Stanford researcher Bob Sutton spent years studying why capable organisations struggle to execute. His conclusion upends conventional leadership wisdom: the problem is rarely a lack of direction. The problem is friction.
Friction - the structural, social, and psychological barriers that slow work down - explains why brilliant strategies stall, why talented teams underperform, and why so much organisational energy disappears into processes that serve no one.
Good leadership, Sutton argues, is about making the right things easier and the wrong things harder. Direction matters. Friction removal determines whether that direction is realised.
Defining Organisational Friction
Friction is anything that slows progress, adds unnecessary complexity, or drains energy. It takes three forms:
- Structural friction hides in processes: approval chains that add weeks, meetings that consume hours, systems that force workarounds.
- Social friction emerges from unclear roles: ambiguous ownership, contested decision rights, the endless question of who can actually say yes.
- Psychological friction lives in fear: teams that wait for permission, leaders who second-guess, cultures where acting boldly feels risky.
Not all friction is harmful: quality checks serve a purpose; compliance reviews protect organisations. But unnecessary friction - the kind that persists because "we've always done it this way" - is corrosive. It compounds into delays, disengagement, and turnover.
The Leadership Bias Toward Direction
Why do leaders focus on vision over friction? Because vision is visible. Strategy decks land well in boardrooms. Thought leadership earns recognition. Direction feels like leadership in a way that fixing broken processes does not.
But the evidence is clear: most strategies fail not because they lack ambition but because organisations cannot execute them. The barriers to action outweigh the clarity of intent.
The Evidence for Friction Removal
Friction Is the Primary Execution Barrier
Research on strategy execution consistently identifies friction as the main culprit when initiatives stall. Teams fail because structural barriers make progress exhausting: unclear decision rights force escalation, excessive meetings fragment focus, bureaucratic approvals introduce latency at every turn.
The drag is cumulative. Each friction point feels minor. Together, they slow organisations to a crawl.
Leaders Shape Organisational Context
Sutton's work reframes leadership as environmental design. The best leaders do not just set direction, they sculpt the conditions in which work happens. They simplify priorities. They clarify who decides what. They remove processes that no longer serve their purpose. They push decision-making authority downward.
IDEO, the design consultancy, applies this principle systematically. Leaders there treat friction as a design problem: identify where it exists, understand why, then redesign. The goal is not frictionless organisations - some friction is useful - but friction-appropriate ones.
The Cone of Friction
Sutton describes how leadership behaviours radiate outward in a "cone of friction". Leaders who demand excessive reporting, who question decisions already made, and/or who add complexity through their own habits, magnify friction across every layer of the organisation.
The best leaders intentionally shrink this cone. They ask fewer questions. They trust more readily. They remove themselves as bottlenecks. Unconscious leaders do the opposite, and rarely see the drag they create.
From Insight to Practice
In practice, removing friction requires judgement and sustained behaviour change.
Trace the actual slowdowns. Where does work genuinely stall? The answer often differs from where people complain. Follow the work.
Diagnose barriers before blaming people. When teams struggle, the instinct is to question capability. The better question: what is making this harder than it needs to be?
Create safety for naming friction. Most friction is invisible to senior leaders because no one raises it. Make surfacing barriers a legitimate act, not a career risk.
Change the system, not just the speech. New strategy announcements accomplish nothing if the same approval chains, meeting cultures, and decision paralysis remain in place.
Clearing the Path
Sutton's research confirms what experienced leaders sense intuitively: direction alone does not produce results. Execution does. And execution depends on the systematic removal of unnecessary friction.
The leaders who deliver lasting impact understand this. They invest less time crafting perfect visions and more time asking: what is slowing us down?
References
“The Friction Project” by Bob Sutton & Huggy Rao (2024). https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15704/9780241594865
"Workplace Friction: How to Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder" - Stanford Graduate School of Business Insights.
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/workplace-friction-how-make-right-things-easier-wrong-things-harder
"How Great Leaders Use Friction to Make Things Easier" - IDEO U.
https://www.ideou.com/en-gb/blogs/inspiration/how-great-leaders-use-friction-to-make-things-easier
"Reduce Organisational Friction - Remove More Things People Hate" - Lead You First.
https://leadyoufirst.com/reduce-organizational-friction-remove-more-things-people-hate/
"Why Teams Stay Stuck - and How Systemic Leaders Can Cut Through Friction" - SIM.
https://pd-csl.sim.edu.sg/article/why-teams-stay-stuck-and-how-systemic-leaders-can-cut-through-friction/
"Strategy Execution: Why Most Strategies Fail and How Organisations Actually Deliver Results" - LeanScape.
https://leanscape.io/strategy-execution-why-most-strategies-fail
Ady Coles works with leadership teams to help strategy survive contact with reality. His focus is on strategy management and agile strategy delivery - designing the translation between intent and execution so that direction remains coherent as organisations move, grow, and adapt. He works as a fractional and advisory partner where clarity, judgement, and sustained alignment matter more than plans on paper.