I guess that what I'm trying to say - and that got clearer to me while replying to other comments in this thread- is that it feels we're using the term "technic

I guess that what I'm trying to say - and that got clearer to me while replying to other comments in this thread- is that it feels we're using the term "technical debt" as a way to avoid talking about personal skills or lack thereof, and to avoid admitting our or other people's faults. If I say that we need one more week of work on something because of technical debt due to the exceptional circumstances is one thing; if I say that it is because one of my colleagues didn't do his or her job properly, it's different. Remember that the business might have no clue of how long or difficult some tasks are and judge them only by the amount of work required. So a series of bad design decisions and consequent technical debt can give the impression of a very hard task on which everybody is working skillfully, while in fact it's an easy task with somebody that doesn't know how to do his job. As for your other points: maybe one of my team members produces consistently more technical debt than the others. Is it still technical debt? Manager or designers can be the source of time pressure for those down in the chain, because bad planning or decisions, made in absence of time pressure, can force others to work under pressure. Again, "technical debt" masks the real problem. I might not have worked in extremely high pressure environments - but I've surely worked in teams where we were leaving the office at ten or eleven pm every night for months on end just because demented design decisions had been made by the much respected solution architect.