Sliding into 2024
Source: ChatGPT-4/DALL-E
Think of it — gliding effortlessly, moving without impediment of any kind. Nothing in our way, nothing slowing us down. Nothing ruining our mood or stealing our precious energy. It feels like the ideal state, and if offered, you’d take it, right?
I was reminded of the need for friction on last weekend’s trip to Yosemite National Park. Huge flakes of snow built up to enhance the already gorgeous landscape. The rain that followed turned the park’s roads and paved footpaths into alternating slush and black ice fields. Tire chain rules were in effect, and I was glad for the Subaru’s all-wheel drive as we carefully steered around the 8-car pileup that had occurred just ahead of us. A lack of “good” friction at a critical time could have ended me.
Truly eliminating all friction, while theoretically possible, is not an achievable goal. Nor would it be desirable; without it, we couldn’t walk, climb, drive, or write, and the simple force of gravity would get the better of us all. However, vast amounts of time, effort, and capital are spent on finding ways to overcome it. The scientific discipline of tribology is devoted to it, and the abstract of a paper in their journal states:
“Growing concerns over energy and environmental sustainability have lately sparked worldwide interest in more efficient and cleaner transportation systems and industrial activities. Friction roughly consumes one-fifth of all energy used worldwide. One-third of all energy used in transportation goes to overcome friction. At the same time, the fruits of decades of dedicated research on all-electric vehicles powered by advanced batteries are paving the way toward a much cleaner and sustainable transportation future. In this article, we provide a short overview of what are the energy efficiency and environmental impacts of current transportation, industrial, and residential systems and how much of that efficiency is adversely affected by friction and wear losses in moving mechanical parts and components. We also touch upon recent advances in new materials, lubricants, and design changes that could reduce energy losses by 18–40%, mainly resulting from friction and wear. The savings would be up to 8.7% of the total global energy use and 1.4% of the gross national products (GNP). Finally, we calculate the energy consumption and friction losses in battery-powered electric passenger cars and show the benefit of electric cars where the total energy use is in average 3.4 times lower compared to combustion engine powered cars. The CO 2 emissions are 4.5 times higher for a combustion engine car compared to an electric car when the electricity comes from renewable energy sources. Moving from fossil to renewable energy sources may cut down the energy losses due to friction in energy production by more than 60%.”
The aims are valid and noble: increasing fuel efficiency through aerodynamic vehicle design ( to the extreme and challenging process of encasing travel pods in a vacuum tube from which all friction-causing air has been pulled), removing hair from a swimmer’s body to shave milliseconds that might separate a silver from a gold-medal finish and even reducing molecular friction to near-zero to make superconductivity possible. Much has been made lately of efforts to remove even non-physical friction from our lives-everything from commerce, customer experience, and trading markets are getting the treatment-and you can’t blame folks for trying.
We know that some friction is good for us. It literally “keeps us on the rails” and gives us the power to make our world move. If we’re not pushing against something (and feeling it push us back), we’re not moving forward. If we want to increase muscle mass, we need to add resistance-remove the basic friction resistance that maintains us, and those muscles atrophy. The sliding filament theory explores the biomechanical mechanisms of muscle function and supposes that internal friction between muscle fibers passing over each other is the reason we can lift and statically hold a weight. To become space-faring people beyond the short stretches already attempted, we’ll need to use friction and resistance embodied in machines like NASA’s Advanced Resistive Exercise Device (ARED) because those natural Earthbound pushes disappear as we leave our familiar envelope of atmosphere and gravity.
Societal good comes from it; taxes, laws, traffic signals, and government regulation are all forms of friction. They shape our behavior by slowing us down, allowing the lag to make us think about our actions and their consequences. The lack of resistance associated with social media interaction removes that behavioral drag at the cost of consequence and civility.
Clashes are natural as people with different ideas and ideals live and work next to one another. Intellectual, political, religious, and even generational friction have always been with us. Good citizenship depends on accepting and adapting to friction rather than trying to circumvent or banish it entirely.
In our personal lives and in business, it’s tempting to avoid the stickiness, the tension, the tough employee conversation that needs to happen and the dread of standing up to admit a mistake. We should seek to make friends with friction and respect it as a signal that makes us pause and pay attention. Its presence signifies an opportunity-either a surface against which we can push to propel us forward and upward or an obstacle to examine and adjust to, surmount, or eliminate. It rarely occurs without reason and seldom disappears without action. In cases where a bit of friction might do some good, creatively introduce it in the form of a change management process or a retrospective after-action exercise.
As we embrace and learn to harness it for ourselves, we turn that capability outward, identifying friction for our teams, companies, and clients and guiding their adaptations. More than most, it’s a skill that sets us ahead and apart as leaders.
