The Friction Nobody Surfaces
Most operational problems don’t announce themselves. They accumulate.
The work is getting done. The team is capable. But there’s a persistent sense that everything is harder than it should be. Decisions take longer than they used to. The founder is still involved in things they shouldn’t need to touch, because it’s faster to handle it than to build the process to handle it without them.
This is how it almost always starts. By the time it announces itself clearly, the cost has been accumulating for a long time.
What friction looks like in practice
In a growth-stage organization, friction is usually not one large obvious problem. It’s several small ones that compound.
Someone needs a decision and waits three days for a response. A process requires sign-off from two people who have never agreed on who goes first. Information that should live in one place lives in three, and the person who knows which one is current is on PTO.
Individually, none of these feel serious. Collectively, they represent hours of lost time per week, per person, across the organization. They also represent something harder to quantify: the morale cost of working around your own systems. People who have to navigate constant friction to do their jobs are not energized by that work. They tolerate it until they don’t.
Where workarounds come from
Every workaround in an organization started as a solution to a friction point that was never fixed.
Someone couldn’t get information through the official channel, so they learned to ask a specific person directly. Now that person is the channel, and the official one is decorative.
Workarounds aren’t failures of discipline. They’re adaptations, usually developed by the most resourceful people in the organization, who are also the people closest to the friction. They understand the actual system better than anyone reading the org chart does.
The problem is that workarounds become load-bearing without anyone noticing. The original friction point gets forgotten, and new people inherit the adaptation without understanding why it exists. The organization ends up running on undocumented fixes that nobody is managing and no one person fully understands.
Why it stays invisible
Friction is hard to see partly because it’s distributed. No single person experiences all of it, so no single person has a clear picture of the whole. The founder sees some of it. Individual contributors see their piece. The pattern across the organization only becomes visible when someone looks at it from the outside, or when the volume of small problems finally exceeds what can be explained by other causes.
The other reason is that capable teams absorb a significant amount of friction without surfacing it. They’re proud of their ability to navigate complexity. That pride is real and worth respecting. It’s also masking a cost.
There’s one more reason worth naming. Sitting with a problem you can’t immediately solve is uncomfortable. The instinct is to find a single cause and act on it. But friction is rarely one cause, and the rush to name it as one thing is often what keeps the actual pattern from coming into focus.
What to look for
The questions worth asking aren’t about whether people are working hard. They’re about how the work actually moves.
What does it take to make a decision in this organization? Where do things reliably get stuck? What would a new person need in order to do their job without relying on whoever has been here the longest? When was the last time someone said “let me just handle it” about something that should have a process behind it?
Those questions tend to surface the friction quickly. Once it’s visible, most of it is fixable, and the fix is almost never a new tool. It’s usually a direct conversation about how work actually moves, followed by deliberate work to make that movement cleaner.
What stays invisible stays expensive.
Originally published on LinkedIn, May 13, 2026.