The leaders who thrive in the age of AI will be the ones who know how to detect friction, read it, and decide what to do with it.
Friction is suddenly everywhere. A deal falls apart and we blame unexpected friction. A relationship cools and we call it friction. Even the geopolitical map gets described in terms of friction, which is often just shorthand for hard to navigate. When one word starts doing that much work, it usually means we are circling something we have not named yet.
So let me try to name it.
The most useful definition of friction is almost two centuries old. The Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz borrowed the word from physics to capture the gap between the plan and reality. Everything in war is very simple, he wrote, but the simplest thing is difficult. Friction, for him, was the accumulation of small resistances that separate war on paper from war as it actually unfolds.
Notice what that reframe does. Friction is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is the texture of the real. It is what you feel the moment a clean idea meets an untidy world.
We seem to have forgot this. For about thirty years, business treated friction as a headache, a pesky irritant. Something that prevented us from achieving our goals more quickly. The goal now is to be a leader who creates a frictionless workplace. One click. One meeting. One step removed. Now that's real progress. And somewhere in the pursuit of hassle-free work, we started to believe that any resistance at all was a defect to be eliminated.
Then AI arrived: the most frictionless machine we have ever built.
The First Answer Is the Trap
Here's where it gets interesting for leaders, and a more than a little uncomfortable. Our proclivity these days is to jump straight to the first answer. Think about the last time you put a query into Google and then dove deeper rather than simply accepting the first thing it threw at you. Today, we ask, and AI answers instantly, fluently, confidently. It feels like a gift. And you know what they say about things that too good to be true.
In our need for speed we hide risks. When we let the tool figure it out for us and move on, we skip the very friction that might have told us we were off base or expose new data sets we didn't even know we should ponder. It's these questions that we didn't ask or taking more seriously the perplexed look on a colleague's face when we laid out a course of action.
These forms of friction are actually information. Don't be the leader who defaults to frictionlessness problem solving. That will only lead to weak decision making.
Not all friction is the same. Let's look at some of different kinds of friction and how you can use them.
Good friction protects you. It's the cooling-off period before a big decision, the moment your gut tells you this issue needs a bit more soak time. It's the “are you sure?” your trusted team member asks before a next irreversible step is taken. It's stopping to actually read the five thousand word statement before you hit "I agree".
Bad friction works against you. This kind of friction is designed to make you give up: the longish pauses AI makes you suffer through on more complex work. Do you wait? Or just simply dumb down the query and take the faster route? It's also rejecting that first pass AI has given you. How many of us admire that first perfectly formatted response, failing to absorb the content fully? Nine times out of ten that "Well, it looks good to go" feeling that will result in submitting a mediocre piece of work. And guess what? These days, everyone knows that's it's just AI slop. Not a good look for a leader.
The skill here is not removing friction. It is telling them apart and knowing which one you are standing in.
You Can't Read Friction You Can't Feel
All of that discernment depends on one thing: your ability to notice that you have hit a pocket of friction in the first place. And that's not an analytical skill. It is a relational one.
If you are not in tune with yourself, you'll miss the internal friction: the uneasiness in your gut, the quiet “something is off here” that we talk ourselves out of. And if you're not in tune with others, you'll miss the friction moving through the room or the zoom call: strained silences, synthetic team behaviour, weak accountability, lack of debate, or low energy.
Picking up on friction is at the heart of the research I conducted for my book, "The Compassion Advantage". Self-awareness and being attuned to others are not soft extras. They are the instruments that detect friction. Without them, we fly straight through resistance we cannot see and wonder later why we crashed.
Leaders who lose the thread will not fail because they lacked information. They'll lose because they ignored the signals of friction.
Become a Friction Hunter
These days, I spend a lot of time helping leaders become friction hunters. Not people who eliminate friction, and not people who simply brace against it, but people who go looking for it because they have learned that a pocket of friction is gold. Friction hunting is a practice, and it has a rhythm:
First, feel it. In your next meeting or next time you're embarking on a new project, take a good thirty minutes to document all of the forms of friction you're likely to encounter. Think about previous resistance you've met with that you might have just powered through rather than worked through.
Second, name it. What kind of friction is this? Good friction protecting me from a decision I am not ready to make? Sludge placed in my path on purpose? Relational friction telling me that a person, not a process, needs my attention?
Third, decide how you want to move. Sometimes you may decide that more information is needed, other times it may be that you need to sound out influencers in your organization to gain more perspective. Sometimes, you'll detect it's slop. Don't let shoddy work become an acceptable norm. Address it for what it is and rally team members to get to the real issue. And sometimes, counterintuitively, you may want to add friction on purpose: hold a think tank, bring in an expert, step back and look for forces that may be slowing the decision down in your organization. In these cases, force a second look, protect people from their own speed.
Friction Is Being Used on All of Us
Because make no mistake: friction is now being used on all of us, and the world genuinely is filling up with it. Analysts have even started describing a friction economy, compounded by hundreds of billions in added cost flowing through borders, tariffs and tangled supply chains.
Friction is being weaponized too. Disinformation spreads because sharing is frictionless while checking is not. Delay, red tape and noise get deployed on purpose to wear people down. Leaders who cannot feel friction cannot tell when it is being engineered against them.
Friction is never neutral. Whoever controls it holds power.
Which brings me back to harnessing friction, while never underestimating it. After decades of being told to strip friction out, leaders today are deliberately putting some back: choose a face to face meeting over a text message if the gravity of the situation calls for it, read the full document instead of the summary, do the harder thing on purpose because that's where leadership responsibility lives.
Turns out the frictionless dream is sorely missing the human touch. The defining leadership skill of this decade will not be the ability to remove friction. It'll be the ability to discern it: to feel it early, read it honestly, and choose what to do with it.
The first answer will always be the easy one. The friction is what stands between you and the right one.
BE A FRICTION HUNTER.
What friction are you tempted to remove right now that might be trying to tell you something?