Friction

Friction is the hidden tax on every action, interaction, and flow. It eats away at momentum, invisibly inflating the time and cost of getting even simple things done, and often long before anyone really notices.

Most of the time, friction doesn’t announce itself. But it shows up loudly in the form of disruption, delays, or duplicate work, while quietly accumulating residue that slows down business processes, workflows, and transactions. People end up fighting against the system more than working with it.

When left unchecked, friction compounds. What may start as small annoyances or inconveniences eventually wear down system interactions, until everyone feels the impact of diminished capabilities and constrained flows. The potential of the entire organization gets weighed down when the system itself becomes the obstacle, and makes everything harder than it should be.

What Does Friction Look Like?

Friction often hides in plain sight until you feel its drag. It seeps into cracks in systems and processes, showing up as wasted effort, avoidable frustration, and unnecessary barriers that people are forced to push through just to move work forward. Eventually friction starts to feel like a structural tax, created by choices, incentives, and neglect.

Repetitive and overlapping approvals, redundant process gates, and extra clicks that add time without adding value.
Customers stuck in confusing journeys, filling out forms with an absurd number of required fields just to complete a simple task.
Processes that bounce people from one team to another, forcing them to repeat the same story over and over until someone finally helps.
Bottlenecks created by rigid processes that cannot adapt, leaving people downstream waiting on dependencies to be resolved before they can move forward.
Quick fixes and bloated features that create clutter instead of clearing the path to what people actually need.

Why Does Friction Matter?

Friction kills momentum and compounds over time. It doesn’t just slow things down, it drains energy, undermines trust, and shifts focus and attention away from what matters to firefighting and workarounds. Over time, if nobody owns the cleanup, friction quietly eats away at performance and morale, becoming part of the system’s DNA and stifling resilience.

Every unnecessary or unnecessarily difficult step in a process multiplies work and cognitive load, exhausting people before they can even get to the real work.
Decision-making grinds to a crawl as people wrestle with inconsistent, incomplete, or conflicting information.
Constant friction forces teams to retreat into isolated silos, fragmenting knowledge and choking off meaningful collaboration.
Innovation has to move to the back of the line when the organization wastes energy patching holes and putting out fires instead of pursuing new possibilities.
Systems and processes grow increasingly fragile as friction builds, with even small disruptions triggering disproportionate ripple effects.

Where Does Friction Come From?

Friction doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. It accumulates from the residue of constant tradeoffs, misaligned incentives, and neglected system hygiene — byproducts of complexity that goes unmanaged and incentives that go unchecked.

Unmanaged complexity piles on layers of systems, rules, and handoffs faster than anyone can prune them back.
Misaligned incentives push teams to optimize for local wins, even if it slows everyone else down or drifts away from strategy.
Ownership gaps emerge when no one is equipped or empowered to maintain the connections and handoffs that keep systems running smoothly.
Workarounds, patches, and short-term fixes solve today’s problems, but create long-term systemic debt that gradually bottlenecks processes and flows.
Cultural inertia sets in once friction becomes normalized, until the drag simply feels like “how things work.”

What Happens If Friction Is Not Addressed?

Friction rarely fixes itself. When left unaddressed, friction grows until it becomes embedded in the way work gets done, ultimately resulting in time and resource costs that eat away at value. First appearing in the form of small inefficiencies, unchecked friction eventually grows into systemic drag that is extremely hard to untangle.

Everyday frustrations lead to disengagement, burning people out — and eventually driving them away.
Collaboration stops as teams give up on working across silos and focus instead on protecting their own interests.
Decision-making grows less connected to reality, distorting priorities and the implications of tradeoffs, eventually ceding to political and social influence.
The organization becomes too weighed down by inefficiencies and fire drills to find the agility to pursue strategic opportunities with speed and confidence.
Customers eventually feel the pain in the form of slow response times, confusing experiences, and broken commitments.

What Does It Look Like on the Other Side of Friction?

Remove friction, and the work actually flows. Energy gets directed back into moving the needle instead of pushing against barriers. When systems align with the flows they support, everything gets lighter, faster, and easier to work with. People feel the difference immediately.

Teams collaborate across boundaries, supported by the system instead of fighting against it.
Decision-making accelerates when the right information is available at the right time.
Processes adapt to change without being dragged down by the residue of past decisions and incentives.
Capacity that was once burned on break-fix and other non-value adding work can be shifted back to building new things.
Customers experience faster turnaround times, smoother interactions, and commitments that are followed through on - every time.

Where Can We Go From Here?

Find where friction hides, root it out, and keep flows running freely so the organization can focus on what matters most without having to fight the system.