[!todo] Seed note. A starting point, not a finished note yet.
Flow debt is a term coined by Daniel Vacanti for what happens when a team hits its cycle-time targets on some items by starving others, letting them age on the board. The average cycle time stays comfortable because the fast finishers pull the mean down, while a growing tail of stale, aging work is invisible in that average. It matters because it is the specific way flow metrics lie: the dashboard reads green while the system is quietly getting sicker, and it is the assumption violation that most often invalidates Little’s Law in practice, since the law requires the average age of work in progress to be stable. The fix is to watch item age directly, through work-item-aging charts, rather than trusting the cycle-time average alone. Seeded from Little’s Law.