Technical debt, one of the key drivers of slow delivery, is rarely understood by non-technical business people. Even rarer are companies who have a strategy for investing in its reduction, which has been jointly agreed to by both business and technology groups. Debt is viewed as a problem for technology to address, not a systemic issue. Unfortunately, this leads to longer cycle times, higher costs, and lengthy time-to-market. The DevOps focus on continuous improvement is displaced by behavior that leads to continuous worsening. For companies to improve, the reduction of technical debt must be understood and addressed as a systemic issue.