Process friction

Process friction is the operational analogue of friction in physics: the additional energy that has to be supplied to move work through the system, on top of the energy the work itself requires. Sources include redundant approvals, hand-offs between systems that do not share data, repeated information requests, and approval queues that exist for historical rather than current reasons.

In the Frustration Condition framework, process friction frequently presents as Approval Loops or Priority Churn: work that has to be redone because guidance shifted, or reviewed by overlapping authorities whose criteria are not aligned. The friction is what people experience as "effort that does not produce progress".

Reducing friction is not the same as reducing process. The intervention is to remove what is no longer load-bearing — approvals whose original risk is gone, hand-offs whose justification has expired — not to remove the structural protections that exist for a current reason.