Friction has a bad name. The dictionary doesn't help - it defines it as conflict or animosity caused by a clash of wills, temperaments or opinions, which makes it sound like something to be eliminated. And in most organisations, that's exactly the instinct: smooth it out, keep things pleasant, avoid the awkward meeting.

I want to argue that this instinct is half right, and that the half it gets wrong is quietly expensive.

Two kinds of friction, and they are not the same thing

Bob Sutton's Friction Project makes a distinction that I think most organisations conflate. There's friction that drains, and friction that sharpens. Treating them as one thing is how businesses end up removing the wrong one.

Draining friction is the bureaucracy. The seven-step approval for a decision that could be made by one person. The process that exists because of an incident in 2018 that nobody remembers. Employees who don't feel listened to, and have stopped trying. This friction saps energy, kills creativity, and makes work harder than it needs to be for no return whatsoever.

And it makes people worse at their jobs, not just unhappier. As Rachel Julkowski put it, when people are exhausted and frenzied they actually get stupid. That's not a slight - it's an accurate description of what happens to judgement under sustained pressure. Worn-down people stop thinking clearly about what they're doing, and start just doing it.

Productive friction is disagreement. It's someone saying "I don't think that's right" in a room where it would be easier to say nothing. It's the tension of two good ideas competing. And it is the thing that stops you shipping a mistake.

Move slow and build things

There's a cost to the culture that measures value by hours logged. People under sustained pressure make poor decisions and don't reliably act in the interests of the project - they act in the interests of getting through the week.

An executive who believes more hours means more productivity is, I'd gently suggest, deluding themselves. What they're often buying is technical debt: work done fast, done without attention, and requiring twice the effort to fix later. The hours look great on the timesheet. The consequences arrive next quarter, attached to somebody else's budget.

Sometimes the right move is to slow down and give people solid ground to stand on. Not as a wellbeing gesture - as a delivery decision.

Remove the friction that drains people. Protect the friction that sharpens the work. Most organisations do precisely the opposite.

Why people don't speak up

Here's the mechanism that does the real damage, and it's subtle.

Someone asks: how long will this take? The person who knows the honest answer also knows that the honest answer is unwelcome. So they give an estimate grounded in optimism rather than realism, because they'd rather not be the one who says the difficult thing. Everyone then plans against that number. The plan is wrong from the first day, and nobody in the room is surprised when it slips - they just couldn't say so at the time.

Professor Hayagreeva Rao has written about exactly this, and it's one of the most reliably destructive patterns in professional work. It isn't caused by dishonest people. It's caused by an environment where honesty carries a cost.

So make the conflict safe

Dominic Price at Atlassian actively promotes conflict in his teams. He wants to see emotion, disagreement, tension on a semi-regular basis - because if it's entirely absent, you start to wonder whether the team is really collaborating at all, or just taking turns to agree.

That instinct is one we share at Distinction. "Be reasonably unreasonable" is one of our values, and it means what it says: we can only make good work if we're prepared to challenge it, and each other. Sometimes that's uncomfortable. It is considerably less uncomfortable than shipping something everyone privately doubted.

The word doing the work in all of this is safe. Conflict without psychological safety isn't productive friction - it's just politics, and the person who wins is the one with the most seniority rather than the best argument. The job of leadership here is to make it genuinely costless to disagree, and to visibly reward the person who does.

The question

When did someone last tell you, to your face, that you were wrong about something significant? If you have to think hard about it, that's not evidence that you're right more often than most.

It's evidence that your organisation has removed the wrong kind of friction.

If that lands, it's worth talking through. Book a short discovery call with the team at Distinction - no pitch, just an honest conversation.