What Friction Can Tell Us About Leading Change
A practical reflection on the conditions that help change move through an organisation
Leaders are holding a lot right now.
There is the work of moving the organisation forward: keeping the strategy alive, responding to new expectations, showing progress on AI, and delivering against existing priorities.
Alongside that sits the human experience of change. People are learning new ways of working, questioning what comes next, repeating familiar patterns, and moving at different speeds.
In a recent Gather & Grow Leadership Lab with the Huckletree community, we invited leaders and change practitioners to pause and look beneath the activity. We explored a simple question:
What can the friction around change tell us about the conditions inside our organisations?
The conversation surfaced three vivid descriptions of what leading change feels like right now: stop and start, loud, and stilted.
Those words will feel familiar to many leaders. They describe momentum that exists, yet struggles to travel consistently through a team or organisation.
“I’d probably go with loud. There’s a lot of people... There’s lots of different types of groups that we’re rolling out a single project to.”
Leadership Lab participant
Friction is information
When progress feels uneven, our instinct can be to push harder, add another process, or try to persuade people more forcefully. A more useful first move is to pay attention.
Friction gives us information about the conditions around the work.
It might show us that:
the direction is clear to one group and vague to another
ownership sits with too few people
a process depends on access, knowledge, or authority that isn’t shared
teams are experimenting, but the learning isn’t travelling across the organisation
people understand what is changing, but haven’t connected with why it matters
activity has started before anyone has agreed what meaningful progress will look like
Seen this way, friction becomes a signal. It helps us locate where attention may be most useful.
This matters because change rarely stalls in one neat, isolated place. A new tool can expose an ownership issue. A slow approval process can reveal a gap in cross-functional clarity. Uneven adoption can point towards confidence, incentives, access, or the story people have been told about the change.
Before deciding what to fix, we need a clearer picture of what is happening.
Five conditions that shape sustainable change
At Gather & Grow, we use five interconnected pillars to understand how growth and change are moving through an organisation: Purpose, People, Process, Products, and Performance.
Together, they offer a practical way to look beneath the surface.
Purpose
Purpose gives people a direction and a reason to move. It helps a team connect everyday decisions with the wider intention behind the work.
During change, purpose needs to be close enough to use. The broad organisational mission matters, and so does the immediate answer to: Why are we doing this now?
When that answer is clear, it can become a filter for decisions and a thread that holds the change story together.
Questions worth asking:
What are we trying to make possible through this change?
How does this connect with the value we want to create?
Where could we bring the reason behind the work back into the conversation?
People
Change becomes real through people’s choices, confidence, and behaviour.
We need to look at whether ownership is clear, whether people have the authority to act, and whether they have the support and access required to contribute.
Sometimes the friction is very practical. One person may become a bottleneck because they have access to a tool that others don’t. In other cases, a team may be willing to move but uncertain about where decisions sit.
“Sometimes I become a bottleneck of certain tasks. I’m like, ‘Oh, you can get this done really quickly. Can you just put this through your Copilot?’”
Leadership Lab participant
Questions worth asking:
Where is ownership clear, and where is it blurred?
Who is carrying too much knowledge or responsibility?
What would help people participate with greater confidence?
Process
Process is the way work moves. It includes the rhythms, handovers, decisions, and points of coordination that help people work together.
In the Leadership Lab, one recurring challenge was inconsistency. Useful experiments were happening in one geography or team, yet the learning wasn’t spreading elsewhere. Other participants described rhythms that existed, then disappeared when priorities or people changed.
“There’s certain teams within an organisation, geographically, who seem to have the direction and the activity, but we’re just not able to replicate that everywhere.”
Leadership Lab participant
A process can look sensible on paper and still rely heavily on individual effort. The useful question is how the work behaves in practice.
Questions worth asking:
Which rhythms are helping us stay aligned?
Where does progress slow down between teams?
How are we sharing what we learn from experiments?
Products
Products asks whether our offers, services, and experiences are evolving with the people they serve.
A clear roadmap can create steadiness during wider organisational change. It gives teams something tangible to organise around. It also needs regular contact with customer and community insight, so that delivery remains connected to real needs.
Questions worth asking:
What are the people we serve experiencing now?
Where is our roadmap giving us clarity?
What have we learned that should shape our next decision?
Performance
Performance helps us see whether change is becoming real.
Traditional measures still matter. We also need earlier signals of movement: adoption, confidence, consistency, decision quality, reduced rework, or the ability for a new behaviour to continue when a key person steps away.
New initiatives often begin before these signals have been named. That makes it harder to learn from the work and adjust with intention.
Questions worth asking:
What would meaningful progress look like in the next 30, 60, or 90 days?
Which signs would tell us that a change is taking hold?
How will we learn and adapt as we go?
The pillars move together
These five areas are deeply connected. Pressure in one can affect the others.
A team might initially identify Process as the weakest area. A closer look may reveal that unclear Purpose is making it harder to prioritise, or that blurred ownership within People is slowing decisions. Performance may be difficult to measure because the intended outcome was never made specific enough.
This is why a quick solution can miss the real source of pressure. Taking a wider view helps us choose a more grounded place to begin.
Your strongest pillar matters too. It can provide something steady to lean on while another area needs attention. A shared sense of Purpose can support a difficult process change. Strong People conditions can help a team work through uncertainty. A clear Product roadmap can offer focus during a period of organisational transition.
“I feel like that could probably be built into our change story, or when we’re rolling out, to really hammer that home because it does resonate with people.”
Leadership Lab participant, reflecting on Purpose
Choose one place to begin
Seeing the whole picture can feel like a lot. The next step can be small and specific.
It might be:
a conversation to clarify ownership
a decision about what good looks like
a clearer explanation of why the change matters now
a regular rhythm for sharing learning between teams
a closer look at what people are experiencing day to day
The aim is to identify the place where attention could create useful movement, then involve the people closest to it.
You could begin with this reflection:
Where is friction showing up most clearly in our organisation, and what might it be telling us?
Pause before solving. Listen for the conditions beneath the visible problem. Then choose one next step that creates greater clarity, ownership, or connection.
“I think it’s just a really good way to navigate the next few weeks and months for us. Certainly something you can come back to.”
Leadership Lab participant
“They’re signals of what’s going on and where to focus your energy.”
Leadership Lab participant
Try the Gather & Grow Growth Assessment
The Growth Snapshot is a short reflective tool built around the five pillars. It helps you notice where your foundations are holding, where pressure may be accumulating, and which area deserves attention now.
We’re offering Huckletree members exclusive access to try the Snapshot and explore what it reveals about the change you’re leading.
Get in touch with Gather & Grow to request access. We’ll share the tool with you and offer a short conversation to help you reflect on your results and consider where to begin.
You’ll leave with a clearer view of the conditions around your work and a practical starting point for moving forward with your people.
