i-suite

The hidden cost of making work easier

Why removing friction in one place can create more work somewhere else, and a few questions worth sitting with.

insight
Sep 17, 2026
9 min read

Author

Leslie James is a global marketing and brand leader with two decades of experience working with executive teams on growth, transformation, and the human impact of social change.

Executive summary

Making all work “frictionless” can hide a serious cost. Friction often does not always disappear; it moves. A cleaner process for leaders may create extra rework for employees, customers, or teams with less power to push back.

The key leadership challenge is to distinguish wasteful friction from useful friction. Wasteful friction includes unclear approvals, broken handoffs, duplicate work, and poor knowledge flow. Useful friction includes checks that protect judgment, safety, quality, and trust. Faster tools, including AI, can help only when ownership, decision rights, and handoffs are clear. Otherwise, they simply move confusion faster.

Efficiency should only be about what looks smoother at the top, but also who absorbs the hidden cost, what friction should be removed, and what friction must remain to protect the business.

Strategy and brand leaders aren't always operating-model experts, but they spend time around the promises companies make to customers, to employees, to themselves, and observe what happens when those promises meet real work. The nicest-sounding ones often share a word: seamless. Frictionless. Zero-touch. One wonders whether that is always the right ambition.

Flow, as far as we can tell, is being able to move through work without spending yourself on resistance that adds nothing. Some slowing down seems useful. It protects a decision, a person, a promise. And yet a lot of organizations still treat every bit of friction as a defect: smooth it, automate it, or hide it behind a nicer screen. If the work feels hard, the assumption is something is broken. If a decision takes time, is the system slow, or is someone thinking? If a person has to pause, does the process need a redesign, or a little room?

Sometimes the first answer is right. Though, less sure that it always is.

Friction does not always disappear when a process is streamlined. It seems to move. While a customer journey is smoother, somewhere behind it, there's often a pile of manual exceptions. A faster approval in one function, and a little more ambiguity in another. Self-service that eases a central team, while small administrative tasks quietly spread across hundreds of people.

From the center, the dashboard looks cleaner. Across the enterprise, has the work simply shifted downstream to people with less authority to question it?

There is another kind of stuck-ness we often see. Knowledge that already exists in the enterprise, in people's heads, in departments, in processes, in data, in organizational history, somehow does not travel. Not because people are unwilling, but because the paths between them are hard. That friction is different from the pause that keeps a decision honest. One traps what the organization already knows. The other is closer to care.

So maybe the useful question is not only

How do we remove friction?

Maybe it is "Which friction are we talking about, and where should it live?"

Is it stopping knowledge and work from travelling, or is it protecting something that matters?

Or is it just tiring people?

Useful friction, and the kind that only drains

Every business, in a way, is a distribution system of effort.

Some of that effort is easy to see: hours in a plan, headcount in a budget, cycle time on a dashboard. Much of it is not. Translating unclear briefs. Chasing missing information. Reconciling systems that do not talk. Explaining to customers why the company cannot deliver what its messaging promised.

We suspect that is where friction that adds no value often survives, even after leaders believe they have removed it.

There is also friction that looks like care. A pause before a high-stakes commitment. A second look at a change that could hurt someone. A checkpoint before you put the brand on the line. Are these inefficiencies, or something closer to brakes, slowing motion just enough to keep control?

Take those away in the name of speed, and the business may move faster, but with less control. The risk does not seem to vanish. It travels downstream, where it is usually harder and more expensive to fix.

Then there is the other kind. Approvals with no owner. Handoffs that break because teams do not share a source of truth. Forms that ask for information the company already has. Meetings that happen again because the first one had no owner. Policies written for a mistake that happened once, years ago, and now slow everyone down every week.

Does that improve decisions, or does it mostly drain energy, and tell capable people that the business does not value their time?

The line is easy to blur. Everyday work stays harder than it needs to be because nobody simplified it. Decisions that should be slow become casually easy, because the checks that made people think were dismissed as bureaucracy. What was supposedly removed can return as burnout, customer frustration, rework, and the invisible overtime of teams managing complexity they did not create.

What a company makes easy

In places that feel well-designed, people know who decides. Information reaches them without a scavenger hunt. Feedback arrives while the work is still fresh. Routines are simple enough to trust, and flexible when the situation genuinely changes. Authority sits close to the work, not three layers above it in a monthly committee.

Tools can help. They can cut repetitive work, move information faster, summarize patterns, free people for the work that needs a human. AI can help too, especially where teams spend their days searching, synthesizing, documenting, or coordinating. Used well, it can also help knowledge travel: the insight stuck in one team's folder, one person's experience, one system's history, finding its way to the next decision that needs it.

But what happens when a faster tool enters a confused operating model?
Does it resolve the confusion, or simply move it faster?

What seems to take the real work is the system around the tool: who owns the decision, how a handoff happens, what should be easy, and what should stay a little hard. That feels like design. It also feels like culture.

What a company makes easy reveals what it values, or so it seems. Easy to launch an initiative, almost impossible to close one: are we rewarding activity over outcomes? Buy in three clicks, get lost trying to get help: have we optimized acquisition at the expense of trust? In many organizations, senior leaders can bypass a process with a message while frontline teams carry compliance that exists mainly to look careful. Whose time have we already decided, matters more.

Values show up in speeches. However, they show up more clearly in places where a company puts its friction.

Who absorbs the cost?

If leaders want flow, perhaps the work is to read that map honestly.

Where is effort spent on motion that goes nowhere? Where has work, or knowledge, been pushed into places it cannot travel from? Where has effort been pushed onto people who cannot push back? What useful friction should we leave in place, the kind that protects judgment, safety, and trust? And what are we tempted to remove only because we have given haste a friendlier name?

For every shortcut, approval, automation, redesign: who absorbs the cost? And is that the right person? Could we loosen the friction that traps knowledge and creates no progress, and keep the friction that makes decisions better? Make routine work easier by redesigning it, not by pushing it onto someone else. Let consequential decisions stay a little harder: slower where judgment needs room, more open where trust is at stake.

And could we refuse to call the transfer of friction an improvement? If a change only works because employees absorb the mess, customers navigate the gap, or a junior team becomes the shock absorber, have we created flow, or only reallocated the problem and called it a win?

From the top, a cleaner process looks like progress, because the hidden work never made the steering pack. The confused handoff may not show up until a talented person leaves. The customer who almost walked away will not always file a report about how exhausting it was to get a simple answer.

Seeing friction clearly means getting close to the work.
It means treating other people’s time as seriously as your own.

The enterprises that improve over time, at least the ones noticed, do not eliminate every hurdle. They make effort deliberate. They smooth the ordinary path enough that people can move, and that, what the organization already knows can travel. They keep enough resistance to protect quality, safety, and integrity. And they refuse to build speed on the patience of those with the least power to object.

Flow may simply be a choice about where useful friction is allowed to live, and which barriers to knowledge and work we are willing to open.

Put effort where it’s worth it. Make the rest lighter. And do not confuse friction leaving your desk with friction leaving the company. That's the difference between an enterprise that feels efficient and one that actually is.

"From friction to flow" is a quiet standard: help what matters travel, keep the pauses that keep us honest, and take seriously the people who make the enterprise run.

FAQs

Building flow without removing useful friction

It means redesigning work so effort sits where it creates value. Not making everything frictionless. Removing wasteful effort, keeping useful checks, and helping people make progress without unnecessary resistance.

Some friction protects quality, safety, trust, and judgment. A pause before a high-stakes decision, a second review on a critical change, or a structured challenge before a major commitment can prevent costly mistakes.

Wasteful friction is effort that slows people down without improving outcomes. Repeated approvals with no clear owner. Forms that ask for information the company already has. Unclear handoffs. Meetings that happen because the last one had no owner. Policies that create delay without reducing real risk.

Look past the dashboard and ask where the effort is really going. Who is chasing missing information? Who is managing exceptions? Who is absorbing unclear decisions? Who is carrying work that was supposedly removed from the process?

AI can reduce repetitive work, support synthesis, and route information faster. It will not fix a confused operating model. If nobody owns the decision, faster tools just move the confusion through more quickly.

When friction is poorly placed, employees spend energy navigating the inside of the company instead of doing the work. Customers may buy in three clicks and then get lost trying to get help. In both cases, the organization has shifted effort rather than reduced it.

Make routine work simpler. Put authority closer to the work. Be clear about who owns what. Cut handoffs that are not needed. Keep a little resistance where the decision carries real risk.

The hidden cost of making work easier

The hidden cost of making work easier

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