Friction Files #3: The 5 minute information friction check

The hidden cost of information friction in business. Nobody has ever put “copying figures from one system into another” on a Board agenda. It takes ten minutes, it has always been done that way and the person doing it is usually too busy to mention it.

Think about the last week in your own business. Someone re-keyed a customer’s details because two systems don’t talk to each other. Someone kept a private spreadsheet because they don’t quite trust the official numbers. Someone searched their inbox for an email they were sure existed, then asked a colleague, then asked another. A report was built on Monday and rebuilt on Thursday for a different audience. A decision stalled because the one person who knew where the file lived was out.

None of this is a crisis. Each instance is a small inconvenience, absorbed by capable people who simply get on with it. That is exactly why the cost stays hidden. Multiplied across every team, every week, it becomes one of the largest uses of capacity in the business and one of the least measured. And this is exactly what information friction is.

This article is about making that friction visible. It ends with a five-minute check you can run on your own organisation today.

What information friction looks like

Information friction is the effort a business spends moving, finding, checking or recreating information it already has. It rarely looks like a problem. It looks like people being diligent. Here are seven forms it commonly takes:

• The copy and paste. Figures exported from one system, tidied in a spreadsheet and typed into another, every week or every month.
• The shadow spreadsheet. A personal workbook kept alongside the official system because its owner doesn’t quite trust what the system says.
• The re-key. The same customer details entered into the CRM, then the finance system, then a job sheet.
• The inbox dig. Searching old emails for the version of a quote, a decision or an attachment that everyone remembers and nobody can locate.
• The chase. Messaging a colleague for a status, a figure or a file, then messaging them again.
• The double report. The same numbers assembled twice, in two formats, for two audiences.
• The wait. Work held up until the one person who knows where something is or what it means, is available.

Each of these made sense on the day it started. The trouble is that none of them ever stops.

Why it stays invisible

First, a reassurance: this is not a sign of a careless business or a weak team. It is usually the opposite. People build workarounds because they care about getting the answer right and meeting the deadline. The shadow spreadsheet exists because someone wants to be sure the numbers are correct.

So why does nobody see the cost? Four reasons tend to combine:

• Every instance is small. Ten minutes here and fifteen there never feels worth raising.
• It is spread thinly. No single team carries enough of it to make it a priority, so it lands in nobody’s objectives.
• It is absorbed by your best people. The people who cope most capably are the ones least likely to complain.
• It does not appear on any report. Lost capacity doesn’t show as a line in the accounts. It shows up as everyone being busy and the business feeling slower than it should.

The habit also tends to become invisible to the person doing it. After a few months, re-keying a record stops feeling like a task and starts feeling like part of the job.

What it adds up to

The most widely cited research on this is the McKinsey Global Institute’s 2012 report, The social economy. It estimated that the average knowledge worker spends nearly a fifth of the working week looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help. The report is more than a decade old and describes managers and professionals in general, not any one sector, so treat the figure as an indication rather than a benchmark for your business. It is still a useful reminder that this is not a rounding error.

Here is an illustration, not a finding. In a business of 40 people, if each person loses just 30 minutes a day to re-keying, searching, chasing and rebuilding, that is 100 hours a week. On a 37.5-hour week, that is close to three full-time roles.

Time is only part of the cost:

• Every manual hand-off is a chance for a typo, a stale figure or a mismatched version.
• Slower decisions. When leaders don’t trust the numbers, they ask for them to be checked and the decision waits.
• Fragile knowledge. When the answer to “where is it?” lives in one person’s head, their holiday becomes everyone’s problem.
• Friction that grows with the business. What was tolerable at 20 people becomes a drag at 80, because there are more people, more systems and more hand-offs.
• Technology on top of confusion. Adding a new tool, including AI, to a process nobody has examined tends to make the confusion faster, not better.

The 5-minute information friction check

You need a pen, a timer and one minute per question. Answer for your own part of the business, from memory, without checking anything. Speed matters: the examples that come to mind fastest are usually the ones costing the most.

Put a rough number on it. For each item you wrote down, estimate how many times a week it happens, how many minutes it takes and how many people are involved. Multiply the three, divide by 60 and you have hours per week. Add the five together, then divide by 37.5 (or your own working week) to see the cost in full-time roles. A rough estimate is fine. The point is to see the scale not to audit it.

Read the pattern not just the total. Look at whether your answers cluster around one system, one team or one person. A cluster tells you where to start.

Be wary of a blank page. If you struggled to name anything, that doesn’t mean there is no friction. It may mean it has become invisible to you. Run the same five questions with someone who does the work day to day, ideally in a different team from yours. Their list will usually be longer.

What to do with what you find

You don’t need a transformation programme to make a start. Five principles keep the response proportionate:

1. Start with the biggest cost, not the loudest complaint. Use your hours-per-week estimates to choose, rather than the item that irritates people most.
2. Ask why the workaround exists. A shadow spreadsheet is telling you something about trust in the data. Remove it without fixing the reason and it will come back.
3. Agree one home for each piece of information. Decide where customer details, pricing or the weekly figures officially live and who is responsible for keeping them right.
4. Fix the process before you automate it. Automation can take out a copy-and-paste step. It can’t tell you whether the step should exist at all. Simplify first, then bring in technology where it earns its place.
5. Involve the people closest to it, then run the check again in a quarter. Those who have quietly compensated for years usually know the best fix and the second total tells you whether it worked.

Making the invisible visible

Information friction is not really a technology problem or a people problem. It is an operations problem that shows up as both and it becomes far easier to tackle once it has a number attached.

If your five minutes turned up more than you expected, that is useful rather than alarming. It is also the kind of thing Alcea works with, alongside operational processes and technology.

This article is part of our Building a Better Business work, where we are exploring what makes businesses harder to improve than they need to be. Information friction is a good example. If you lead a business and would like to share your experience in one of our interviews, we would be glad to hear from you.

To talk any of this through, you’ll find us at alceaconsulting.com. Just a conversation, whenever it’s useful.