Part I — Discovering Organizational Flow · Chapter 1 · 7 min read · First Public Draft

Friction

Introduction

How much more could you do with what you already have?

Christoffer Råsten

Every organization is full of things that were once a good idea. The reporting line, the approval step, the weekly forum, the strategy deck nobody has opened since the offsite. Somebody sensible introduced each of them to solve something real, and all of it was meant, in the end, to help the place create more value.

What rarely gets asked is whether it still does. Things brought in for good reasons tend to outlast the reasons, and noticing that is nobody’s particular job.

Which leaves a question worth asking more often than it gets asked:

How much more could this organization create with exactly what it already has?

With the people and the knowledge already in the building today, rather than after the next hire or the next transformation.

In most places I have worked the honest answer is quite a lot more, and it is almost never a matter of effort or talent. Everyone is busy, the calendar is full, and yet the thing everybody agrees is important has not really moved since spring — and nobody can quite point to where it stopped.

So a good deal of what an organization is capable of never turns into anything. Structural friction is the name I ended up giving to the mechanism behind that, and the claim the rest of this paper rests on is short enough to say plainly:

Organizations don’t become slow because people work slowly. They become slow because structural friction accumulates faster than value is created.

The mechanisms themselves are rarely dramatic. Someone isn’t sure whose decision this is, so they check with somebody first. Checking becomes a standing meeting, and the meeting becomes how things are done here. Every step was reasonable, and nobody would defend the result.

One thing worth saying before any of the rest of it.

Friction that somebody chose is not what this paper is about.

Plenty of organizations carry a great deal of it entirely on purpose, and are right to. A bank that puts three pairs of eyes on a payment above a certain size has decided the delay is worth what it prevents. A hospital that will not let one person authorize a change to a dosing rule has made the same trade. Regulated industries are full of friction that somebody sat down, priced, and accepted — and it would be a poor kind of advice that told them to remove it because a paper about flow said so.

There is a third kind, which somebody pointed out to me and which I had been treating as part of the second. Some friction is correct right now because the thing that would remove it does not exist yet. The manual check that is there because nothing checks it automatically. The review that happens because the team could not yet be handed the judgement. That is not carelessness and it is not caution — it is a stage, and stopping the check before building the thing that replaces it would simply be reckless.

The trouble is that this is also the most comfortable explanation available for friction that has stopped being temporary, and it never expires on its own. We are not ready for that yet is true for a while and then quietly becomes the reason nobody looks. The version worth holding is narrower: which rung are we on, what would take us up one, and when did anybody last ask.

What I am interested in is the same arrangement arrived at by nobody. The approval that exists because of an incident in 2018 that nobody now remembers. The forum that was set up to solve something since solved. Structurally these look identical from the inside; the only difference is whether anyone can tell you what it is for and what it costs.

So the useful question is never is there friction here. There will be, and some of it is load-bearing. It is whether the friction you have is the friction you would choose, now, knowing what it takes out of you — and whether anybody has looked recently.

Organizations are also not interchangeable. What is obviously right in one is obviously wrong in another, which is why nothing in these pages is a recommendation about your particular situation. It is a way of looking at it, and you know things about your organization that I do not.

What I find more interesting is why it went unclear to begin with, because almost nobody chooses it. A reorganization moves a line and a capability ends up split between two teams who each own half of it. Someone leaves and takes the only reliable answer to a weekly question with them. None of it looks like a decision at the time, which is why it so rarely gets revisited.

Organizational Flow

The name I use for an organization’s ability to keep creating value is Organizational Flow.

It is a property every organization already has, sitting somewhere high or low, whether or not anyone has thought to look at it. The chapters ahead work out what it is made of: the conditions that raise it, the ones that quietly lower it, and what each of them looks like from the inside. The same mechanisms keep surfacing in chapters that appear to be about quite different things, which is the clearest sign that this is one system rather than a set of separate subjects.

Why it feels more pressing now

Two things have shifted.

Building software used to be the constraint — the thing everything else queued behind. It gets cheaper and quicker every year, and as that friction falls away what is left is the organizational kind: who decides, who owns the outcome, whether anybody finds out if it worked. The bottleneck is moving, and it is moving somewhere most organizations have spent far less time thinking about.

The other is the word transformation, which usually arrives attached to a programme with a start date, an end date and a completion report. Run that way it treats the organization as a machine to be rebuilt and handed back, and it manufactures friction while it does: a programme comes with its own boundaries, its own steering group, its own reporting line and a handover at the end — most of the shapes in the next chapter, assembled on purpose. Meanwhile the thing it was meant to change carries on being what it always was, something living that never quite finishes, and the friction returns the moment attention moves elsewhere. That makes this closer to tending than to transforming — less a project to be completed than part of how an organization stays alive.

None of this is an argument against projects. Some work really is temporary, and a project is a perfectly sensible way to organize it. A migration ends. A regulatory change has a deadline. Sometimes there really is a thing to finish, hand over and go home from. The problem starts when we use the same temporary structure for something the organization will need to keep doing long after the project has gone.

The other side of it

I have also seen the opposite, usually in organizations that looked no better resourced than anyone else. The same work moves more easily. Decisions get made, things get built, and what comes out the other end reaches someone who actually wanted it. Nobody seems to be in much of a hurry. There is simply less in the way.

None of them got there by hiring more people, spending more money or buying better technology. That is the part I found interesting enough to keep pulling at, and it is what the rest of this paper is for: learning to see where the friction sits, and then finding the ways past it.

You have almost certainly run into all of this already. You may simply not have had a name for it.