I was on a call with one of my most reliable team members, and they were venting about a project team they were part of.
“I can’t believe these people. They’re constantly stepping on my work and not doing their own. And haven’t they heard of communicating? It’s hard enough to collaborate when you’re all remote, but when you have to pull every detail out of people, it’s exhausting.”
I listened. Because here’s what I heard beneath the frustration: friction.
Friction is anything that makes it harder for a team to work together gracefully, with ease. It’s the invisible drag on collaboration—the misaligned expectations, the unclear ownership, the communication gaps that turn simple work into a slog.
Here’s the thing about friction: we often treat it as a people problem. “They’re difficult.”
“They don’t communicate.”
“They don’t get it.”
But what if friction is actually a design problem?
What if the team never established shared mental models for how work flows? What if they skipped over creating communication norms—who needs what information, when, and how? What if nobody mapped out who knows what, so people keep reinventing wheels or stepping on toes? What if they never built the rituals that turn a group of individuals into an actual team?
These things don’t generally emerge by accident. And when they do emerge accidentally, it’s pure luck.
Learning interventions can help teams build what’s missing. Not to “fix” people, but to create the shared foundations that make collaboration feel effortless instead of exhausting. Before we write off a struggling team, we might ask: What does this team need to build together?
If any of this sounds familiar, and you’d like to talk to someone who can actually help, reach out. My mission is to end workplace suffering, and friction is absolutely one of the greatest causes of that.