Most engineering organisations track technical debt. Far fewer track the quieter cousin: planning debt. It appears when commitment language drifts, when dependency owners go unnamed, and when carry-over is treated as weather rather than a signal.
The early symptoms are cultural. Stand-ups start narrating work that was never sequenced. Roadmaps gain footnotes nobody reads. Stakeholders hear “on track” until the week before launch.
We recommend a monthly planning-debt review: list every item that slipped without a recorded trade-off, every ceremony that produced no decision, and every forecast that used hope as an input. The list itself is usually enough to reset language for the next cycle.
Treat planning debt like backlog hygiene. Small, regular reductions beat heroic re-plans after a missed release.