Back in 2005, when I first joined the SUNY Buffalo CSE department, the department secretary was a wonderful lady named Joann, who was over 60. She explained that my travel reimbursement process was simple: I'd just hand her the receipts after my trip, she'd fill out the necessary forms, submit them to the university, and within a month, the reimbursement check would magically appear in my department mailbox.

She handled this for every single faculty member, all while managing her regular secretarial duties. Honestly, despite the 30-day turnaround, it was the most seamless reimbursement experience I've ever had.

But over time the department grew, and Joann moved on. The university partnered with Concur, as corporations do, forcing us to file our own travel reimbursements through this system. Fine, I thought, more work for me, but it can't be too bad. But, the department also appointed a staff member to audit our Concur submissions.

This person's job wasn't to help us file reimbursements, but to audit the forms to find errors. Slowly but surely, it became routine for every single travel submission to be returned (sometimes multiple times) for minor format irregularities or rule violations. These were petty violations no human would care about if the goal were simply to get people reimbursed. The experience degraded from effortless to what could be perceived as adversarial.

This was a massive downgrade from the Joann era.

This story (probably all to familiar to many) illustrates the danger of not setting the right intention regarding friction. If the goal isn't actively set to help and streamline the process (if the intention isn't "how do we solve this?"), the energy of the system inevitably shifts toward finding problems. Friction becomes the product.

This dynamic is not just true for organizations, it is also true for each of us.

We have to manage the stories we tell ourselves. These stories, whether we tell them knowingly or unknowingly, determine how we manage/conduct ourselves, which in turn determines our success. Just as organizations can start to manufacture friction, individuals can do the same internally. You can install an internal auditor in your own mind.

When intention shifts away from growth, things degrade. You stop asking how to move forward and start looking for violations. You nitpick and reject your own efforts before it has a chance to mature. You begin to find ways to grate against your own progress.

I wrote about this concept previously in my post "Your attitude determines your success". That post tends to get two very different reactions. It gets nitpicked to pieces by cynics (the auditors), and it gets a silent knowing nod from people in the know (the builders). Brooker recently wrote career advice along the same lines, reinforcing that high agency mindset. In a similar vein, I wrote about recently to optimize for momentum.

“When there is a will, there is a way,” as the saying goes. Get the intention right and friction dissolves. Get it wrong and you may end up weaponizing process, tooling, and auditing against your own goals.