Three steps to build friction awareness in your organization

Understanding friction is one thing. Building systematic friction awareness into your organization is another. This final piece focuses on practical steps to move from insight to action.

Step One: Evaluate Your Present Condition

Before you can improve friction management, you need to understand your current state. Assess the maturity of your organization’s friction diagnostics. How mature is it? Where are the gaps in your existing transformation readiness evaluation?

Examine the conventional friction patterns observed in previous transformations. What patterns emerge? Where did resistance show up? Were there early warning signs that got ignored? What types of friction consistently create problems?

Interview transformation veterans in your organization. They’ve lived through the failures. They know where the bodies are buried. Their experience is invaluable for identifying common friction sources. Comprehend the common origins of organizational barriers.

Assess your current transformation methodology. Does it systematically evaluate friction across all four dimensions before implementation? Or does it focus primarily on technology and process design while treating people and organizational issues as afterthoughts?

Be honest about deficiencies in the existing transformation readiness evaluation. Most organizations have significant blind spots in friction assessment. Acknowledging this is the first step toward improvement.

Step Two: Implement the Friction-First Approach

Don’t try to transform your entire transformation methodology overnight. Start with a pilot on one upcoming initiative.

Implement the IPTA Friction Management Approach in an upcoming transformation. Apply the framework to identify four to six key frictions for this specific initiative. Do stakeholder interviews and workshops. Assess systematically across Human, Process, Organizational, and Ecosystem dimensions. Prioritize the frictions that matter most.

Design and implement interventions to address these friction points during planning, before they can escalate during implementation. Document the distinctions from the conventional approach. Document what you do, what works, and what doesn’t.

Compare results against your conventional approach. Track metrics like timeline variance, budget variance, and value realization. But also track qualitative indicators like stakeholder satisfaction and adoption rates.

Use this pilot to establish a compelling rationale for systematic implementation. Nothing convinces skeptics like demonstrated results on a real initiative.

Step Three: Develop Organizational Capacity

Once you’ve proven the approach works, the question becomes how to make it standard practice rather than a special pilot.

Incorporate friction diagnostics into your transformation methodology. Make systematic friction assessment a required gate in your governance process. No transformation gets funded without documented friction analysis.

Train transformation teams on the sixteen friction types and their diagnostic methods. This isn’t abstract theory. It’s practical skill development in identifying and addressing specific friction types.

Establish friction monitoring as a standard practice in governance. Regular checkpoints should assess whether new frictions are emerging and whether interventions are working.

Establish ongoing learning and record results for empirical validation. Document friction patterns, effective interventions, and lessons learned. Build this into a knowledge base that informs future transformations.

Over time, friction awareness becomes embedded in your organizational DNA. People naturally ask about friction during planning. They recognize early warning signals. They intervene proactively rather than waiting for crises.

The Critical Question

In an age where the capacity for transformation dictates competitive advantage, can you afford to manage change reactively? Or is it time to embed systematic friction prevention into your organizational DNA?

The 70 to 84 percent failure rate isn’t inevitable. It’s the predictable result of reactive approaches that wait for resistance to appear before taking action.

Organizations that systematically identify and address friction during planning consistently outperform those that don’t. They deliver on time and on budget more often. They capture more value. They build transformation capability that makes each successive initiative easier than the last.

The choice is yours. Join the 70 percent who fail by continuing reactive approaches. Or join the 30 percent who succeed by making friction prevention a core capability.

The methodology exists. The framework is proven. The question is whether you’re ready to make the shift from reactive change management to predictive transformation leadership.