<aside> 🔥

From Chapter 2. The book gives you the solo version. This is the facilitated version: ninety minutes, with your team, the exact questions to ask, and how to stop it turning into a complaints meeting.

</aside>

The Friction Map Exercise

Friction has a recognisable sound. It is a question that has been answered before.

This session exists to find where your business repeatedly wastes time, loses money, confuses people, delays decisions, drops tasks, or depends too much on you, and to leave the room with one system that gets built this month. Not twelve. One.

Before the session

[ ] Invite the people who do the work, not the people who represent the work. Four to eight is ideal.
[ ] Book ninety minutes. Not sixty. The useful part happens in minute fifty.
[ ] Send one line of context: "We are going to find the three things that waste the most time here and fix one of them. Nobody is in trouble."
[ ] Prepare a wall, a whiteboard, or one shared page. Not a document you type into while people watch.
[ ] Decide in advance who is facilitating. If it is you, you cannot also be defending.

<aside> ⚠️

The one rule you must say out loud at the start. We are looking for where the system failed, not where a person failed. If a name comes up as the cause, the answer is that the process depended on a person's memory, which is a design problem and therefore mine.

</aside>

The ninety minutes

Time	Step	What you are actually doing
0 to 5	Frame it	Say the one rule. State that the output is one system, built this month, owned by a named person.
5 to 20	Silent dump	Everyone writes friction points alone, one per line. Silence first prevents the loudest person setting the agenda.
20 to 35	Read them out	Round the room, one each, until exhausted. No debate yet. Group duplicates as you go, because duplicates are data.
35 to 50	Score	Score each cluster out of five for pain, repetition, value and founder dependency. Do it fast and by feel.
50 to 70	Interrogate the top three	Use the eight questions below on each one. This is where the session earns its ninety minutes.
70 to 85	Choose one and design the smallest fix	Not the best fix. The one that lightens the load and can exist by Friday.
85 to 90	Close	Name the owner, the date, and the next review. Say what happens to the other items: they stay on the list and get looked at next quarter.

The eight questions

Ask these, in this order, about each of your top three. Write the answers where everyone can see them.

What is the problem, in one sentence, without naming a person?
What outcome do we actually want? Not "better communication". Something you could photograph.