Hidden Cost of Friction

Friction Is the Real Resource Problem

Every organization has limited resources: limited money, limited staff, limited volunteers, limited hours in the day. Because of those limitations, leaders spend an incredible amount of time asking questions like “How do we raise more money?” or “How do we recruit more volunteers?” or “How do we hire another employee?”

Those are important questions. They just aren’t the first ones I ask anymore.

Over the years I’ve become convinced that many organizations don’t have a resource problem. They have a time problem. More specifically, they have a friction problem. Every unnecessary step, every duplicate phone call, every email that could have been avoided, every hour spent searching instead of serving — all of it steals time from the very people the organization depends upon most. The tragedy is that most organizations never measure it.

We Celebrate the Wrong Metrics

Walk into almost any nonprofit and you’ll find a dashboard filled with impressive numbers: families served, meals distributed, volunteers engaged, pounds of food collected, clothing provided, grant dollars received. None of those numbers are wrong. They’re simply incomplete.

Imagine two organizations. Both help one hundred families this month. On paper, they’re identical. But one organization requires its staff to spend three hours coordinating resources for every family. The other requires fifteen minutes. Did they really produce the same impact? Most reports would say yes. I would argue no.

One organization quietly consumed hundreds of hours performing work that never directly benefited a single family. Those hours came from somewhere. A school counselor spent less time with students. A case manager met with fewer families. A nonprofit leader postponed another project. Someone paid the price — the family simply never saw the bill.

The Cost Nobody Budgets For

Most organizations budget for payroll, rent, insurance, technology, and utilities. Very few budget for friction. Yet friction may be one of the largest expenses they incur.

Think about how many times professionals perform work that adds no value to the person they’re trying to help: searching for information, calling multiple organizations, waiting for responses, explaining the same situation repeatedly, tracking down the right contact, looking for paperwork, trying to remember who helped last time. None of those activities solve the problem. They simply delay the moment someone finally can.

The irony is that many organizations become so accustomed to this work they begin accepting it as normal. It isn’t. It’s simply expensive.

A Different Question

Early in my career, I probably would have asked, “How do we solve this problem?” Today I ask something different: “Why does this work exist in the first place?”

That’s a completely different question. One seeks a better answer. The other questions whether the process itself deserves to exist. Those questions rarely produce the same solution.

Time Is a Leadership Decision

We often talk about time as though it’s fixed. It isn’t. Leaders create time every day — not by adding hours to the clock, but by removing work that never should have existed.

Every unnecessary approval, every duplicate entry, every disconnected system, every extra phone call, every avoidable delay — these aren’t inconveniences. They’re leadership decisions. Whether intentional or accidental, someone designed that process. Which means someone can redesign it.

The Lesson We Learned

Years ago, while working with professionals across North Texas, I noticed something. School counselors weren’t struggling because they couldn’t recognize children who needed help. Police officers weren’t struggling because they couldn’t identify families in crisis. Case managers weren’t struggling because they lacked compassion. They were struggling because responding often required hours of additional work — finding the right organization, determining who had resources available, making phone calls, waiting, trying again. None of that improved the outcome. It simply delayed it.

So instead of asking, “How do we distribute more resources?” we asked, “How do we eliminate the work that keeps professionals from helping people?”

That one question changed everything. The answer wasn’t another warehouse. It wasn’t another program. It wasn’t another spreadsheet. It was a system — a system designed around the professional instead of the organization, one that reduced friction and returned time. And when professionals got their time back, something remarkable happened: they spent it doing the work only they could do. Helping people.

Every Organization Has Friction

This isn’t just a nonprofit issue. Businesses experience it. Schools experience it. Hospitals experience it. Governments experience it. Churches experience it. Every organization accumulates friction over time. Processes are added. Approvals multiply. Forms expand. Meetings increase. No one intended to make work harder. It just happened.

The question every leader should ask isn’t “Where do we need more resources?” It’s “Where are we wasting the resources we already have?” Those are two very different conversations.

A Challenge

This week, choose one process inside your organization. Not your biggest process — just one. Follow it from beginning to end: every email, every phone call, every approval, every handoff. Then ask one simple question: “Which of these steps actually improves the outcome for the person we’re trying to serve?”

You may discover that much of the work exists because it’s always existed, not because it creates value. That’s where innovation begins — not with new technology, not with bigger budgets, not with additional staff, but with a better question.

Final Thoughts

The organizations that create the greatest impact are rarely the ones with the largest budgets. They’re the ones that relentlessly remove friction. Because every minute a professional spends searching is a minute they aren’t serving. And when you multiply those minutes across an entire organization, across an entire year, across an entire community, removing friction becomes one of the greatest gifts a leader can give — not because it saves time, but because it gives people their time back.