Good evening, and welcome to this edition of The Scribbler—a newsletter that circles one organisational problem until it shows itself.
This month's thread is simple: the modern organisation is running out of friction.
Friction is what lets you steer. Remove it and you get speed, not control. In an era of AI-assisted writing, instant analytics, and industrial-scale content production, friction is being stripped out of organisational life. There are fewer pauses, fewer evidentiary gates, fewer principled refusals, and—if we are honest—less care taken with language. The result is not efficiency. It is skid risk.
But first, a bit of trivia...
Trivia question: In 1971, which Nobel laureate warned that 'a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention'? Answer at the end of this scribbling.
This Edition's Scribbling
In the last edition I argued that organisational life revealed a common flaw: people drowning in information yet starved of judgment. From trust to hiring to AI, the task remains the same—recover the authority to decide rather than defer. The deeper pattern now coming into view is broader. It is not only that proxies are compromised; it is that the whole decision chain is being lubricated.
Small speed bumps have been removed. Drafting is instant. Charts look authoritative without anyone chasing the lineage. Replies are fired off in the time it takes to feel insulted. Old frictions did not guarantee wisdom, but they forced delay—and delay is often the pause before good judgement begins.
Across the pieces I wrote last month—critical ignoring, metacognition, delivering bad news, and even the unfashionable defence of the em-dash—the same strategic imperative kept recurring:
Leaders must reintroduce friction on purpose, or be governed by whatever moves fastest.
That is not a plea for bureaucracy. It is a call for architecture: deciding where delay is a feature, not a flaw.
My balm for this ailment is fourfold.
1) Add Friction at the point of Intake: Attention as Governance
Herbert Simon’s (1916–2001) observation—more than half a century old—has aged well: abundant information creates scarce attention. When attention is treated as an infinitely scalable capability, executives drown in inputs and congratulate themselves on being data-driven.
The corrective is not heroic critical thinking applied to everything; it is critical ignoring—the defensible refusal to engage with information that has not earned the right to shape judgement. Overload reliably degrades decision quality, and emotionally charged material spreads faster precisely because it captures attention before deliberation begins.
AI compounds this by lowering the cost of persuasive rubbish and by producing summaries that look authoritative while quietly severing the link to provenance. The risk is not merely hallucination. It is the slow degradation of evidentiary standards: people stop asking "where did this come from?" because the prose is fluent, the charts are neat, and we are time poor.
A pragmatic and strategic response is to treat evidence the way we already treat money: with admissibility rules—then embed them in governance.
- Establish an evidence hierarchy: If a board paper relies on AI-generated analysis, it is a lead, not ground zero for decision making. Require primary sources (human generated memos, verbatim survey responses, financial reports), traceable internal data lineage, or independently verifiable external reports before the AI output can be used to justify a decision.
- Make "default deny" normal: Tools, feeds, dashboards, and model outputs should justify their place in the decision chain. Uncritical inclusion is how you scale error.
- Treat attention capture as an incident category: When a fabricated trend, misleading summary, or spurious statistic makes it into an SLT forum, log it, examine how it happened, and tighten the gates.
Strategy requires trade-offs. The trade-off most organisations now refuse to make is input selection.
2) Add Friction between Stimulus and Response: Metacognition by Design
The most common confession behind leadership failure is remarkably consistent: "I just reacted."
Metacognition—thinking about one's thinking—matters in executive life for a simple reason: it inserts a pause between stimulus and response. Under status threat, fatigue, or time pressure, otherwise competent leaders collapse into autopilot: defensiveness posing as decisiveness; certainty substituting for judgement. The ability to notice that slide while it is happening is not personality. It is performance.
The mistake made in organisations is to treat this as an individual virtue rather than a design problem. If you want leaders to outgrow their reactions, build routines that force reflection before harm is done.
Two high-yield practices are worth institutionalising:
- The 60-second interrupt. When the heat rises, ask three questions:
- What am I assuming?
- What am I protecting?
- What would I advise a colleague to do?
- The 10-minute debrief. After key meetings or decisions: what did we think we were doing, what happened (facts only), which assumptions held or failed, and what will we change next time? Debriefs are one of the few interventions with a reliably positive evidence base—when they are honest, specific, and time-bound.
The strategic point is that corrigibility beats brilliance. In complex systems, the capacity to be corrected—quickly, without ego drama—is a competitive advantage.
3) Add Friction at the point of Declaration: Bad News as an Authority Test
Most leaders do not lose trust because they deliver bad news. They lose it because they deliver it like a mugging: sudden, opaque, and with a perpetrator oddly proud of themselves.
Bad news threatens security, meaning, and dignity. When leaders communicate poorly in hard moments, they do not merely convey a decision; they reveal the quality of their judgement under pressure. "Transparency" and "empathy" are inadequate slogans. What people actually need is predictable structure, coherent reasons, bounded control, and concrete compassion—because trust is, in part, a judgement about ability, benevolence, and integrity. Perceptions of procedural fairness strongly shape how people respond to adverse outcomes, including layoffs and restructures.
Treat major communications as decision artefacts with design standards:
- Remove the ambush: Do not weaponise uncertainty with vague invites and concealed agendas.
- Lead with the headline, then the reasons: Adults resent being narrated into grief.
- Offer bounded predictability: If you cannot provide certainty, provide dates, decision points, and what will not change in the interim.
- Make compassion operational: Time, options, respectful treatment, and an avoidance of humiliation matter more than polished scripts and keeping "on message".
In hard moments, the temptation is euphemism and control theatre. Resist it. Restraint is the leadership virtue most often replaced by performance.
4) Add Friction in the Written Record: Style, Provenance, and the New Suspicion of Competence
We have reached a strange moment where carefully constructed prose is treated as suspicious because it "looks like AI". The em-dash, once a mark of literary control, is now a supposed tell.
The organisational risk is that, in trying to look "authentic", people start writing badly on purpose. That is self-sabotage. Language is not decoration; it is the medium of reasoning. When prose collapses, argument follows.
The fix is not to perform "human-ness" by lowering standards. It is to show your work: cite primary sources, name assumptions, make data lineage visible, keep version history, and record decision rationales. Encourage leaders to add the one thing AI cannot supply: lived context, specific trade-offs, and accountable judgement.
A Simple Diagnostic for the Month
Audit four places where friction should exist:
- Inputs: What information is inadmissible by default?
- Interpretation: Where are pauses built into decisions, especially AI-assisted ones?
- Declarations: Do hard messages follow a dignity protocol, or a compliance ritual?
- Records: Can you trace why a decision was made, and on what evidence?
Most organisations have detailed controls for finance and safety, but treat attention, language, and judgement as informal matters of personal style. That made sense when the world was slower. It is no longer in the best interests of the company.
Good night, and good luck.
Worth Your Time
A small reading list if you want to go deeper than slogans:
- Kozyreva, Wineburg, Lewandowsky, and Hertwig (2023) on critical ignoring as a digital competence—useful for designing "attention gates" that work before analysis begins.
- Kozyreva, A, Wineburg, S, Lewandowsky, S, and Hertwig, R (2023) Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 32(1), 81–88. doi:10.1177/09637214221121570.
- Wineburg and McGrew (2019) on lateral reading—a simple, fast antidote to being impressed by well-formatted nonsense.
- Wineburg, S, and McGrew, S (2019) Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information. Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 121(11), 1–40. doi:10.1177/016146811912101102.
- Tannenbaum and Cerasoli (2013) on debriefs—rare evidence that a lightweight routine can measurably improve individual and team performance when done properly.
- Tannenbaum, SI, and Cerasoli, CP (2013) Do Team and Individual Debriefs Enhance Performance? A Meta-Analysis. Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 55(1), 231–245. doi:10.1177/0018720812448394.
- Schoorman, Mayer, and Davis (2007) on organisational trust, paired with Brockner et al. (1994) on procedural justice—together they explain why delivery often matters as much as the decision.
- Schoorman, FD, Mayer, RC, and Davis, JH (2007) An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust: Past, Present, and Future. Academy of Management Review, 32(2), 344–354. doi:10.5465/AMR.2007.24348410.
- Brockner, J, Konovsky, M, Cooper-Schneider, R, Folger, R, Martin, C, and Bies, RJ (1994) Interactive Effects of Procedural Justice and Outcome Negativity on Victims and Survivors of Job Loss. Academy of Management Journal, 37(2), 397–409. doi:10.5465/256835.
- NIST's AI Risk Management Framework and ISO/IEC 42001—use them less as compliance theatre and more as a blueprint for admissibility, provenance, and decision rights.
Art and About
Titian's painting depicts three human heads—youth, maturity, old age—paired with three animal heads, often read as wolf, lion, and dog. The work is usually discussed as a visual argument for prudence: that the present ought to act with restraint, drawing on the past so as not to damage the future. It is a reminder that delay can be moral, not merely procedural. In an executive culture that confuses speed with strength, prudence is friction: the willingness to slow down at the right moments, insist on provenance, and refuse the easy answer that cannot survive scrutiny.
Trivia Answer
Answer: Herbert A. Simon won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences and is closely associated with "bounded rationality"—the idea that real decision-makers "satisfice" [sic] under constraints rather than "optimise" in the abstract.
Melencolia I by Albrecht Dürer is (1471–1528) is licensed under Public Domain.
