Good Friction, Bad Friction

Mo Fong wrote a post about The New York Times piece asking whether a frictionless society is a trap, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

Here's where my head went: if every barrier is removed from your life, what exactly are you learning?

Friction is feedback. It's how you learn about yourself, about a situation, about reality as it actually is. Strip all of it away and I don't believe the effect on us is neutral. Effort is where the growth lives.

But not all friction teaches. Some of it just blocks.

That's the distinction Bob Sutton and Hayagreeva Rao draw in The Friction Project, which Mo recommended: good friction versus bad friction. The leader's job is to make the right things easier and the wrong things harder.

Before I was a founder, I spent 15 years as a music director leading creative teams of up to 90 volunteers, and that experience taught me the same lesson.

Removing bad friction sometimes meant hard conversations I'd rather have avoided. Introducing good friction looked like challenging my musicians to take on a gospel arrangement just beyond their reach, and then succeeding together. That's where the payoff lives, and everyone feels it. Friction in one team never stays in one team. It spreads through the whole body. This framing names something I managed for years before I had language for it.

And here's the thought I can't shake. Their work is about organizations. Mine is about individuals. But organizations are made of individuals, and every person walks in carrying their own internal friction economy.

At Pistachio Pay, we build for neurodivergent adults, and we apply this exact principle to a person's financial life.

We remove the bad friction: the executive function load of maintaining a rigid budget, the forced compliance that sets people up to fail and then calls it a character flaw. And we deliberately add good friction: a real pause between impulse and purchase, a conversation before money moves.

My thesis is that this flows upstream. Stabilize someone's financial life and you don't just improve their quality of life. You change what they bring to their team, their workplace, their community, their family. Reduce a person’s internal friction and you increase the odds that they’ll bring more clarity, stability, and capacity into the organization.

Same principle. Different altitude.

Thank you Mo for this post. The books are in my Amazon cart.