Emotions are messy. Life is full of friction. Here’s what to do about it. You’ve felt it – the meeting that goes sideways after one wrong word, the feedback that lands wrong no matter how carefully you planned it, the relationship that keeps getting stuck in the same loop. You’ve felt it inside yourself too: the moment you react before you mean to, the pressure that makes everything harder than it should be, the Sunday evening dread that has nothing to do with the actual work. That tension has a name. It’s friction – and most of us have never been taught what to do with it. In Friction, leadership researchers and organisational psychologists Maggie Sass and Ross Blankenship make the case that friction isn’t random, it isn’t weakness, and it isn’t just ‘bad communication.’ It’s a predictable force that shows up in three distinct places – inside you, between people, and in the systems and structures around you – and it’s quietly shaping everything from your own performance to your team’s culture. Drawing on findings from their National Emotions Survey of U.S. working adults, Sass and Blankenship introduce a practical framework for understanding how emotional tension actually works at work, and what you can do to reduce the costly kind while using productive friction to sharpen thinking, deepen trust, and improve outcomes. The heart of the book is 45 experiments, organised across all three types of friction, that you can put to work immediately.
