The invisible problem that everyone feels
If you ask most executives what is holding their company back, they will point to external factors such as competition, market shifts, and regulatory changes. They rarely consider that the biggest growth killer is often inside the company.
Every business has friction points: small inefficiencies, redundant processes, outdated approvals, and bottlenecks in decision-making. At first, they are manageable, but as the company grows, they multiply.
Friction doesn’t show up on a balance sheet.
You won’t see it in a financial report.
You won’t get an alert when it slows a project down.
It doesn’t cause a catastrophic failure; it just drains energy, bit by bit, until everything feels harder than it should.
This is why executives struggle to diagnose it. When they feel the symptoms, like low morale, project delays, & stagnant growth, the root cause has been eating away at the organisation for years.
What is organisational friction?
Organisational friction is the cumulative drag created by small inefficiencies, disconnected systems, redundant approvals, unclear roles, and processes that haven’t kept up with the scale of the business.
These issues are deeply felt by everyone on the ground.
It shows up as:
- Meetings that multiply but rarely move decisions forward.
- Employees stuck in loops of rework and clarification.
- Approval chains that feel more like obstacle courses.
- Talent spending time on admin rather than impact.
- A culture of waiting replacing a culture of action.
How friction creeps into growth?
Friction doesn’t arrive all at once. It sneaks in, quietly embedding itself into daily operations. No one sounds the alarm. And so, it grows until it’s cultural. Here’s how:
- Processes designed for a smaller business no longer scale.
- The approval process that made sense when you were a 50-person company becomes a bureaucratic nightmare at 150 employees.
- Workflows that were once flexible are now rigid, forcing employees to work around them rather than through them.
- Technology that was ‘good enough’ starts holding people back.
- Employees waste hours manually updating spreadsheets because systems don’t integrate.
- Customer data is scattered across multiple tools, making insights difficult to access.
- Legacy systems require workarounds, adding complexity instead of efficiency.
- Decisions slow down
- More layers of approval are added "just to be safe."
- Meetings multiply as alignment becomes harder to achieve.
- A culture of waiting replaces a culture of action.
- Employee energy gets wasted on the wrong things
- High-value employees spend time on administrative tasks instead of strategic work.
- Teams get caught in endless loops of rework due to unclear processes.
- Small inefficiencies add up, leading to widespread frustration.
This is how a once-agile company starts feeling heavy. Growth slows, not because the market changed, but because the internal mechanics of the company started working against itself.
How to identify If organisational friction is slowing your growth?
How do I know if this is happening in my organization?
The signs are subtle:
- Teams are working harder but producing less.
Employees are constantly "busy," yet deadlines keep slipping.
- High-performers are frustrated.
Your best people spend more time dealing with bureaucracy and roadblocks than solving real business problems.
- Meetings are increasing, but decisions aren’t getting faster.
You’re adding "alignment meetings" to fix issues that never existed before.
- You hear phrases like "That’s just how we do things here."
Employees have accepted inefficiency as normal.
- Customer experience is suffering.
Bottlenecks in internal processes lead to slower service, missed opportunities, and increased complaints.
If these sound familiar, friction is already costing you.
The lesson for every growing business
Every company hits an invisible wall where internal friction becomes the biggest barrier to growth. The best leaders don’t just set vision — they clear the path so their teams can move faster, with purpose and clarity.
So, here’s the real question:
Where is friction hiding in your organisation? And what is it quietly costing you, every single day?
The way forward
Tackling organisational friction doesn’t require a massive transformation. Often, it's about the right adjustments, streamlining what already exists, clarifying ownership, integrating the tools you already use, and shifting the mindset from process-first to outcomes-first.
Start by asking:
- What are our teams spending time on that doesn’t create value?
- Where are decisions getting stuck?
- Which systems or habits have outlived their usefulness?
When you focus on eliminating friction at the systemic level, not just in isolated teams or tools — the change is transformative. Projects accelerate. Accountability becomes clearer. Teams are more energised, not more burdened. And execution becomes a competitive advantage, not a daily struggle.
This isn’t about working harder — it’s about creating the conditions for your organisation to move faster, with greater clarity, and less resistance.
How we can help
At Inite, we partner with growing organisations to remove the internal friction that holds them back. If you’re exploring how to scale without slowing down, our Digital Transformation as a Service model gives you a structured way to do just that — without adding more complexity. We’d be glad to share what we’ve seen work across industries.
Contact us to clear the path to faster growth.
