In a startup it's important to reduce friction. The main asset available to you is to go fast. If you can't do that, you won't beat the competition.

It's often the small things that create the most friction. Minor issues compound in to major problems. This can be due to frequency multiplication, context switching penalties or motivation drain.

Here are some of the common areas I see friction in startups:

• Approval processes with either unnecessary steps or unclear criteria. For example, purchasing a license to a critical piece of software.

• Unclear decision making authority. When it's unclear who is the person who can actually say yes to a decision. Does it always have to be the founder or CEO, or can they hand off some decisions to other people?

• When requirements aren't locked down. When there's uncertainty within the team on what is actually being built and a real danger of scope creep beyond what is really important.

• Documentation that is hard to find. When it isn't clear which tool is the right place to document, processes get documented in different places or nowhere at all. They get lost.

• Information overload without clear prioritisation creates cognitive overload. When every task is shouting for attention at once it's hard for the team to understand what is important.

• Pull requests that take days to review. Either due to the right people being unavailable, or due to the size of the code change, or a lack of coding style guidelines.

Looking for Friction

You can spot the signs of friction within an organisation by looking for these signals:

• Tasks that people avoid or continuously delay
• Processes where people create informal workarounds
• Complaints that seem disproportionate to the size of the problem
• Things that require knowledge from one specific person to navigate

Removing Friction

If it isn't clear where the friction is in your company, and asking around hasn't helped, then a value stream mapping exercise can help you to understand the issue.

By carrying out this exercise you can map out your workflows and learn about the duration and effort it takes to complete each step. Walk through the steps with the people who actually do the work and look for steps that take a disproportionately long period of time, require multiple people or require re-work.

Focus on areas where there is wait time between activities or the same information needs to be gathered repeatedly are good candidates for removing friction.

The pattern across all these friction points is the transition cost - the overhead from moving between states. The highest-impact improvements often come from either eliminating these transitions entirely or making them so smooth they become invisible.

Where do you see friction in your organisation?