Understanding and eliminating process friction

You hire smart people. You give them clear objectives. You provide resources. And somehow, work still moves at a glacial pace. Projects get bogged down. Coordination takes forever. Simple tasks require unreasonable effort.

This isn’t about lazy employees or poor management. It’s about process friction, the operational obstacles that hinder execution and collaboration even when everyone is trying their best.

When Effort Becomes Excessive

Effort friction means excessive cognitive or physical work, steps, time, or complexity required beyond what the outcome justifies. An inordinate amount of cognitive or physical exertion necessary for new processes that are overly complex, excessively time-consuming, and involve numerous manual steps.

You see this when new processes require extensive training just to understand, when simple tasks involve dozens of clicks across multiple systems, when people need to manually copy data between applications, when exceptions to the process happen more often than the standard flow.

The symptoms are clear. People develop workarounds instead of following official processes. They revert to old methods whenever possible. They complain that the new way is harder than the old way, and they’re right.

When Coordination Breaks Down

Coordination covers inefficient handoffs, unclear ownership, or meeting and communication overhead that slows multi-team work. Inadequate or ineffective coordination mechanisms among teams, departments, and systems prevent collaboration.

Information gets lost between groups. Work products arrive incomplete because upstream teams didn’t understand downstream needs. Dependencies aren’t visible until they cause delays. Teams duplicate effort because they don’t know what others are doing.

You see perpetual alignment cycles that don’t produce alignment. Redundancy and rework. Projects that stall waiting for input from groups that didn’t know they were on the critical path.

When Capabilities Don’t Match Requirements

Capabilities means missing skills, tools, or enablement needed to perform new processes reliably and at quality. Skill deficiencies, insufficient competencies, and inadequate tools or resources. People are expected to do new things but lack the ability.

Maybe you’ve implemented a new technology platform but your teams don’t have the technical skills to use it effectively. Maybe you’ve redesigned processes but people lack the judgment to handle the increased decision rights. Maybe you’ve changed operating models but managers don’t know how to lead in the new structure.

The signs include quality problems, error rates increasing, projects delivered late, widespread frustration, and requests for help that exceed available support capacity.

When Data Doesn’t Flow

Data friction means inaccessible, inconsistent, or fragmented information that impedes decisions, automation, and execution. Data silos that hinder effective execution.

Critical data lives in five different systems with five different definitions. Reports don’t match because they’re pulling from different sources. People spend hours manually consolidating information. Decisions get made without reliable data because getting reliable data takes too long.

You see multiple versions of truth, extensive manual data work consuming valuable time, and important decisions delayed or made blindly because needed information isn’t available.

Why Process Friction Persists

Process friction often persists because organizations focus on designing ideal state processes without accounting for transition costs. They map out how work should flow in a perfect world, then are surprised when real world implementation hits obstacles.

The processes look elegant on paper. They make logical sense. Subject matter experts reviewed them. Leadership approved them. But nobody asked whether people can actually do the work this way given their current skills, tools, and constraints.

What Actually Fixes Process Friction

Fixing process friction requires honest assessment of transition costs. For effort friction, that means reducing complexity through simplification, providing job aids and automation, building in practice time before expectations kick in.

For coordination friction, it means making dependencies visible, establishing clear interfaces between teams, creating lightweight coordination mechanisms that don’t require endless meetings.

For capability friction, it means realistic assessment of skill gaps, targeted training that actually builds competence, providing adequate support during transitions, accepting that some roles might need different people.

For data friction, it means investing in integration before you need it, establishing single sources of truth, making data access easier than manual workarounds.

None of this is glamorous work. But it’s the difference between processes that work and processes that look good in presentations while creating friction in reality.