Friction and Reward

The Two Forces That Determine Whether Work Actually Moves

Business improvement does not need to be mystical.

Beneath the programmes, beneath the jargon, beneath the theatre of transformation — two forces keep showing up. Friction and reward. Reduce the former. Strengthen the latter. And things begin to move. People move. Customers move. Work moves.

Earlier in my career I kept reaching for the same idea but used different words: resistance and outcomes. Later I found the sharper label in Richard Hammond's work on retail — friction and reward.

His writing comes from queues, checkouts, delivery promises, and the reality of customer choice. But the lens travels remarkably well. Because organisations are full of moments where someone is trying to do something — buy, return, ask, join, leave, learn, ship, decide — and in every one of those moments the question is quietly the same: how hard is it? And what do we get on the other side?

The two forces that determine whether work actually moves

In the Idea to Value system, everything between an idea and its realised value is cost. That cost accumulates through friction — through every unnecessary step, every pointless approval, every broken handoff, every missing piece of information that sends someone back to the start.

Friction is not always visible from above. It is felt by the people living inside it, every day, and it shapes whether they give their best or their least.

Reward is the other side. It is what makes the effort feel worth it. In retail the reward is obvious: price, speed, convenience, reliability. In work it is subtler. Reward can be progress you can see, autonomy you can feel, mastery you are allowed to build. Purpose that is not a poster. Fairness that shows up in actual decisions. Belonging that is not conditional on performance.

When reward is real, people tolerate considerable friction. When reward is thin, even small frictions become unbearable — a clumsy process becomes a daily insult.

The quadrant makes this visible.

High friction, low reward is where things rot. Customers abandon. Employees shrug. Good intentions turn into fatigue. This is where the best people quietly leave — not dramatically, but just stop.

High friction, high reward is where people tolerate the effort. They queue if the price is right. They persevere if the outcome matters. The low-cost supermarkets that have long queues and fast-moving tills are a good example — the friction is real but the price is the reward, and the trade is understood. Not every high-friction situation should be fixed. Some friction is load-bearing.

Low friction, low reward is smooth but forgettable. Easy to acquire but easy to lose. The frictionless experience that delivers nothing worth remembering.

Low friction, high reward is the obvious sweet spot. Not always achievable. But worth recognising — and worth designing toward deliberately.

What friction really is

Friction is anything that makes good work harder than it needs to be.

The extra step nobody can explain the origin of. The sign-off that adds weeks but no value. The broken system that everyone works around. The missing information that sends people back to the beginning. The report written for nobody. The meeting held because the calendar says so.

It is also political friction — where truth is risky, where clarity has consequences, where people learn to talk around reality rather than engage with it. This is the most damaging kind, because it compounds. A culture where surfacing problems is punished produces a culture where problems are hidden — and hidden problems grow.

Not all friction is bad. Some friction protects. Some prevents harm. Some is the cost of being careful, of maintaining standards, of keeping the business operating. The problem is unexamined friction — the friction nobody owns, the friction that has accumulated over time and become "just how it is here." That friction is always a choice, even when nobody can remember making it.

Context changes everything

One of the most useful parts of Hammond's thinking is the role of context — what he calls need states and modifiers.

A need state is what someone is trying to do. A modifier is what changes the urgency, the tolerance, the emotional weather around that attempt. A customer browsing is not the same as a customer whose business is completely unable to operate and losing money every hour. An employee exploring an idea is not the same as an employee trying to unblock a failing launch at 4:45 on a Friday.

The same friction can be tolerable in one moment and explosive in another. This is how organisations consistently solve the wrong problem. They design the system for an ideal day — calm, unhurried, operating as intended — and then act surprised when reality, with its modifiers, arrives and the system fails.

The right question is not "is this friction?" but "what does this friction feel like to someone in the state they are actually in?"

Three examples in practice

Recruitment.

One organisation I worked with had a hiring process that took two to three months from application to decision. We plotted it on the quadrant: high friction, low reward. Not only was the process long, but the organisation itself was not yet a good place to work. The best candidates — the ones with options — simply did not wait.

We reduced the friction first: restructured the process, cut the stages, gave managers direct authority to move quickly. Then we worked on the reward side: better management, clearer direction, genuine development opportunities, an honest culture.

Over several months we moved from high friction/low reward to low friction/high reward. The hiring timeline dropped from months to two weeks. The quality of candidates improved. The organisation started competing for talent it had no right to attract before.

Software delivery.

The same organisation was releasing software every eighteen months. High friction throughout — slow requirements, slow build, slow testing, slow deployment. And low reward — by the time something shipped, the market had moved. Features arrived too late to matter. Teams lost belief that their work connected to outcomes.

We addressed the friction across the whole delivery system: clearer requirements, smaller batches, better tooling, removal of approval stages that added time without adding safety. Within a year and a half we were shipping daily. Not because we pushed harder — because we removed what was in the way.

Customer support.

A large customer support function had a process with twenty-five stages. Not because twenty-five stages were needed, but because the team had learned to protect themselves from a management report generated every Wednesday at 3pm showing how many cases were in each person's queue.

To avoid being called out, people had learned to distribute cases across different buckets — legitimate work turned into performance management theatre.

We removed the report, streamlined the process to five stages, and focused on first-contact resolution. Within months the team was resolving around 80% of cases on the first call. Employee satisfaction improved significantly. The teams started working together rather than protecting their individual queues.

The friction had been organisationally created — and organisationally removing it changed everything.

Why this matters for ideas becoming value

The friction and reward lens sits directly inside the Physics layer of the Idea to Value system — the layer that asks how investment and effort move toward value, and where they stall.

Every initiative is moving through a friction landscape. The question is always: where is the friction, is it examined or unexamined, is the reward on the other side worth the cost of the friction on this side, and what would need to change to move this from one quadrant to another?

Friction is rarely accidental for long. It is created by choices — policies, structures, incentives, approval chains — often made with good intent and left unedited. Leaders control the conditions that determine whether friction accumulates or gets cleared. They also control the conditions that make reward credible: what gets recognised, what gets protected, what gets resourced.

A business can survive a lot of friction if the reward is honest. In a world where customers can switch and employees can leave, high friction with low reward is not a stable equilibrium. It is a slow exit. People do not always protest. They just stop.

Friction and reward is not a motivational idea. It is a lens. A way of seeing work as it is, rather than as it is described. And when that lens is used carefully and honestly — with data, not just observation — it makes improvement practical again. Not mystical. Just human. Just real.

Learning Notes

These are "learning notes" - real notes created for personal learning using the 4 step Personal Knowledge Management System of capture, curate, crunch and contribute. What you see here is part of step 4 - contribution.