By Jonathan H. Westover, PhD
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Abstract: This article discusses how leaders can manage organizational friction to maximize performance. While some friction is inevitable, excessive "bad friction" in the forms of disagreements and conflicts can damage efficiency and morale. However, controlled "good friction" through healthy debates and tension around priorities can stimulate new ideas and innovation. The key is distinguishing between the two and implementing strategies to leverage good friction while minimizing bad friction. The article then provides examples of how companies like Anthropic and Telefónica applied such strategies successfully.
All organizations experience some level of "friction," whether in the form of disagreements, conflicting viewpoints, power struggles, limited resources, organizational silos, or bureaucratic processes. On the one hand, excessive friction can breed inefficiency, diminish performance, and seriously damage morale. However, managed properly and channeled constructively, certain types of controlled friction within an organization can actually help simplify complex leadership challenges, stimulate new ideas, and ultimately boost overall performance. The key for leaders is to understand how to distinguish between "good friction" and "bad friction," and implement strategies to maximize the benefits of the former while minimizing the harms of the latter.
Today we will explore the concept of organizational friction, outline how different types of friction impact leadership and performance differently, and provide practical recommendations and industry examples for how leaders can leverage "good friction" to streamline processes and increase effectiveness.
Understanding Organizational Friction
Before addressing how to manage friction, leaders must first understand what is meant by the term "organizational friction" in the context of this paper. For the purposes of this discussion, organizational friction refers to any internal forces, barriers, or tensions within an organization that create disagreements, conflicts of interests, or that impede the smooth or efficient functioning of the organization. Some examples of common sources of organizational friction include:
Differing perspectives: When employees, departments or strategic business units have conflicting viewpoints, priorities, or ideas on key issues or directions for the organization.
Limited resources: Scarcity of funding, staffing, equipment or other assets that forces difficult choices and prioritization between competing needs.
Bureaucratic processes: Complex or rigid compliance procedures, approvals, reporting structures that slow down operations and decision making.
Silos and turf wars: Lack of collaboration between departments or teams that compete over budgets, headcount or credit rather than synergize efforts.
Power struggles: Internal politicking, lack of clarity over roles and decision rights, or battles for influence that undermine cooperation.
While some level of friction is inevitable in any organization with multiple stakeholders and imperfect information, excessive organizational friction usually does more harm than good by draining resources, demotivating employees, and impeding progress. However, managed properly, limited and constructive friction within key boundaries and parameters can actually help leaders tackle complex challenges. The next section outlines how different types of friction impact an organization differently.
Managing the Impact of Good vs. Bad Friction
Not all organizational friction is created equal - some types are more productive than others. A leader's job is to understand how different sources of friction influence operations and performance, and take targeted steps to reduce "bad friction" while cultivating "good friction" in a controlled manner. Some general categories of friction impact include:
Boosting Innovation through "Good Friction": Controlled exposure to alternative viewpoints and healthy debate can spark new ideas that would otherwise not surface. A certain amount of questioning of the status quo and challenging of assumptions fosters innovative thinking critical to long-term success. However, this type of friction works best within clear guardrails on decorum and with a shared understanding that the ultimate goal is improving the organization, not personal agendas or turf battles. Done right, it leads to better solutions and strategies.
Slowing Progress with "Bad Friction"
Excessive disagreements over priorities and resources or rigid adherence to previous ways of doing things despite market changes bog an organization down in endless discussion instead of action. Personal attacks, covert political maneuvers and siloed "us vs. them" mentalities erode trust and cooperation. This kind of unproductive friction strangles innovation as energy shifts to internal conflict rather than customers and outcomes. It signals the need for resetting culture, processes or roles.
Clarifying Responsibilities through Limited "Good Friction"
Moderate challenging of accountabilities and a little healthy competition between departments on metrics like customer satisfaction or project delivery times can focus efforts on goals. But it works best with clear performance expectations and when successes are jointly celebrated rather than individually claimed. This type of tension, kept within reasonable bounds, drives alignment on who is accountable for what.
Breeding Dysfunction with Too Much "Bad Friction"
Constant power struggles over credit, shifting of blame or lack of consequences for poor performance confuse responsibilities. Employees disengage while valuable talent leaves. Prolonged periods of organizational stress, uncertainty or gossip takes a toll on morale, health and productivity. Leaders must step in to resolve conflicts, promote cooperation and reinforce a culture of togetherness over division.
Strategies for Constructively Managing Friction
Armed with an understanding of good vs. bad friction, leaders can take meaningful actions to maximize the upside of the former and minimize the downsides of the latter through targeted interventions. Some suggestions include:
Establishing shared goals and purpose: Clarifying strategic priorities coalesces efforts and gives productive outlets for differing views. Celebrating joint wins over individual successes helps unite teams.
Fostering psychological safety: Leaders model openness to feedback and ensure respectful debate. Policies protect dissenters reporting issues from retaliation so diverse perspectives surface freely within agreed norms.
Balancing input with decisions: Leaders solicit diverse perspectives but avoid "analysis paralysis." They make tough choices to end necessary discussions and move initiatives forward.
Setting boundaries for debate: Establishing guardrails on topics, decorum and timeframes focuses disagreement on improving solutions rather than attacking others. Leaders facilitate discussion toward resolution.
Aligning incentives and accountability: Performance metrics recognize joint contributions toward shared goals versus just individual targets. Finger-pointing is discouraged while cooperation is rewarded.
Streamlining processes: Simplifying approvals, standardizing reports and consolidating functions addresses unnecessary bureaucracy that breeds "us vs. them" silos.
Facilitating connections: Leaders break down information barriers between departments through roundtables, rotation programs and joint planning sessions to spur collaboration.
Addressing power dynamics: Leaders model inclusive leadership, distribute decision rights fairly to balance input, provide mentorship and call out microaggressions that breed unfair friction.
Managing change proactively: Leaders socialize strategic shifts carefully, involve impacted teams in transition planning and acknowledge change resistance in healthy ways to build understanding.
By applying these friction management techniques within their organizations, leaders can derive benefits from useful "good friction" while minimizing the harms of destructive "bad friction" to boost performance. The following case studies provide real-world industry examples.
Case Study: Leveraging Friction at Anthropic
Anthropic, an AI safety startup, faced challenges managing differing opinions amongst their technical team of over 100 research scientists on safety approaches for advanced AI models like Constitutional AI. Founder Dario Amodei chose to cultivate debate by holding regular seminars where scientists could present perspectives on contested issues, but within clear rules of engagement focused on improving ideas rather than personal attacks. He also helped set shared high-level safety goals everyone agreed with to unite efforts.
By soliciting diverse viewpoints openly but ensuring debates remained constructive, Anthropic was able to surface insights that strengthened their approach. Scientists felt free to dissent without repercussions, leading to innovative research papers like "Constitutional AI" that advanced the field. By balancing input with decisions, addressing power dynamics respectfully and making debate a regular forum, Amodei transformed "bad friction" into "good friction" driving progress.
Case Study: Reducing Bureaucracy at Telefónica
Telefónica, a Spanish telecommunications company, struggled with inefficient processes slowing innovation until CEO Álvarez-Pallete launched an initiative in 2018 to simplify management structures and streamline approvals. He consolidated functions, cut layers, and increased decentralization to break apart silos and bureaucratic friction points.
By standardizing routine decisions at lower levels through guidelines rather than committee approvals, Telefónica reduced friction and sped up operations. Employees had clearer accountabilities with fewer handoffs, giving them autonomy within guardrails that drove cooperation rather than "us vs. them" dynamics. Costs fell by over 20% as unnecessary bureaucracy and "bad friction" dissipated, freeing resources for reinvestment in 5G and other growth areas.
Conclusion
All organizations experience friction to some degree given imperfect information, limited resources and differing perspectives. However, leaders who understand how to distinguish between types of organizational friction and implement targeted strategies based on these dynamics hold the key to leveraging "good friction" productively while dampening "bad friction" destructively.
By clarifying shared goals, fostering open debate within boundaries, balancing input with decisions, simplifying processes to break down silos, addressing power dynamics and managing change proactively, executives can transform inherent tensions into sparks of innovation and accountability rather than sources of dysfunction. The case studies of Anthropic and Telefónica demonstrate how approaches grounded in research can help real companies boost performance by constructively channeling organizational friction. Leaders would do well applying these principles within their own organizations to similarly derive benefits from "good friction" and offset the costs of "bad friction." With careful management, what appears as an impediment can become an asset driving progress.
References
Amodei, Dario, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, Tom Brown, Chris Olah, Jack Clarke, and Jascha Sohl-Dickstein. "Constitutional AI: Modeling the policy space and grounding decisions in a formal framework." 2022. arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.13481.
For research on the impacts of different types of organizational friction:
Armstrong, David J., and Don R. Riemenschneider. "The barriers to effective use of information technology in smaller firms." In Proceedings of the fifteenth annual conference of the International Academy for Information Management (IAIM), vol. 3, pp. 221-223. 2000.
For recommendations on effective strategies for managing organizational friction:
Briscoe, Forrest, and Tope Fadele. "When fair process leads to worse outcomes." Harvard Business Review 97, no. 3 (2019): 112-121.
Jonathan H. Westover, PhD is Chief Academic & Learning Officer (HCI Academy); Chair/Professor, Organizational Leadership (UVU); OD Consultant (Human Capital Innovations). Read Jonathan Westover's executive profile here.
Suggested Citation: Westover, J. H. (2024). Harnessing Discord: How Strategic Disagreement Can Fuel Organizational Growth. Human Capital Leadership Review, 11(4). doi.org/10.70175/hclreview.2020.11.4.5
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