Invisible Friction Is Slowing Your Strategy
Issue 231, September 25, 2025
Earlier this year, the new CEO of a high-tech organization rushed to get an AI tool that promised to revolutionize customer onboarding into production. She was recognized as a “hot shot” talent who had staked her reputation on being a visionary and early mover. She was always several steps ahead of everyone else. She was also very persuasive and had convinced the board to invest in the tool, but they put pressure on her by demanding visible progress. Competitors were already following her lead and touting their own AI investments, adding more pressure to get the tool to market. Fast-tracking production, the solution went live within a few weeks, and almost immediately, chaos followed.
The customers who purchased the tool were not recognized by the organization’s system because of a technical glitch in its algorithms. Regulators flagged the tool and raised questions about bias. Customer service frontline employees were overwhelmed by complaints. And to make a bad situation even worse, the new customers the organization had hoped to impress cancelled their contracts and went to the competitor.
In today’s culture, one mistake is all it takes to have customers flee elsewhere. In this case, there was a cascade of mistakes, misjudgments and poor decisions. What happened?
Over Your Skis
The organization’s strategy was to be bold and urgent, but it lacked the capacity to absorb the workload, the capability to interpret and refine the technology, the culture to raise concerns before launch, and the behavioral readiness to manage the fallout.
This story is not unique. We are living in an age when speed has become both a reward and a punishment. Leaders are told they must move faster, pivot more quickly, and deliver transformation yesterday. Artificial intelligence is heralded as a tool that collapses time horizons and delivers instant advantage, but its hype has not lived up to its promise for most organizations. Even with the advantages of AI, many organizations cannot adjust to accelerated timelines when markets shift in weeks if not in days, competitors rise and fall in months, and customers demand immediacy in everything from how they purchase to how they experience. The drumbeat of urgency is unrelenting.
Despite the need for acceleration, many organizations remain stuck, like really stuck. Their strategies look impressive in presentations, planning documents and leadership discussions, but they stall, if not completely flame out, in practice. The visions that sounded compelling in workforce town halls and investor meetings often collapse in the daily grind. Invisible friction is a paradox: the faster the outside world moves, the more slowly many organizations seem to become, often paralyzed for reasons they can’t seem to identify.
The Cloak of Invisibility
Understanding this paradox requires looking beneath the surface of the strategy to examine four often invisible factors that govern organizational mobility, like hidden speed traps:
- Capacity: the oxygen to act
- Capability: the intelligence to adapt
- Culture: the energy field that either accelerates or suffocates)
- Behavior: the human willingness to let go and lean forward
These factors inform and infuse what we call the Human Factor Method (HFM), a framework that describes transformation as a human journey through four phases:
- Awareness: recognizing what must change
- Acceptance: letting go of what once defined you
- Alignment: creating shared direction anchored in meaning
- Activation: embedding new behaviors in identity and purpose
Any movement forward is a dance between the four factors and the four phases; they are interdependent and interconnected. Invisible friction slows down transformation when these factors and phases are not working together. And what is the most powerful force to eliminate this friction? The human factor.
The Acceleration Trap
What makes transformation and change different today from past cycles of disruption is the convergence of forces pressing on organizations simultaneously, like weather systems colliding to create a perfect storm. Technology alone would be disorienting, particularly considering the pace of its advancement and promise to make organizations more effective and efficient. It is now compounded by economic volatility, geopolitical instability, and cultural polarization. These external factors come together to create an atmosphere of relentless challenge and acceleration that is seen as progress but also creates a larger concern as to where we are heading.
Add to the backdrop of geopolitical shocks and economic urgency, supply chains are fragile, regulations are shifting, and markets punish hesitation or mistakes rather than rewarding the effort. Leaders are expected to make decisions in real time, yet the systems through which they act—human, cultural, organizational—are often sluggish and brittle. What was formerly successful in the past is often irrelevant for current conditions. The speed of the environment then collides with the inertia of the organizational enterprise, and invisible friction builds and permeates the organizational system.
The Changing Workforce
Add to the macro external trends, generational dynamics are reshaping how organizations function, creating friction (both invisible and visible) at the very foundation of how work gets done. Younger employees, particularly Gen Z and millennials, come to an organization with expectations of flexibility, authenticity, and purpose. They are less willing to tolerate hierarchical control or cultures of fear, and they want work to align with their personal values. At the same time, older generations still hold much of the positional power, often clinging to familiar rules of control. The result is a clash of assumptions, one side pushing for meaning, the other grasping onto certainty. Strategy gets caught in the crossfire when leaders mistake generational friction for immaturity or entitlement, rather than recognizing it as a cultural transformation in progress.
Impatience of Customers
Meanwhile, customers are becoming less forgiving and impatient. In the “now economy,” consumers expect seamless digital experiences, instant delivery, and personalized interactions. If they don’t get it, they abandon the brands that stumble. They desire relationships, not transactions. They seek trust and loyalty but their impatience often results in bouncing from brand to brand in a hurry, infused with their own sense of urgency. Yet fast-tracking their careers can compound the risk of failure if they haven’t mastered the skills of execution.
Let’s return to our story about the AI tool; it’s not about technology misfiring; it’s about an organization trying to move at the speed customers and/or stakeholders expect without ensuring its workforce can move with it. It misfired by not asking if it had the right people with the right skills to execute on the plan.
The Four Hidden Speed Limits
Even for highly capable leaders, there are hidden speed limits that can trigger failure. If you add up all the components of a perfect storm, leaders are expected to navigate our four factors of capacity, capability, culture, and behavior. These are not trivial; they are the very levers that determine whether organizations can respond to these converging forces with clarity and timeliness or whether they will drown in the high tide of acceleration.
These pressures don’t impact organizations abstractly; they strike directly at the human system, creating friction points that either accelerate strategic momentum or suffocate it entirely. Each of the four factors becomes a potential bottleneck, a place where the velocity of the external world crashes against the resistance of the internal human-based workforce.
Capacity: The Oxygen to Act
Capacity is the most overlooked barrier. Leaders mistake busyness for impact, but the two are not the same. Look closely at any organization today, and you will see calendars crammed with meetings, inboxes overflowing with messages, and initiatives stacked upon initiatives. People are running faster but accomplishing less. When leaders insist on piling on new priorities without eliminating old ones, they confuse motion with momentum. Capacity is not an infinite resource, and when it is depleted, strategy becomes just another weight dragging people down.
In an era defined by constant urgency, real leadership is not adding more to the pile but clearing enough space so that what matters most can breathe and grow. Without capacity, nothing new can take root. Organizations that thrive know how to create space by ruthlessly prioritizing, eliminating low-value activities, and protecting time for strategic thinking. They ask: “What will we stop doing?” before they add new initiatives. And they focus on meaningful priorities, opposed to pleasing the egos of a board with extraneous projects and distractions.
The Human Factor Method’s Phase One, Awareness (recognizing what must change), is directly tied to Capacity as the foundation for all transformation. Without sufficient capacity—the oxygen to act—organizations lack the breathing room necessary for genuine awareness to emerge. When people are overwhelmed by competing priorities and endless busyness, they operate in reactive mode, putting out fires rather than stepping back to recognize patterns and identify what truly needs to change both in themselves and the work environment.
Awareness requires mental space, time for reflection, and the ability to observe both internal operations and external market signals without the fog of operational busyness. Organizations drowning in initiatives cannot develop the strategic clarity needed to recognize transformation opportunities or threats. True awareness emerges only when leaders create enough capacity for their teams to lift their heads above the daily grind and see the bigger picture.
Capability: The Intelligence to Adapt
Organizations invest heavily in training, reskilling, and certification, believing that if people acquire new knowledge, good strategic thinking will naturally follow. Capability, however, is not just a technical skill; it is adaptive and responsive intelligence. It is the willingness to unlearn, the courage to experiment, and the resilience to work without guarantees. In today’s marketplace, where AI can reshape workflows in one quarter and reset customer expectations overnight, static skillsets have no stamina. A workforce that thinks strategically but cannot adapt is no more capable than one that resists outright.
The Human Factor Method clarifies how Phase Two, Acceptance (letting go of what once defined you), is a critical partner to Capability. Without that acceptance, capability becomes an illusion, a performance that never translates into action. Organizations that understand this distinction invest as much in unlearning old ways as they do in learning new ones. They cultivate and coach teams that embrace experimentation, learn from failure quickly, and continuously evolve their approaches.
Culture: The Energy Field that Can Accelerate or Suffocate
Culture is often the strongest speed limit. Many organizations remain bound to dysfunctional cultures of fear and control, even as the world outside demands empathy and agility. In such environments, employees wait. They wait for permission, they wait for approval, they wait for certainty. Every decision must climb the hierarchy, and by the time it trickles down again, the opportunity has passed. If one is paying attention, most organizations can see this happen daily. Leaders who cling to control imagine they are reducing risk, but in reality, they are guaranteeing irrelevance. And here’s a key question: What do you do while you’re waiting? We can say with certainty, rarely anything meaningful.
By contrast, cultures built on trust and psychological safety allow decentralized decisions to be made where the work and customers are. When people are aligned to a North Star and united in a shared purpose, they no longer need to wait for direction; they move with empowerment and confidence because they understand both the “what” and also the “why.” The Human Factor Method Phase Three, Alignment (creating shared direction anchored in meaning) speaks directly to this tenet: Culture is not wallpaper; it is the energy field that can either accelerate or suffocate strategy.
Behavior: The Human Willingness to Change
And then there is behavior, the most human and therefore the most unpredictable of the four factors. This is the factor we write about most often. Strategies, however rational and planned, must pass through the human filter of identity, history, and emotion. People resist not because they are obstinate, but because they fear loss. They suffer when uninformed. They disengage not because they are lazy, but because they feel disconnected from meaning. Drift is not a defect of character but rather a symptom of an organization that has failed to show individuals where they belong in the narrative.
In today’s market, where attention is fragmented and uncertainty is constant, disengagement spreads as quickly as wildfire through dry brush. The Human Factor Method Phase Four, Activation (embedding new behaviors in identity and purpose) recognizes that behavior changes only when people feel seen and can connect their personal identity to the collective journey. Without this anchoring, even the most brilliant strategies remain abstractions. Organizations that succeed create a connection between individual growth and organizational transformation, helping people understand how their role contributes to a larger purpose, ensuring their identity is enhanced rather than threatened by change.
Building an Empathetic Ecosystem
The external environment will only continue to accelerate: Leaders cannot slow down the pace of AI adoption, the churn of customer expectations, or the unpredictability of politics and economics. But they can choose how their organizations manage these conditions. Leadership today is less about pronouncing vision statements and more about creating the human conditions that make execution possible. That means creating space for capacity instead of drowning people in busyness; cultivating adaptive mindsets instead of static skills; building cultures of trust that accelerate instead of constraining. and aligning behavior by connecting strategy to meaning and identity.
This is not “soft, squishy” work that many offhand dismiss. It is the hardest work of all because it requires leaders to confront their own natural instincts to control, not measure progress only as efficiency, and treat people as interchangeable units of labor rather than as the essential human ecosystem that drives momentum. The human factor is not just a collection of cogs in an Industrial Age machine. They have real needs.
Organizations that ignore the human ecosystem will become irrelevant, no matter how brilliant their plans or how ambitious their rhetoric. But those that embrace the human factor, recognizing capacity, capability, culture, and behavior as the true levers of speed to market, will find that strategy can keep pace without collapsing under its own weight. In the end, strategy does not fail in the boardrooms or planning sessions. It fails—or soars—in the lived experience of the people who are asked to carry it forward.
If there is one lesson the marketplace can teach us, it is that timeliness is no longer optional. The question for leaders is whether they demand speed at the expense of critical thinking, or whether they create the conditions where speed and human thought can coexist. That is the choice. And that is the difference between organizations that merely chase the future and those that are ready to live it and thrive today and for tomorrow.
Harkening back to our opening story, we should not mistake urgency for progress. It will backfire in often unforeseen and unanticipated ways. Uninformed urgency comes with unintended consequences. The outside world will only move forward faster, but speed without critical thinking is recklessness, and recklessness in today’s marketplace is punished swiftly by customers, investors, regulators, and employees. What separates organizations that stumble from those that thrive is not the boldness of their strategies but the honesty with which they confront their own friction.
The Human Factor Method
The Human Factor Method offers a path forward because it honors truth to power that transformation is not a technical exercise but a human journey. Awareness, acceptance, alignment, and activation are not abstract phases; they are the dynamic stages organizations must move through if they are to survive in this accelerated age.
We have recently launched a change and transformation readiness assessment tool on our website to help you evaluate your transformation capability and capacity. It is a short survey that provides an organizational readiness state and score, and comes with advice and recommendations specific to the level of readiness. Explore the Human Factor Method and the Transformation Assessment now and unlock your true potential.
Connect with Us
What stories are shaping your organization’s biggest decisions right now? We’d love to hear your insights. Share your experiences with us on our Substack or join the conversation on our LinkedIn. For more insights on navigating transformation in today’s complex business environment, explore our archive of “Ideas and Innovations” newsletters or pick up a copy of The Truth About Transformation.
The Truth About Transformation: Why Most Change Initiatives Fail (And How Yours Can Succeed)
Why do 70% of organizational transformations fail?
The brutal truth: It’s not about strategy, technology, or resources. Organizations fail because they fundamentally misunderstand what drives change—the human factor.
While leaders obsess over digital tools, process improvements, and operational efficiency, they’re missing the most critical element: the psychological, behavioral, and cultural dynamics that actually determine whether transformation takes hold or crashes and burns.
The 2040 Framework reveals what really works:
- Why your workforce unconsciously sabotages change (and how to prevent it)
- The hidden biases that derail even the best-laid transformation plans
- How to build psychological safety that accelerates rather than impedes progress
- The difference between performative change and transformative change that sticks
This isn’t theory—it’s a battle-tested playbook. We’ve compiled real-world insights from organizations of all sizes, revealing the elements that comprise genuine change. Through provocative case studies, you’ll see exactly how transformations derail—and more importantly, how to ensure yours doesn’t.
What makes this different: While most change management books focus on process and tools, The Truth About Transformation tackles the messy, complex, utterly human reality of organizational change. You’ll discover why honoring, respecting, and acknowledging the human factor isn’t just nice—it’s the difference between transformation and expensive reorganization.
Perfect for: CEOs, change leaders, consultants, and anyone tired of watching transformation initiatives fizzle out despite massive investment.
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Ready to stop failing at change? Your organization’s future depends on getting this right.
