interpretation may find that the relevant inputs and reasoning are technically inaccessible” · “When organisations defer sensemaking work to automated systems … The cumulative effect is the slow depletion of the organisation’s collective capacity to make sense of itself: to know when the systems are wrong, to reconstruct why past decisions were taken, and to bring new members into substantive rather than merely procedural competence” · “This depletion remains invisible until a repayment event audit, crisis, system failure, or turnover forces the organisation to perform interpretation it has not been practising” weick sensemaking