5 ACTIONABLETIPS TO REDUCECOLLABORATIVE FRICTION
Leaders, keep scrolling to learn how to resolve systemic causes of collaborative dysfunction and unlock your team's potential.
WHAT IS COLLABORATIVE FRICTION?
Definition:
"The challenges, obstacles and tensions that emerge when individuals or teams work together toward a common goal, hindering productivity and innovation."
Manifesting as:
- Miscommunication and misunderstandings
- Misaligned priorities and expectations
- Conflicting responsiblities
- Complex dependencies
- Unresolved conflicts and tension
- Inefficient decision-making
- Alignment issues
- Lack of trust and psychological safety
- Inefficient decision-making processes
- Decreased team morale and engagement
COLLABORATIVE FRICTION OFTEN EMERGES FROM STRUCTURAL, CULTURAL, AND COMMUNICATION GAPS.
Common Causes:
- Siloed organizational structures create delays and handoffs, and complicates unifying around a shared vision.
- Lack of clarity leads teams to move in different directions, to duplicate work or to deliver the wrong thing..
- Competing stakeholder priorities lead to constant re-prioritization, task switching and confusion.
- Rigid Hierarchies & Top-Down decision making disempowers teams, leading to frustration and delay.
- Communication bottlenecks lead to misunderstandings, missed opportunities and reduces trust.
LEADERS,
HERE ARE 5 ACTIONABLE TIPS TO LIMIT COLLABORATIVE FRICTION
TIP 1: EMBRACE THE IDEA OF "END-TO-END EVERYTHING"
When teams (and their leaders) only focus on their own slice of the process, they're blind to downstream dependencies and customer the overall customer journey.
This siloed approach leads to hidden dependencies and complexity, slow decision-making, and suboptimal outcomes for customers. When accountability is fragmented, no one truly ‘owns’ the customer experience from start to finish.
So... When we're delivering projects how can we work more 'End-to-End?'
Key Idea: Structure teams and work around the entire value stream or customer journey rather than isolated functions.
- Use an end-to-end Service Blueprint or Value Stream diagram to create a shared understanding of the entire process. This helps teams understand the dependencies and the impact of their work on the overall customer journey.
- Build cross-functional teams using your Service Blueprint that take collective responsibility for every stage—from customer request to final delivery.
TIP 2: EMPOWER DECISION MAKING AT THE POINT-OF-KNOWLEDGE
Rigid hierarchies and top-down approvals slow down decision-making and create bottlenecks.
Often, the decision making is done by a single person or a small group of people who do not have the full picture. For particularly complex decisions, contextualizing the decision is time-consuming, and teams spend more time building powerpoint decks, socializing intent and waiting for approvals than actually delivering value.
What can be done?
Key Idea: Empower teams to make local decisions, experiment, and pivot quickly without excessive gatekeeping.
- Define decision boundaries so that squads know what they can decide independently—and trust them to iterate without excessive sign-offs.
- For larger initiatives, empower a small group of leads to make decisions on behalf of the wider stakeholder group.
TIP 3: ESTABLISH FEEDBACK LOOPS
Work is performed in large batches with little customer or stakeholder input until it's too late.
Late feedback leads to extensive rework and wasted time on features people don't want or need. This forces reprioritization, handoffs, delays, frustrationand misalignment.
"So... What feedback loops should we establish?"
Key Idea: Book frequent check-ins and user validation sessions to iterate quickly and course-correct early.
- Adopt short sprints (2 weeks max), daily standups, and regular demos to spot issues quickly.
- Leverage metrics reviews, operations reviews and retrospectives to spot emerging issues early on and resolve them.
TIP 4: WORK IN THIN SLICES OF VALUE
Teams develop large, monolithic features all at once, leading to late discovery of problems.
Big-bang deliveries hide complexity and make it hard to learn or pivot until too much is built.Users only see final outputs, so critical feedback arrives too late to avoid rework.
How can we frame our work in thin slices of value?
Key Idea: Deliver smaller, end-to-end increments that can be validated with real users or stakeholders quickly.
- Break down features into vertical slices that include UI, logic, and data layers, enabling rapid feedback and adjustments. (You can use your service blueprint to help you do this)
- For larger initiatives, break up the customer journey into meaningful chunks that can be delivered incrementally.
TIP 5: CREATE A SINGLE SOURCE OF TRUTH
Different teams store requirements, metrics, and project status updates in scattered tools or documents.
This 'information fragmentation' creates confusion, duplicated efforts, and misalignments since people rely on outdated or conflicting information.Critical data is often locked in silos, making it hard to see the full picture and make informed decisions.
Aligning everyone around a single source of truth is ONE OF THE MOST important things you can do.
Consolidate key information—such as scope, progress, metrics, and decisions—into one accessible system or repository.
- Establish a shared, central hub (e.g., a combined Kanban board) where all team members can view the most up-to-date information.
- Regularly update this source with new data, decisions, and feedback to maintain alignment and ensure everyone works off the same set of facts.
READY TO OVERCOME COLLABORATIVE FRICTION?
I've helped A LOT of teams and leaders take actionable steps to reduce collaborative friction.
Connect with me on LinkedIn if you'd like some help with it.