Alberto Terol

In this second episode of the “Change Pills” series, I’m reflecting on friction. You can enjoy the short video here:

In change management, we talk a lot about incentives and how to drive new behaviors. But lately, I’m convinced we are asking the wrong question. A few months ago, I listened to Richard Thaler, the Nobel laureate in behavioral economics, talking about the concept of “sludge“. Sludge is the small invisible friction that make good behavior harder than it needs to be. And that idea stayed with me.

Because when I look at most change initiatives, the problem is rarely a lack of incentives or motivation, because people are already wanting to do the right thing. They want to collaborate, they want to make better decisions. But what stops them is friction. So we respond by adding new incentives, bonuses, recognition, KPIs, nudges. But the incentives are deeply personal. What motivates one person does nothing for another. And worse, incentives create second-order effects we often don’t anticipate.

Friction works differently. When you remove friction, you don’t need to convince people. You simply allow behavior to flow. Like water, action is channeled toward the path of least resistance.

Take collaboration as an example. Collaboration is not something you promote, it’s something that emerges, or it doesn’t, depending on how the system is designed. If roles are unclear, if decision rights are ambiguous, or if risk is pushed downward while authority stays upward, or if metrics silently punish cooperation. Then, asking for more collaboration does not improve the system. It results in burnout.

So the real change management question is not how do we incentivize people to change. The real question is what frictions are making the desired behavior costly, heroic or invisible?

Because once friction is removed, change stops being rhetorical and becomes operational.

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Other key ideas worth exploring:

⭐️ “Sludge” (Richard Thaler): Administrative and cognitive friction that blocks desired behavior. https://lnkd.in/eqrZfAhh

⭐️ “Systems thinking” (Donella Meadows): Behavior follows structure, not intent. https://lnkd.in/eaQJ-kwn

⭐️ “Path of least resistance”: Outcomes are not caused, they are selected once thresholds shift. https://lnkd.in/eQ8ixbjY