What Hidden System Friction Is Blocking Your Strategy?
I've been revisiting the Book Rethinking Users, which challenges how we view roles in complex systems. (I like using books like these to help me see things differently)
The insight?
Organizations many times stall due to conflicting roles, misaligned incentives, and cultural fractures, not just individual resistance.
Here's how I'm adapting their framework to map system friction:
-Dependent Functions: Roles needing approval to act. In a financial merger for example dual sign-offs could create delays and risk aversion and cost an organization missed opportunities as competitors move faster.
-Complementary Functions: Teams with conflicting incentives. You could have Sales pushing customization while Operations wants to standardize, which can cause a clash between customer-centric and cost-driven approaches.
-Generative Functions: Teams adapting processes locally. Think of a manufacturing org that has seven plants with seven "optimized" workflows, creating a 'every plant for itself' environment. Standardization fails not from resistance, but fragmentation.
-Parallel Functions: Interdependent teams without alignment. Imagine a tech rollout, Product and Customer Service define "on-time delivery" differently. Result?
Weeks of delays and frustrated customers - from conflicting definitions of success.
-Direct Functions: The obvious focus but least informative. Most transformation targets direct functions, missing the system dynamics that kill execution.
The takeaway? What may look like resistance is usually system friction in disguise.
If your strategy is stalling, don't look at motivation first (because it takes more experience and nuance than you have been told). Look at your systems.
I map these friction points with clients to visualize where execution stalls and how it's costing them delays and lost opportunities.
What friction points are you seeing, and which of these resonates most with your experience?