Rid Your Organization of Obstacles That Infuriate Everyone

Along the way, we learned that friction can be both bad and good: Not everything ought to be quick, easy, and frictionless. Activities that involve good friction include developing deep and trusting relationships, making complex and irreversible decisions under uncertainty, and doing creative work that’s messy, inefficient, and failure-ridden (if you’re doing it right!). Skilled leaders are bent on eliminating unnecessary obstacles, in large part because doing so gives them more time to focus on those many things in organizational life that should be slow, hard, and complicated.