Friction: Where Good Intentions Stall

Friction - Mental Model Dojo - Coach Takeshi

Friction is anything between an intention and an action that makes the action cost more in steps, time, attention, or effort. When a team member fails to follow through on a task, it may not be due to a lack of motivation, discipline, or commitment. It may simply be friction.

Removing friction has long been a core practice in process management; in Lean they’re called muda and muri and in Agile, impediments. The significance here is that friction is not just physical, functional, or mechanical, but behavioral as well. Processes, steps and requirements that are cognitively and mentally taxing, are good targets for friction removal or reduction. Addressed well, they are low-hanging fruit opportunities to improve team productivity and organizational performance.

Meanwhile, no friction is a problem too. Effort is what makes people pause, question, and think. Making everything effortless can also work against learning, creativity, and sound judgement. Good friction matters as much as removing bad friction; managing friction is an exercise in deliberate design and leadership finesse.

Friction is everywhere

Like defaults, friction fades into the background of everyday busyness and goes unnoticed until we pay attention to it.

We get used to the multiple data entries, the copy this from email and paste into the spreadsheet tool-hopping routines, searching for documents in cluttered folders, meeting overloads, approval bottlenecks, ambiguous roles and fuzzy ownership, constant context-switching, and an always-on culture.

The cost, however, accumulates. A few wasted minutes become hours across a team. Repeated ambiguous communication drains attention. The rules and requirements set by someone else may have made sense back then, but they now just make the work feel heavier than it should. Friction keeps growing, because adding a step is a small decision, while removing one feels like risk.

This is why friction needs to be audited from time to time, and that is a leadership responsibility. Friction does not announce itself, and unless leaders call it out and encourage others to do the same, it stays exactly where it is.

How friction impacts behavior

Behavioral science reminds us that people do not act on motivation and intention alone. Even a small amount of friction can stop people from acting, because the effort is immediate while the benefit comes later. This is especially true when people are already busy, tired, stressed, or uncertain. Even modest extra effort can sharply reduce participation. One additional form, click, login, or approval may seem trivial to the person designing a process, but it can be enough to interrupt someone trying to use it.

Uncertainty creates friction too. When people do not know what to do next, who owns a decision, or whether their action will be supported, delay becomes a reasonable response. Slow feedback and invisible progress make follow-through harder still.

Friction also changes how people work, not just whether they follow through. It pushes them towards shortcuts, workarounds, avoidance, and familiar options, while draining attention that could be used for judgement, learning, and creativity. Many modern leadership concerns about weak ownership, accountability, and initiative may therefore have more to do with friction than leaders realize.

In other words, addressing friction is not only process improvement. It is a leadership leverage point for building a more autonomous, accountable, and self-organizing workforce.

Bad friction, good friction

We often talk about friction as though it is something to eliminate. That is only half the story.

Bad friction

Bad friction survives because it was introduced for a good reason. Something went wrong once, a control was added, and the control stayed. It becomes a problem once the controls accumulate. Each additional step once had an owner who could defend it, and that single step may still look reasonable on its own. However, the sum of steps has no owner at all, which is why processes get heavier without anyone checking.

Bad friction makes useful action harder without improving the outcome. It appears in processes, systems, communication, role clarity and decision rights, workload and boundaries, interpersonal dynamics and culture. It can also be unevenly distributed. A process that feels simple to one person may create hours of hidden effort for others. What looks efficient from the top often places an administrative, cognitive, or emotional burden on someone further down the chain.

Good friction

Good friction serves a clear purpose. It may protect safety, improve quality, surface assumptions, or prevent a consequential decision from being made too casually. You can see it deliberately designed into a cooling-off period before a major purchasing decision, a second reviewer on anything touching client money, or a deliberate pause before responding to a complaint. Someone placed each of those there for a stated reason and could say out loud what the effort was buying.

Good friction introduces constraints that can strengthen learning and creativity. A challenging question, a clear escalation threshold, or a requirement to explain the reasoning behind a decision can produce better thinking than unrestricted ease.

Without good friction, decisions can become fast but thin. Assumptions go untested, thresholds remain vague, and people act before the consequences or dependencies are fully visible. Over time, an organization may become efficient at moving, but less capable of noticing when it is moving in the wrong direction.

Managing friction through emotional intelligence and facilitative leadership

Managing friction sits at the intersection of facilitative leadership and emotionally intelligent leadership.

Facilitative leadership asks: what in the environment is helping or hindering people from doing good work? It focuses on structures, processes, decision rights, information flow, and the conditions for participation. Managing friction means redesigning those conditions so people can act with greater clarity, autonomy, and effectiveness.

Emotionally intelligent leadership asks: how are people experiencing those conditions? It notices the cognitive load, frustration, anxiety, hesitation, or overconfidence that friction creates. It also recognizes that some effort is useful because it supports reflection, learning, accountability, and better judgement.

Together, they make friction a leadership design question, not merely a process problem. The leader’s role is to notice where the system is making good work unnecessarily hard, understand how that burden is affecting people, and decide where to remove friction, where to redistribute it, and where to preserve or add it deliberately.

Audit, remove, and add friction deliberately

Audit: Trace a real piece of work from intention to action. Notice where people wait, search, repeat information, switch tools, seek permission, or hesitate because ownership is unclear. Ask the people doing the work what feels unnecessarily heavy, and pay attention to where the burden lands.

Remove: Simplify or eliminate steps that add effort without improving quality, safety, judgement, or accountability. Clarify roles and decision rights, reduce handoffs, make information easier to find, and remove controls that have outlived their purpose.

Add: Introduce friction where speed or ease could weaken judgement. Use decision memos, pre-mortems, second reviewers, escalation thresholds, constructive challenge, or deliberate pauses before consequential or emotionally charged action. Every added step should have a purpose that can be explained clearly.

Make effort serve a purpose

Friction is often a low-hanging-fruit opportunity for leaders to make a meaningful difference. Once you direct your attention to it, you begin to see where it has accumulated. The key is not simply to remove effort, but to distinguish between effort that serves a purpose and effort that has become an unnecessary burden.

People genuinely appreciate leaders who remove burdens that everyone else has simply learned to live with, while preserving the effort that supports judgement, learning, quality, and safety.

Frame Decisions and Design Choices - Mental Model Dojo - Coach Takeshi

Behavioral Science for Emotional Intelligence, Part 2 of 4

In 2026, I am running a four-part “Behavioral Science for Emotional Intelligence” series through our free Mental Model Dōjō.

This article was prepared as a pre-read for the second session in the series, “Frame Decisions and Design Choices,” held on July 28, 2026.

The session features four behavioral science concepts: Prospect Theory, Defaults, Friction and If-Then Plans. Pre-reads for the other three concepts are available through the session information and sign-up link below.

Session Info & Sign-Up