FrictionThe Silent Killer

Preface

I sometimes say that it was easier before.

Not necessarily better. Just easier to understand.

Not that long ago, we built many systems much like we built machines. We designed them, implemented them, put them into production and, if everything went according to plan, declared them done.

Done. We said it out loud, in meetings, without irony.

The slightly uncomfortable truth was that many of them started degrading from day one. The business changed. Technology changed. Expectations changed. People found new ways of working. What had been a good solution slowly became yesterday’s solution, held together through maintenance, projects and the occasional heroic effort.

We have become much better at accepting that technology needs to evolve continuously. The more I worked with change, though, the less useful I found it to separate the technology from the organization around it.

A system is part of how an organization works. So are the people using it, the knowledge behind it, the decisions it supports, the teams changing it and the outcomes it exists to create.

Change one without being able to change the others and surprisingly little may happen.

Being able to build something faster, it turns out, is not the same as being able to turn it into value faster. Sometimes it simply reveals where the difficulty was all along.

Organizations are not finished any more than their systems are. Customers change. Knowledge ages. Regulation moves. People learn. What the organization needs to do, and how it can best do it, keep evolving together.

So when I talk about an organization’s ability to change, I mean the whole thing. The business and the technology. The people and the systems. How work is organized, how decisions are made, where knowledge lives and who owns what.

The interesting question, then, is not how we make technology easier to change, or how we make organizations more agile.

It is how we create the conditions for all of it to move together.

That question has followed me for a long time.

I did not sit down one day and decide to develop a theory about organizations. It accumulated slowly: projects that went surprisingly well, projects that became unnecessarily difficult, arguments around whiteboards, books, mistakes, and a good deal of thinking afterwards about why. Some of it went into a blog along the way, which is still there with its dates on.

Over time I kept seeing the same patterns.

Teams achieved very different outcomes depending on what knowledge came together within them. A decision that took an afternoon in one organization took three months in another. Organizations full of capable people and good technology still found surprisingly simple changes surprisingly hard.

At first I treated all of that as context. Every organization has its own history, people and constraints, and there is no universal model for how they fit together.

I still believe that.

But after enough years and enough organizations, some things became harder to dismiss as coincidence. Different industries used different words and structures, and underneath them I kept finding the same conditions — ones that either helped change move, or quietly created friction around it.

Different disciplines describe parts of it. Architecture some, leadership another; systems thinking, psychology and organizational design have all given me ways of understanding things I first met in practice.

I often found myself wondering whether we were all looking at different parts of the same thing.

Eventually, I started calling what I was seeing Organizational Flow.

The name matters less than the observation behind it. Some organizations are simply better than others at bringing people, knowledge, decisions and technology together to create value — and at carrying on doing it as the world around them changes.

This paper is my attempt to collect what I picked up along the way and make some sense of it.

It is not a finished model, and certainly not a recipe for designing the perfect organization. I am not convinced such a thing exists. It is a working theory and, more importantly, a lens: a way of looking at an organization and noticing what makes change easier, what makes it harder, and where friction quietly accumulates.

I expect parts of it to change, and I hope they do. Every conversation and every reader who points out something I have overlooked helps sharpen it.

That is also why I wrote it.

I hope some of it is directly useful — an idea you can take into a meeting on Monday and actually do something with.

But I would be equally happy if it simply makes you notice something you had stopped noticing.

A handover that suddenly looks unnecessary. A decision travelling strangely far from the people who understand it. A team waiting for another team because of a division nobody quite remembers creating. Or, just as importantly, a place where people, technology and purpose come together remarkably well — and you find yourself wondering why.

And perhaps that is reason enough for writing it.

As for The Silent Killer: yes, the title is slightly dramatic. I know. But friction rarely arrives with an alarm. More often, things simply take a little longer, require a few more meetings and become slightly harder to change — until one day that has become normal.

This paper is my attempt to understand why.