The Five Frictions Diagnostic
Score your highest-volume workflow against the Five Frictions framework. Generate your organisation's unique Friction Fingerprint — the shape that tells you where to attack first.
The Problem Nobody Measures
A $2.3 million pricing decision that took 42 days, 9 handoffs, and 3 hours of actual work. A billing complaint that consumed 49 hours for 45 minutes of productive effort. These are not anomalies — they are how most organisations operate every day.
The uncomfortable truth: Every organisational innovation in the last 150 years optimised communication. None of them questioned whether the communication should exist at all.
Five Frictions Radar
Think of your highest-volume workflow — the one that runs hundreds or thousands of times per year. Score it against each friction on a 1–5 scale.
Each handoff multiplies friction. Over 5 handoffs: 23% information lost. Over 10: 40% lost.
Score Each Friction (1 = minimal, 5 = severe)
Waiting for approvals, reviews, signatures. Accounts for 60–80% of elapsed time in approval-heavy processes.
Turf wars, ego, passive-aggression, political manoeuvring. US companies spend $359 billion annually on workplace conflict.
Same process, different outcomes depending on who handles it. Two reps, same policy manual, wildly different results.
Each handoff loses ~5% of context. Formula: 1 − (0.95)^n. Over 10 handoffs, 40% of the original information is gone.
Brooks's Law: adding people adds n(n−1)/2 communication channels. Team of 10 = 45 channels. Team of 50 = 1,225 channels.
Understanding the Five Frictions
Your Friction Fingerprint is Unique
No two organisations have the same shape. Some are latency-heavy (long approval chains). Some are information-loss-heavy (deep handoff chains). The shape tells you where to attack first — and the total friction load tells you whether to patch or fork the entire workflow.
In the next lesson, you'll put a dollar figure on this friction. That number is what gets the board's attention.