Picture an engineer who wants to thank a colleague for staying late to help him. He opens the recognition portal. Password reset. Two-factor code. A dropdown of categories. A minimum word count. Manager approval. Half a minute in, he closes the tab.
Two months later, the leadership team looks at the portal’s dismal usage and concludes: our people aren’t engaged.
They have diagnosed the wrong disease.
The spark has a short life
The impulse to do the right thing — thank someone, share an idea, flag a problem — is a spark. It lasts seconds. If acting on it is easy in that moment, it happens. If it isn’t, it’s gone, and no poster or campaign brings it back.
BJ Fogg’s Behaviour Model puts it simply: behaviour happens when motivation, ability and a prompt come together. When ability is very low — when the action is hard — even high motivation can’t carry it over the line. Kurt Lewin made the same point decades earlier: you can push harder on the driving forces, or you can remove the restraining ones. Removing restraints is usually cheaper and works better.
A confession from a process builder
I spent years building control-heavy processes in large corporations, proud of every approval layer that stopped someone abusing the system. Looking back, most of those controls protected us from a tiny minority while taxing everyone else, every day.
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein call this kind of unnecessary friction sludge. Good design nudges people towards the right behaviour; sludge quietly pushes them away from it.
Defaults show how powerful this is. Johnson and Goldstein’s 2003 study of organ donation found dramatically different consent rates between countries with opt-in and opt-out systems — not because people cared differently, but because the default made one path easier.
Where friction kills culture
- Recognition. A separate portal with approvals, versus thanking someone in one click inside the tools people already use.
- Frontline ideas. A formal business case, versus a quick voice note and a small budget teams can spend without asking.
- Learning. A clunky learning system, versus short, timely nudges in the flow of work.
Become a Chief Friction Hunter
The leader’s job is less about pushing people and more about clearing their path. Four practical moves:
- Run the 30-second test. Time how long it takes a real employee to do the behaviours your culture depends on. Anything over 30 seconds or three clicks is broken. → The 30-Second Test
- Audit your “1% rules”. For every control, ask: what would abuse actually cost, and what does policing everyone cost? Netflix famously replaced a detailed travel policy with five words: act in Netflix’s best interest.
- Put culture in the flow of work. Recognition, feedback and learning should live where people already work — not in yet another destination.
- Hold a Red Tape Demolition Derby. Let people nominate the most pointless rules, and have leaders scrap the worst ones in public. → Red Tape Demolition Derby
Removing friction is a form of respect — for people’s time, their energy and their good intentions. Most people want to do the right thing. Our job is to make it easy.
This article was writte by Roshan Thiran, a thought-leader and authority on culture transformation from Budaya. Reach Roshan at [roshan.thiran@budaya.app](mail: roshan.thiran@budaya.app)