The discomfort dividend
Most change programmes start from one assumption, reduce friction and people will do the right thing. Make the process easier. Remove the extra steps. Automate the decision. Lower the barrier. But this assumption is incomplete.
Our biology is still calibrated to a world that required effort. When everything becomes effortless, we lose more than inconvenience. We lose the conditions that create ownership, competence and lasting motivation.
There’s a growing interest in deliberately reintroducing small, chosen obstacles so that thinking, deciding and acting remain ours. Not hardship for its own sake, but the right amount of resistance in the places that matter.
In organisational change, customer experience and habit design, the same pattern appears. Stripping out every point of friction can remove the pause that makes a choice deliberate. Once that pause is gone, so is much of the sense that the outcome belongs to us. The more useful question isn't “How do we make this easier?”
It’s “Where does a little friction still serve the people we’re trying to help?”
Good change isn’t always about making things easier. Sometimes it’s about creating the right conditions for people to think, decide and act. If that’s a challenge you’re working through, get in touch.
"Friction-maxxing" has gone from internet in-joke to genuine cultural moment. Columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton coined the term in a January 2026 essay for The Cut, describing it not as a call to abandon technology, but as the deliberate practice of building tolerance for inconvenience: cooking from scratch, reading instead of scrolling, working something out yourself instead of asking an app. The BBC and the Guardian have since picked it up, one broadly sympathetic, the other more sceptical that this is anything new. Both are worth holding at once, because underneath the branding sits a genuinely useful question about how change and growth actually happen.
Why frictionless living has a cost
For most of human history, daily life supplied more effort than anyone wanted. Food had to be found and cooked. Places had to be walked to. Boredom and physical discomfort were simply part of being alive. Writing on evolutionary mismatch, researchers Norman Li, Mark van Vugt and Stephen Colarelli argue that many of the health and wellbeing problems common in industrialised societies exist because our biology is still calibrated to that effortful environment, while our surroundings have become dramatically easier. We did not evolve for convenience. We evolved for a world that pushed back.
Journalist Michael Easter makes a related argument in his book The Comfort Crisis, drawing on time with Kalahari hunter-gatherers and Alaskan wilderness expeditions to suggest that too much ease erodes the physical, mental and emotional capacities that make us resilient and satisfied. His concept of "misogi," a single, self-chosen hard challenge each year, is a structured way of reintroducing friction on purpose, rather than waiting for life to impose it.
The paradox at the centre of it
Classical models of decision-making treat effort as a cost, something we are wired to minimise. But psychologist Michael Inzlicht and colleagues describe what they call an effort paradox: effort is costly, and yet it also adds value, and we sometimes choose the harder path precisely because it is harder. Brain imaging backs this up, with reward centres responding more strongly when a payoff has required real work.
This matters for change work, which usually assumes the opposite, that reducing friction is always the goal. If effort itself carries motivational value, stripping all friction out of a change process, a learning programme, or a habit may remove the very thing that makes it stick.
Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's self-determination theory offers a reason why. Sustained motivation depends on three needs being met: autonomy, competence and relatedness. Frictionless systems quietly undermine all three, since a fully automated task leaves little sense of authorship, little chance to build competence, and is usually done alone. Deliberately chosen friction can restore all three at once. Cooking a proper meal instead of ordering one gives you authorship, a chance to improve at something, and often a reason to sit down with people.
The case study hiding in your wallet
Customer experience and service design were originally developed to make products genuinely more usable. Much of that work still holds, but a large share of the discipline's modern energy goes into a narrower goal: removing every point of friction between a customer and a completed transaction. The one-click purchase, the card saved on file, the subscription that renews without a prompt, each was designed with a reasonable intention, and each also makes it easier to spend money you had not quite decided to spend.
Behavioural economists Drazen Prelec and George Loewenstein describe this as the "pain of paying," the psychological discomfort of watching money leave your hand. Prelec and Duncan Simester tested it directly in a well-known 2001 auction experiment, finding that people bid roughly 60 to 100 per cent more for identical items when paying by credit card rather than cash. Later neuroimaging work by Prelec and Sachin Banker found that card purchases activate the brain's reward circuitry in a way cash does not, suggesting cards do not simply loosen the brake on spending, they press the accelerator. A card saved on file removes the pain of paying almost entirely, since even typing the number is gone.
That convenience carries a second cost. Every card saved on file is another piece of sensitive data sitting on a server, and retail remains one of the most targeted sectors for data breaches, with stored payment details a favourite target for theft and resale. The frictionless checkout that looks like good design from the front end is, from a systems view, a growing attack surface. Removing friction for the customer often means concentrating risk somewhere less visible.
A note of caution
None of this is an argument for making life needlessly hard, and the people most drawn to friction-maxxing are often those with the most convenience to spare. Choosing to walk instead of drive is a different proposition for someone with time, health and safety on their side than for someone without. Friction should be chosen, proportionate and reversible, not imposed as a virtue test. The goal is enough resistance to make effort meaningful, not so much that it becomes another source of depletion.
Putting friction back in, on purpose
Some of the most effective friction is small and easy to design in.
- Remove saved payment details and re-enter card numbers for discretionary or infrequent purchases, restoring a moment of pause before money moves.
- Add a short cooling-off step before larger or one-off transactions are confirmed, rather than a single tap.
- Build challenge into leadership processes, testing assumptions and exposing blind spots.
- Ask teams to diagnose a problem before bringing in a consultant. External expertise can then test and strengthen their thinking rather than replace it.
- Write a first draft by hand or from scratch before turning to a tool to refine it, so the thinking is still yours.
None of these make life harder for its own sake. They put a small, deliberate obstacle back between impulse and action, in the places where that pause is worth having.