Few words have suffered a worse fate in contemporary management than friction. It is almost always treated as a defect that slows things down, creates inefficiency, gets in the way of execution and, not least, makes it hard for customers to complete online ordering processes.
Entire industries have emerged around the promise of removing it. We streamline workflows, align objectives, standardise procedures, and optimise decisions, not to mention design frictionless UX. The ideal organisation, at least in theory, resembles a well-lubricated machine whose parts move smoothly and predictably in relation to one another.
There are of course good reasons for this, as nobody enjoys battling a procurement system designed by pocket sadists, for instance, however, some forms of friction are simply waste or, worse, justification of useless jobs disguised as procedures.
Yet there is something of a curious paradox about organisations that become too good at eliminating resistance. The smoother everything becomes, the more difficult it often becomes to explain where genuinely new ideas are supposed to come from. They kind of need to be polished to a fine sheen before they are ever properly discussed, never mind attempted.
But then, a violin string produces music because it resists the bow. A pearl forms because an irritant remains lodged inside the shell. Importantly, we learn because reality stubbornly refuses to conform to our expectations. The same might just be true of organisations and, in particular, of how they choose to approach the thorny issue of innovating beyond their current products, services and practices.
Innovation occupies a peculiar place in organisational life. It appears in mission statements, annual reports and conference presentations, and leaders invoke it constantly. Entire departments are established to encourage it. Yet innovation itself rarely arrives in a smooth, orderly fashion. More often -usually, actually - it appears as an interruption, an irritation or, at least a complication. A question that refuses to stay politely within the finely smoothed boundaries assigned to it.
Thomas Kuhn observed something similar while studying scientific revolutions. The great shifts in science did not usually begin with consensus. “I say ladies and gentlemen, let’s have one of those great scientific upheavals, shall we?”
Awkward observations that stubbornly refuse to fit prevailing theories are, for the most part, explained away. A few, however, prove impossible to dismiss, and eventually accumulate - until the old framework can no longer contain them, or is effectively rendered irrelevant by a wave of The New. Bucky Fuller’s famous quote comes to mind: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
History of science is full of such moments - a measurement result that is kind of weird, an experiment that should have worked but did not as expected. Discovery often begins not with certainty but with irritation.
The same pattern appears elsewhere. A composer may hear a note that, seemingly, does not belong and, instead of dismissing it, becomes fascinated. Miles Davis, when setting out to record Kind of Blue, expected the musicians in the studio to work to a rough outline of the chord changes and a general creative direction. Everything else was - intentionally - left a struggle. “There are no wrong notes”, he was quoted as saying.
Or maybe, an artist enters a workplace and asks a question so simple that nobody can quite explain why it has not been asked before - while the stock answers often, if not usually, serve to confuse things further instead of clarifying.
These are moments of disturbance - something rubs against something else, a settled pattern encounters resistance, and attention is prick up its ears. And then something interesting and unexpected begins to stir.
Here, the notion of epistemic friction takes on its peculiar form. The phrase appears in several fields, but at heart it describes the encounter between different ways of knowing. Not disagreement for its own sake, nor conflict as a management technique, but the productive tension that arises when one perspective collides with another and neither emerges unchanged.
The philosopher Gila Sher argues that knowledge itself depends upon an interplay between freedom and friction. Freedom allows ideas to roam, combine and speculate. Friction prevents them from drifting into fantasy. One supplies movement; the other supplies contact with reality. Remove either and something essential disappears.
That image comes to mind as especially vivid when thinking about organisations. Many workplaces become extraordinarily effective at producing alignment. People learn the language, absorb the assumptions, internalise the priorities. Over time the organisation develops a shared understanding of how the world works.
That is often described as culture but it is also, occasionally, a trap. The danger is not that people become incapable of thinking but that they become capable of thinking only within the same conceptual landscape. Everyone is smart and experienced. Everyone is committed. And everyone is looking from roughly the same vantage point - hard won from all that experience.
Dorothy Leonard’s work on innovation introduced the memorable phrase “creative abrasion” to describe what happens when genuinely different perspectives are brought into contact. The metaphor is revealing. Abrasion is not comfortable as it involves rubbing, resistance and wear - yet without it there is no spark. Leonard found that some of the most inventive organisations were not those that eliminated disagreement but those that learned how to use it constructively. To innovate, we need to imagine, and imagination means not sticking to what we know. That is likely to ruffle some feathers but without that friction, you will be only play acting at inventing.
Researcher Berit Sandberg arrives at a remarkably similar point through her studies of artists working inside organisations. What artists frequently contribute is not expertise in a company’s products, markets or technologies. They contribute a different set of assumptions. They notice different things, ask different questions. They linger where others have already moved on quickly.
The key to this is, they often possess an unusually high tolerance for ambiguity. In practical terms, they introduce friction. Not the bureaucratic kind which we all, rightly, detest. The cognitive kind that causes a familiar problem to appear unfamiliar again.
Donald Schön would probably have recognised the phenomenon immediately. His work on reflective practice begins with the observation that professional expertise contains a vast amount of tacit knowledge. We know more than we can easily explain. Most of the time this serves us well. It allows action without endless deliberation. Yet expertise can become so fluent that it ceases to notice itself - we stop seeing the assumptions embedded within our own practice. The great musicians, painters and writers are forever looking for ways to get beyond those limitations of high-grade expertise.
Reality occasionally intervenes - a project fails unexpectedly, a customer behaves irrationally, a colleague interprets the same situation in a radically different way. What follows is often experienced as disruption, though it might equally be described as an invitation to think again as something that had become invisible over time becomes visible once more.
Perhaps this helps explain why so many organisations struggle simultaneously with innovation and conformity. They seek novelty while relentlessly rewarding predictability. They celebrate creativity while being really rather uneasy with the necessary friction from which creativity emerges. To be a little cheeky, we might say, they invest heavily in alignment and then wonder why everybody sees the same thing.
This probably comes in large part from a tendency to imagine that healthy cultures are harmonious cultures. Yet, if we think about it, the strongest communities have rarely been those in which disagreement disappears. They are frequently those in which disagreement can occur without threatening the relationship itself - people feel secure enough to challenge assumptions because they know they remain part of the group. Belonging, viewed this way, is not the absence of friction but the condition that allows friction to become productive.
A positive future seldom emerges from perfect alignment. More often it begins as a small irritation that somebody notices, and refuses to ignore.
Sources and further reading:
Donald Schön – The Reflective Practitioner
Michael Polanyi – The Tacit Dimension
Edgar Morin – On Complexity
Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger – Situated Learning
Ariane Berthoin Antal – Artistic Interventions in Organisations
Berit Sandberg – Art Thinking and artist-in-residence research
Jennifer Mueller – Managers Reject Ideas Customers Want
Pier Luigi Sacco – Culture 3.0
Dave Snowden – Cynefin Framework
Brian Eno – What Art Does
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