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The Friction Paradox
Friction is rarely difficult to recognise.
Through delayed decisions, repeated discussions, duplicated effort, uncertainty, hesitation and unnecessary complexity, organisations experience friction every day. The instinctive response is often to reduce or eliminate it. This is understandable, but consequential.
Complexity and Clarity are necessary organisational conditions. Complexity provides capability, governance, knowledge, experience, legacy and structure. Clarity provides understanding, navigation, coherence, momentum and direction.
Neither is sufficient on its own. Organisations require both to exist in equilibrium.
However, some friction is inevitable. Challenges, governance, decision making, growth and re-positioning all create resistance of some form.
It is when Complexity and Clarity fall out of equilibrium that additional friction becomes more prevalent.
In this case organisations typically respond by removing process, structure, oversight or legacy, or by adding resources, controls and new ways of working, in an effort to move more freely.
Yet these actions can further disrupt the equilibrium between complexity and clarity, creating the conditions for additional friction rather than reducing it.
Understanding this relationship allows organisations to retain the capability they need whilst maintaining the understanding required to use it. Effort becomes more focused, decisions more certain.
Friction is not eliminated.
It becomes manageable.
It becomes proportionate.
The paradox is that friction is often regarded as the problem, when it may simply be the consequence of an imbalance between Complexity and Clarity.
Friction was never the problem.
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