Anyone who has ever run a project, program, team, or even a home can probably relate to the impulse to ruthlessly hunt down and eliminate any points of friction.
That need is certainly deeply baked into my personal operating system.
But not all friction is created equal.
To use what may well be my most frequently used example, nobody has ever migrated their CMS and thought, “Thank God my humanity was protected and I was able to copy and paste hundreds of pages of content from one CMS window to another.”
Or maybe: “I’m so happy I spent hours designing that new page. I’m really proud of it, and the fact that it sat on a Jira ticket waiting to finally get picked up by the MarTech team really enhanced my experience.”
Those are exactly the types of friction that need to be ruthlessly tracked down and banished into exile. Luckily, AI agents—led, in my admittedly biased view, by the good folks at Gradial—are increasingly good at eliminating exactly those kinds of friction, where the process impedes the progress.
But what about good friction?
Years ago, Vienna Sausage Company did what good companies are supposed to do: it modernized.
Its old Chicago factory was something of a mess. Sausages moved through a maze of hallways on their way to the smokehouse. So when the company moved into a clean, modern, state-of-the-art facility, it streamlined the process.
And the hot dogs got worse.
Same recipe. Same spices. Same basic process. But the dogs had lost their signature snap.
They spent a year and a half trying to figure out why.
Eventually, someone remembered Irving.
Irving’s job at the old factory had been to move the uncooked sausages to the smokehouse. The trip took about half an hour, winding through warm parts of the building. Nobody had considered that walk part of the recipe.
Not only was it part of the recipe, it was crucial.
The new factory had efficiently eliminated Irving’s half-hour trip—and with it, a step nobody realized mattered.
They eventually built a room specifically to recreate the warm conditions of the inefficient old walk.
Your Irving may look different.
It may be the meeting beforehand where two people or two teams debate the better approach, only to arrive at something better than either idea they brought into the room.
The intentional pause that helps ensure a decision is responsive, not reactive.
The multi-step interview process that gives people with different perspectives enough exposure to a candidate to make a better decision about the role.
Sometimes friction is waste.
Sometimes it is carrying something we have not yet learned to see.
Before eliminating it, it is worth asking what the friction is producing: clarity, accountability, trust, confidence, deliberation, or some other value that disappears when the step does.
Sometimes Irving is the recipe.
