Why I Learned to Love the Knot

My path to becoming a change leader was organic and appropriately messy.

I didn’t fall into this work to justify a newly minted MBA. It wasn’t a second-choice consulting career or a “safe” place to land. The honest truth is that if someone had explained to me 20 years ago that “change management” was a legitimate career path, it would have saved me a lot of confusion. But as with most things that end up mattering, I had to figure it out in my own due time — slogging through countless digital operations projects and a half dozen full-scale transformations until, at some point, I could finally recognize and name what I’d been doing all along.

The gist of what I figured out is that I have a change mindset. And once I could see it clearly, I could distill my skills and experience and start doing the work I actually loved.

A critical thing I grew to understand about that work: it is fundamentally about friction.

Not creating it for its own sake. I’m not an arsonist firefighter. If something is working just fine, let’s leave it alone and direct our energy where it’s genuinely needed. But when something is knotted up? When the human elements are tangled and everyone seems to want something slightly different and no one can quite articulate what “good” looks like from where they’re standing?

For me, figuring that out is my version of hearing a great guitar riff or drum solo. It scratches a special place in my brain.

But in enterprise transformation (and especially in AI transformation, where the change isn’t just operational but deeply human) minimizing the friction means leaving the most important work undone.

Real change leaders don’t avoid friction. It calls to them. And there’s a reason for that: friction is information. It tells you where the resistance lives, what people are actually afraid of, which assumptions are shaky and where the real work needs to happen. Smooth, frictionless change usually means someone did a great job of not looking too closely.

But here’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, in the context of everything AI is doing to our work and our organizations and, honestly, our sense of professional identity:

What happens when we start treating friction itself as a problem to be automated away?

AI is extraordinary at reducing effort. It’s genuinely one of the most remarkable things about this moment. Tasks that used to take hours now take minutes. Analysis that required teams can be approximated by a single person with the right tools. The cognitive load of certain kinds of work has dropped dramatically, and in many cases, that’s a genuine gift.

But there’s a risk buried inside that gift.

Discernment — the ability to read a room, recognize when a project plan is missing the point, assess how to make space for and address different forms of resistance, understand what an organization actually needs versus what it says it needs — rarely results from efficiency. It comes from having been in the mess enough times to develop pattern recognition. It comes from the friction.

There’s a type of change leader I think of as a “minimizer.” They’re organized, deliver on scope, produce the communications plan and the enablement sessions and the status updates. But they’re a little allergic to the friction. They optimize for tidiness. They minimize the scope of change as much as possible so they can move quickly and cleanly to the next engagement.

And in straightforward implementations, that often works fine.

The friction is where the real change happens. And learning to love it or, at least, to stop flinching from it, is the difference between managing change and actually leading it.

But in enterprise transformation (and especially in AI transformation, where the change isn’t just operational but deeply human) minimizing the friction means leaving the most important work undone. It means an organization that looks like it changed but didn’t actually. It results in people who don’t trust the next change initiative, because the last one didn’t account for what they were actually experiencing.

The friction is where the real change happens. And learning to love it or, at least, to stop flinching from it, is the difference between managing change and actually leading it.

I had to slog through a lot of messy projects to understand that about myself. I’m not sure I’d have understood it any faster. And that’s exactly the point I want to sit with as AI continues reshaping how we work: some things cannot be shortcut. Some things require the long way around. And it takes discernment to figure out which things deserve that kind of understanding and support. 

More on that in the next piece.