Why Leadership Teams Need Constructive Friction

Leadership Judgement Series – Part Five

Constructive friction is supposed to be part of how leadership teams challenge important decisions. Most would say it is.

A major investment or acquisition comes to the executive table with a business case, financial modelling, strategic rationale and recommendations from experienced people. Questions are asked, risks are discussed and the proposal is tested before a decision is made.

Yet when some of those decisions subsequently disappoint, the retrospective conversation can reveal something uncomfortable.

The commercial director had been hearing greater hesitation from customers than the forecast suggested. Operations suspected the integration timetable was unrealistic. Finance was uncomfortable with one of the assumptions underpinning the return. Someone closer to the market thought a competitor was becoming more significant than the business case allowed for.

Nobody necessarily possessed enough evidence to prove the decision was wrong, but collectively, they knew enough to have made the discussion better.

The important question is why those concerns did not create more friction before the organisation committed its money, people and reputation.

Leadership teams do not need disagreement for its own sake. They need enough constructive friction to discover whether an important decision survives serious challenge.

The absence of disagreement is not necessarily evidence of alignment. Sometimes it is evidence that disagreement has become too difficult, too uncomfortable or simply too unlikely to change the outcome.

Agreement Is Not the Same as Alignment

Strong leadership teams need alignment. Without it, important decisions are endlessly revisited, execution becomes inconsistent and different parts of the organisation begin pursuing competing priorities. However, alignment and agreement are not the same thing.

Agreement means that people broadly hold the same view.

Alignment means that the relevant arguments have been heard, a decision has been reached and the leadership team is prepared to commit to delivering it.

A team can disagree strongly during a discussion and still leave the room fully aligned behind the eventual decision. Equally, a team can appear completely united because nobody believes there is much value in expressing a different view.

That second form of consensus is much more dangerous.

Recent McKinsey work on decision-making makes a similar distinction. For consequential “big-bet” decisions, it argues for multiple perspectives and robust debate, while warning leaders not to confuse consensus with unanimity. The objective is not for everybody to hold exactly the same opinion; it is to surface the genuine points of contention before the decision is made.

For leadership teams, that distinction matters.

The objective of constructive friction is not agreement before the decision. It is commitment after the decision has been properly tested.

Why Successful Leadership Teams Can Lose Constructive Friction

One of the reasons constructive friction disappears is that leadership teams become better at working together.

That sounds contradictory, but it is a natural consequence of experience.

Executives who have worked alongside one another for years develop shorthand. They know how colleagues think, recognise familiar arguments and learn which information each person is likely to consider important. Meetings become faster because the team does not need to rediscover how it works every time a decision is required.

That efficiency has considerable value. However, the problem begins when familiarity turns into predictability.

People start anticipating how a conversation will end before it has properly begun. Arguments that have been heard previously receive less attention. Particular executives develop authority in particular areas and their interpretation gradually becomes the organisation’s accepted starting point.

Hierarchy makes this more pronounced

Imagine a CEO opening an acquisition discussion with:

“I’ve looked at this carefully and I think it’s clearly the right acquisition for us.”

Now compare that with:

“There are good reasons to do this and good reasons not to. Before we reach a conclusion, what are we missing?”

Neither CEO has instructed anyone to remain silent.

But they have created two very different discussions.

In the first, disagreement requires somebody to push against the preferred answer of the most senior person in the room. In the second, challenge has been established as part of the job.

Previous success compounds the effect. A commercial director who has called the market correctly several times earns greater confidence. A CFO whose caution has repeatedly protected the business acquires influence. A founder whose instinct created the company understandably carries authority that another executive may find difficult to challenge.

Again, none of that is inherently unhealthy.

The risk appears when the team becomes so familiar with who is usually right, which arguments usually prevail and which debates are worth having that it gradually reduces the range of thinking brought to important decisions.

Time pressure contributes too. Executives have full agendas and businesses need decisions. Reopening arguments feels inefficient, particularly when the likely outcome appears obvious.

Over time, a successful leadership team can therefore become extremely good at collaborating with one another while becoming slightly less good at surprising one another.

That matters because surprise is sometimes exactly what a consequential decision needs.

Constructive Friction Is Not Destructive Conflict

None of this means that better leadership teams argue more.

Conflict carries its own risks.

Research into team decision-making has found that disagreement about the task can become damaging when it develops into relationship conflict. When people begin experiencing the challenge as personal rather than substantive, they can become more rigid in their original positions and process information more selectively.

The distinction is therefore important.

Constructive friction is not about making meetings uncomfortable for the sake of it. Nor does every opinion deserve equal weight simply because somebody holds it strongly.

The aim is to create an environment in which credible alternative interpretations can be explored without disagreement itself becoming the problem.

Research by Charlan Nemeth and colleagues over several decades has found that dissent can stimulate broader thinking, encourage consideration of more information and, on balance, contribute to better decisions and greater creativity.

The practical leadership challenge is to allow important ideas to collide without important relationships doing the same.

Comfortable Consensus Has a Commercial Cost

Consider an acquisition

The strategic logic appears compelling. The target gives access to a new market, brings complementary capability and creates apparent opportunities for cross-selling. The financial model works and the leadership team wants to move while the opportunity remains available.

During due diligence, operational leaders express concern about integration. The businesses use different systems, delivery models and working practices. Customer relationships appear less transferable than initially expected, and some commercial assumptions depend upon cross-selling taking place relatively quickly after completion.

Those concerns are discussed, but because the strategic case already feels strong, they gradually become classified as execution risks. The acquisition itself remains the right decision. The organisation simply needs a robust integration plan.

That distinction matters. Sometimes the concerns genuinely are execution issues and the acquisition should proceed.

But sometimes what has been labelled an execution problem is actually evidence that one of the assumptions making the acquisition strategically attractive deserves to be reconsidered.

If constructive friction is weak, the organisation can spend considerable energy working out how to deliver a decision before it has sufficiently challenged whether the decision itself remains sound.

The same pattern appears elsewhere.

Consider other key decisions:

A product continues receiving investment because the roadmap has momentum even though customer-facing teams are increasingly uncertain about demand. A pricing decision makes perfect sense against the margin target while account managers are hearing that customers already question value. A transformation programme remains strategically important, so repeated concerns about adoption are treated as resistance to change rather than possible evidence that the design itself needs revisiting.

In none of these cases does dissent automatically make the alternative view correct. That is not its purpose.

Constructive friction makes it harder for an organisation to commit significant capital, management attention or strategic credibility without understanding what would have to be true for its preferred interpretation to be wrong.

The commercial consequences of failing to do so eventually appear as wasted investment, delayed course correction, margin pressure, failed integration, lost customers or opportunities that received too little attention because the preferred option acquired momentum first.

By then, concerns that could have improved the original decision are often reframed as things the organisation should have known.

Sometimes it did know them. It simply did not give them enough room to change the discussion.

Why Appointing a Devil’s Advocate May Not Be Enough

A common response to groupthink is to appoint somebody to challenge the proposal. There is value in forcing a leadership team to consider the opposing case, particularly when everyone appears to be converging too quickly. However, manufactured disagreement has limitations.

Nemeth’s research is interesting here. Her work distinguishes between authentic dissent and somebody being instructed to play devil’s advocate, finding that genuine dissent is more effective at stimulating divergent thinking and improving the consideration of alternatives. That makes sense around an executive table.

If everyone knows that Sarah broadly supports the proposal but has been asked to argue against it for twenty minutes, her objections may be intellectually useful, but they carry a different weight from Sarah saying:

“I genuinely think we’re wrong about customer demand, and here’s what I’m hearing that makes me uncomfortable.”

The second statement changes the room. The objective should therefore not be to manufacture challenge after a team has already reached consensus. It should be to build a leadership environment in which genuine disagreement is able to survive long enough to be properly examined.

That does not guarantee that the dissenter will be right.

In fact, constructive friction remains valuable even when the challenge is ultimately rejected, because the preferred decision has been forced to explain itself more rigorously.

The Leader’s Response Determines Whether Challenge Survives

Many leaders say they welcome challenge and most probably mean it. The more useful test is what happens when somebody actually provides it.

Does the leader ask them to explain further? Do they explore the evidence behind the concern and allow others to build on it? Can the discussion genuinely alter their position? Or does the leader quickly explain why the objection has already been considered, why the circumstances are different this time or why the concern can be dealt with later?

Those responses may be completely rational and they also teach the room something.

Psychological safety is relevant here, although constructive friction should not be reduced to a cultural programme. Amy Edmondson describes psychological safety as an environment in which people can speak candidly without excessive interpersonal risk, and her more recent work specifically connects that candour with higher-quality decision-making on senior teams.

For leadership judgement, the practical point is simpler.

The more senior the person expressing the preferred answer, the harder everybody else has to work to disagree with it.

Leaders therefore create constructive friction partly through the way they handle opposition to their own thinking.

The culture of challenge is not defined by the invitation.

It is defined by the response.

If challenging the CEO produces curiosity, further questions and occasionally a changed decision, people learn that challenge has value. If it consistently produces a well-articulated explanation of why the CEO remains correct, people may gradually conclude that challenge is permitted but largely pointless.

Nobody needs to announce that dissent is unwelcome. The organisation learns through experience.

Challenge Before Commitment

Constructive friction works best when leadership teams are clear about when disagreement is useful. Before a consequential decision is made, challenge should be encouraged. Assumptions should be exposed, evidence tested and competing interpretations given sufficient room to change the outcome.

After the decision, the organisation needs commitment.

Otherwise constructive friction can become permanent relitigation, with executives repeatedly reopening decisions they opposed and undermining the organisation’s ability to execute.

A practical discipline is therefore to pause before committing to an important decision and ask three particularly difficult questions.

What is the strongest argument against this decision?

Not the easiest objection to dismiss, but the most credible case that the leadership team’s preferred answer may be wrong.

If this decision has failed 18 months from now, what will we probably discover that we misunderstood today?

This forces the team beyond a conventional risk register and towards the assumptions that may determine whether the decision itself succeeds.

Who around this table can genuinely change our minds — and what happens when they try?

That final question is as much about the leadership team as the decision. If nobody in the room is capable of changing the prevailing view, either the evidence is exceptionally strong or constructive friction has already disappeared. The operating principle is simple:

Encourage disagreement before the decision. Expect commitment after it.

That gives challenge a purpose. It exists to improve judgement, not to demonstrate independence or prolong debate.

Constructive Friction Protects Leadership Judgement

Strong leadership teams do not need endless argument, manufactured opposition or a culture in which every decision becomes an intellectual contest.

They need enough friction to know that important assumptions have been exposed, credible alternative interpretations have been considered and uncomfortable evidence has been given an opportunity to matter.

Agreement reached by avoiding difference can feel efficient.

Alignment reached after difference has been properly explored is much stronger.

The strongest leadership teams are not necessarily those that agree most often. They are the ones in which disagreement is still capable of changing the decision.

That leaves one question worth asking before the next significant commitment of money, people or strategic attention:

Who around this table can genuinely change our minds — and what happens when they try?

Next in the Leadership Judgement Series

How Leaders Make Better Decisions Under Uncertainty

Constructive friction can expose assumptions, challenge evidence and reveal alternatives, but it cannot remove uncertainty.

Eventually, leadership judgement requires a decision to be made when every available option still carries risk, compromise and consequences.