Aristotle's Law of Corporate Friction

What can we learn from F = mv?

Aristotle thought that for something to keep moving, you had to keep applying force. This was a pre-Newtonian law of motion. If we were to put that law into an equation, it would look like F = mv, or force equals mass times velocity.

“If you want something to keep moving, you have to keep pushing” is not what Newton said. Newton argued that objects conserve momentum—an object in motion stays in motion. Push it once, and it goes on forever. Force only matters when you change the velocity, which is known as acceleration and gives us Newton’s first law: F = ma.

Why would Aristotle think differently? His universe was high-friction. All around him, he saw carts and horses, slaves rowing in galleys, sledges drawn through mud. To him, for something to move, you had to keep pushing it.

Does that sound familiar? For something to move, you have to keep pushing. His equation actually works for high-friction environments if you substitute some form of friction for mass.

For something to move, you have to keep pushing… Where do we see that?

In every organization I’ve ever worked for.

Why? Because human organizations develop friction.

When we are in a large organization, we have to fight friction to achieve anything, and we fight by pushing harder and harder.

The friction we fight is not physical—it's the friction of complexity, lack of coordination, lack of organization, lack of alignment, and lack of trust. (It’s closely related to Clausewitz’s idea of friction, or the accidents and uncertainties that slow down a large, complex military operation.)

Let’s go back to F = mv and pretend that m stands for friction. If velocity is your independent variable, you have v = F/m. If Force stays the same and you increase friction, your velocity has to go down. The inverse is also true. That is, if you want to move fast, you have to find ways to reduce friction or increase Force.

Small, high-trust organizations have less complexity and less friction. If they are motivated and competent, they can move fast, and they're called startups. When they succeed, they grow to become more complex, and that complexity slows them down. Their leaders notice the deceleration and think they need to push harder. Rarely do they consider all the friction they have heedlessly accepted during growth. This is organizational debt, and they are faced with interest payments on it.

There are numerous ways to reduce friction, including crystal clear decisions from the top, simplifying and clarifying who makes decisions about what, building shared knowledge management systems (these days, it could be a pile of documents that you query with an LLM and RAG) so one team doesn’t repeat another’s work, or eliminating cross-team dependencies, which typically lead to massive slowdowns. But let’s assume you did none of these things and just tried to apply more force.

Instead the message comes down from management that we need to run faster, work harder, work longer hours. Time becomes the lever we pull, under the pressure of changing markets and the advice of consultants.

And all of this impacts knowledge workers as they mature, because after the age of 30, their energy begins to decline, and the complexity of one’s own life tends to grow. Maybe you're married, you have kids, your parents are aging, you buy a house, and other responsibilities arise. All this can be deeply meaningful, but it adds to the complexity of your existence. It becomes harder for you to get things done.

The reason why time is the lever people choose when trying to make their companies move faster, or make themselves work harder, is because time is easy to measure. You can tell whether someone's in the office or not. You can't necessarily tell how well they're performing a complex intellectual task.

You don't need context to measure the time they put in, but you need lots of context to judge whether they are adroitly navigating their tasks and making the right choices. And because sharing and processing context and information takes considerable energy and time itself, we default to measuring the things that are easy to measure. Due to availability bias, we standardize on time and avoid metrics more aligned with output. (When people work remotely, we standardize on availability, responsiveness, the number of emails and Slack messages they respond to.)

Unfortunately, this thinking is flawed. It's not time that we need for work, but energy over time. We need to maintain our energy, for if we have energy during the time we work, we can do our best work. If we don't have energy during the time we work, we will make worse decisions and slowly burn out until we can no longer work at all. At that point, the company loses an experienced team member, and the team member loses a job.

So what we're really talking about here, the crucial question we're trying to address, is energy renewal. How do we keep doing our best work over many years? How do we renew our energy?

The answer, known for years now both to professional athletes and corporate athletes, is to program short bouts of recovery into your day, bouts during which you exercise, calm your mind, hydrate, or step outside for a walk. This is essentially the interval method, but for knowledge work. I’ll dive into the details in a later post.