Friction Isn't Your Problem. The Mess Is.

Ask any executive what's slowing down a training development initiative, and you'll get the same list within about ten seconds. Too many approvals. A budget cycle that doesn't match the delivery timeline. Tools that don't talk to each other. A steering committee that meets once a month, whether the project needs it or not.

All of that is real. All of it is also friction, and friction has a very specific quality that makes it attractive to fix: you can see it. You can point at the approval chain. You can count the weeks lost to procurement. You can put it on a slide with a red arrow and a caption that says “here.” Friction is visible, which means it's measurable, which means it's fundable. Somebody can build a business case around removing it.

Here's the problem. Most of the initiatives that stall out in your organization aren't stalling because of the approval chain. They're stalling because three senior stakeholders have three different opinions about what “done” looks like, and nobody has resolved that disagreement, they've just scheduled another meeting about it. That's not friction. That's the Mess, and it doesn't show up on the process map because it was never a process problem to begin with.

The Mess is the plain fact that whenever more than one person has to exercise judgment together, you get variability. Opinions differ. Priorities compete. One VP wants speed, another wants polish, a third is quietly protecting headcount. None of them are wrong, exactly. They're just human, and humans don't align just because a project plan says they should by Thursday.

This matters because the two problems need completely different fixes and treating one like the other wastes real money. You can remove friction with discipline: fewer approval steps, a faster budget process, better tools. Discipline barely touches the Mess. You can streamline the approval chain down to a single signature and still watch a project stall because the people signing off don't agree on what they're signing off on.

I've watched leadership teams spend a full quarter and a real budget line rebuilding their intake process, convinced that a cleaner workflow would finally get training initiatives moving. The workflow got cleaner. The initiatives kept stalling, because the actual holdup had never been the workflow. It was two department heads who had never actually agreed on the goal, and no software update was going to fix that.

So before your next improvement effort goes looking for friction to remove, ask a harder question first: is this slow because of the system, or because of the people making judgment calls inside it? If it's the system, you already know what to do. If it's the people, you need a different kind of answer, one built for managing human variability rather than eliminating it, because you can't eliminate it and still have a team worth having.

That distinction is the whole starting point of how I work with clients. Not because friction doesn't matter, it does, but because most companies are already reasonably good at finding it. Almost none of them have a deliberate way of managing the Mess, and that gap is usually the real reason the training investment isn't paying off the way it should.