Finding friction

On a windy hill in Lancashire there sits a crag called Thorn Crag. Gritstone boulders scattered around. Often wet, such is the way in Lancashire, and on those days, it's best avoided. The tiny holds, hold nothing at all. But on a cold crisp winter day, it becomes something else entirely. Sharp rock so grippy, those holds meaningful. It was here, on such a day I first nailed a 7a - And for my Next Trick (not me in the video ;). And it felt magical indeed. I'd found the friction that made it possible.

I've spend more time than I care to remember thinking about friction. Coefficients of friction, drag, crag condition. Sometimes it was trying to reduce friction, but often, as strange as it sounds, I was trying to add more.

To reach a 7a didn't just take the right conditions, it took the right conditioning. Hours on a 45 degree board, or weighted pull ups. Adding resistance, to build up strength. And footwork, this one especially required good footwork, applying as much force into tiny holds. Friction.

Our advancements as a society have often resulted in reducing friction, whether as the intended outcome, or as a way of encouraging behaviour. Many of these have improved our lives, but have they all? Satnavs reduced the friction of navigation. No more reading maps and plotting routes, just a start point and an end point and with real time data, they can adapt your route for you. You don't even need to think as you go. Are we lost?

Contactless payments massively reduced friction at the point of sale for both customer and seller. But is it too easy? Amazon, the masters of reducing friction introduced One Click pay. Don't think, just click. Instagram and Ticktock reduced the friction of choosing what to watch, turn it on, and instantly and continuously you are fed media. Frictionlessly.

We are at an age where easy answers are everywhere. The massed knowledge of civilizations across civilizations combined with advances in llm models means that answers are easy to find. Google reduced the Friction of finding information. Generative AI reduces the friction of producing an answer. It can remove the blank page, the search, the synthesis, the first draft, sometimes even the need to formulate the problem clearly.

But real work isn't always about answers, it's about the unpicking of things, of thinking critically, of knowing whether an easy answer the one to go with, or even if the question itself is the right one to start with. And more than that, it's going beyond easy answers to stretch ourselves to new heights, new ways of looking at things, of dreaming. Are there new ideas anywhere?

There is a book called "Do hard things". Much of the background behind it comes from physical challenges creating growth in both the physical and mental. Drawing from elite sports coaching, much of the learning points to our need to experience hard things, friction, to grow. Not constantly obviously, because physiological adaptation requires rest. Rest is part of the work.

And the same is true of our mental capability. We require time to slow down, to consider, to drift, for us to adapt. But in a world that is speeding up, where you can get easy answers, and move at such rapid pace, and you are almost expected to move at such pace, we are moving into dangerous territory.

The often quoted Thinking and Fast and Slow talks of two types of thinking System 1: fast, intuitive, automatic thinking and System 2: slower, effortful, deliberate thinking. The removal of friction from much of our thinking work means we need to be very deliberate in leaning into System 2 as a practice.

Maybe we need Productive Friction? Doug wrote (and sold out) his first zine recently on such a thing, various chapters all about intentional productive friction. It's not about making your life harder for the sake of it, far from it. But it is about noticing where friction is helpful. Noticing. Indeed the simple act of creating time, space to notice is an act in intentional productive friction. Next time you are on a train, look up from your phone, notice, let the mind wander.

When it comes to work, I've noticed a huge shift over the last couple of years. Where once people craved knowledge, now what I notice as most useful, is time and space to consider, to reflect, to pick apart the deluge of easy answers, and work through tricky problems. People now crave the opportunity to sit in the grey area of uncertainty (side note - petition to rename the grey area to kaleidoscope of colour).

And yet our systems and approaches are leaning more into the frictionless state, right when this is the last thing we need. In education there is a rise in easy to measure controlled learning, where our children are driven through uniform lessons, facts and recall, rinse and repeat. In the world of work we are prioritising efficiency and scale, especially when it comes to learning and change programmes. Our mental models for this have gone backwards, as the world has accelerated in the other direction. Because quick answers don't really solve things.

It's about working these through in reality, as often quick answers don't last in the reality of the world, when people are involved. We need space and time to work on them, reflect, adapt, evolve. We need less information, more time to processes. We are overwhelmed with access to knowledge and under prepared with how to integrate it. Our children are learning through rote learning, when it is the underpinning weaving of ideas and critical thinking that is needed. We need things to be hard sometimes. We need friction.