Friction gets a bad press. I don't think it should.
Around a year ago, I wrote a short piece on Friction, and got some generous and thoughtful flak from a reader in the USA. A marine, he was steeped in the notion of friction as embodied in concepts of mission command, where friction is anything that slows down strategy execution. From his standpoint of course, he was right.
Friction as inefficient versus friction as signal.
A lesson for me. Be clear. What I was focused on was friction as a signal of resistance, of something not working. A constraint, as in a beautiful constraint where we turn the constraint to advantage. From "we can't because" to "we can if"
The position we currently find ourselves in brought it to mind. As we struggle with the unknowns of Coronavirus, and even more with the unthinking fear it generates in people, we are faced with a tsunami of "we can't because".
Serious though the issue is, it's a learning opportunity. The things we can't do - fly, meet up, buy hand san…
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