Skip to main content

Topic

Organizational Friction

Friction is the systemic dissonance that turns a two-minute decision into a two-week process. It shows up as unnecessary handoffs, approval chains that add no value, and communication patterns that create more work than they resolve. Over time, process overhead can take a noticeable share of each person's week.

Unlike misalignment, friction is often invisible to leadership because the delays happen in the gaps between teams, not inside them. Individuals build workarounds — shadow tools, back-channel conversations, doing it themselves rather than filing a request. The symptoms look like slowness, but the cause is structural.

All articles

See how it fits your next engagement.

Tell us about your consulting work. We’ll walk through an example and discuss how your team could use Phaseplane, including access and pricing.