Imagine bricks made of molasses mixed with pumice, applied to systems in order to protect them but rough to deal with.
From John Gall's "Systemantics"
When Charles Babbage, early in the Nineteenth Century, attempted to build the world's first large calculating machine he made the parts of wood and promptly discovered the importance of Internal Friction. Briefly, his machine wouldn't go -- and he couldn't Push It hard enough to Make It Go without breaking it....This was not a Planned Discovery, and it was not one that Babbage enjoyed making.
And also Piet Hein from Grooks 1
Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back.
When building systems, inevitably there will be some friction between you and the desired end state. Anything you can do to recognize that there is friction and address it is worthwhile. You get stuck; that stuck feeling is friction.
Observe that friction happens at all layers of the stack, and that having friction at one level can obscure the difficulties you are seeing at adjacent levels. Take for instance the venerable corporate firewall. If you can't reach a remote site that you need to get your work done, it's impossible to know whether this is as a consequence of corporate policy that is hard to change, firewall vendor software that is buggy, or even a simple typo in some config file somewhere that doesn't intend to make policy. It's unclear whether something simple needs to be sanded down to size, or whether an entire layer is made of sticky grit.
Friction in an ecosystem shows up in the form of seemingly simple tasks that end up taking way longer than they should take - and as a consequence, filtering out anyone with a dopamine timer that's too short. Note that people who are used to quick response times and rapid turnaround rarely have much patience for tasks that take forever.
Friction wears you down; it makes the easy tasks laborious; it entraps you in its gritty debris; it turns work into heat. Recognize it where it happens, and do your best to smooth the path when it throws sand (or wood) in the gears.
Postscript: also noted, Strategy by Design on Friction as part of a discussion of von Clausewitz's "On War".
He used this term to describe the “myriad of small, but collectively numerous things that happen that cannot be foreseen or planned for, and which cause leaders to spend time on unforeseen decision making.”
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