No Internal Friction Is Not Good Temper, It Is Two Gates

One Sunday morning, several hundred unread messages sat on the phone. At that volume, weighing the wording of each one burns the whole morning and nothing real gets done.

Our position first. No internal friction is not good temper. It is a good process. Internal friction was never a personality problem. It is a process problem — friction inside the process, plainly put, and when the friction is high all the effort turns into heat. There are three leaks: replies have no standard; the gates are not set; and what should stop has not stopped. Why? One at a time below.

There is only one fix: change the process. Everyone gets the same reply. Anyone genuinely interested will follow up; those who follow up pass the second gate — two questions, and if they can answer, we move on; if not, it ends there. I went to the gym at midday, came back, and cleared all of them.

The first gate: standardise the reply

Do the arithmetic first. Several hundred messages, weighing the wording of each, at three minutes apiece, is most of a day (the numbers are illustrative). One standard reply compresses the cost to a single instance. What is saved is not just most of a day, it is the intact attention inside that day. Attention is supplies. Once burnt, it is gone.

Does it look dismissive? A little. But someone genuinely interested is not put off by one standard reply; he follows up. The follow-up is itself the sieve.

The second gate: two questions are enough

Setting a gate means moving the judgement ahead of the effort. Two questions: if he can answer them he has done the work; if he cannot, the thing is not yet worth the time. Some will say this is too hard. But saying it up front is far more decent than dragging it out three months and then saying it does not fit. When one or two thousand messages come at you, nobody can hold the line without gates; with gates, the same volume does not matter. Holding the line is not about endurance, it is about a filter. Pressure tolerance can be trained.

A stop-doing list is harder to write than a to-do list

So every week we also confirm what should stop: which firms are paused, which meetings will not be scheduled, which materials will not be revised again, which things are not worth a founder's attention. We call this the stop-doing list — plainly, writing down what we will not do, because writing it down is what makes it count. Everyone can write a to-do list, but a stop-doing list means writing off effort you have already spent. Without stopping, there is no focus.

So where does the saved effort go? Into the one thing only you can do. In the Archive, below "no internal friction," it also says long-board effect and council of elders, and the three are really one thing: no pedigree test, no patching of weaknesses, only connecting each person's strongest side into the chain; and where the boundaries of process are unclear, the recognised professional decides. Once assessment turns from fault-finding into lifting people up, internal friction has no fuel left. On this one we are fairly confident.

The most expensive thing in an organisation is a partner's time. A mandate runs sixty days across eight milestones, and a partner's attention has to be allocated by the day; which means every extra minute spent inside is a minute less outside. The right measure is this: never a second late when you are genuinely needed, never a minute taken when you are not. That judgement is itself what seniority means.

So once internal friction is at zero, what is left? The thing that is genuinely hard. There is always a fight to be had at the table. Save the effort for the fight.