Avoid Meh: Intentional Friction in Storytelling
Quite a while ago, I was on a local City Council and I was Chair of the Utilities Committee. We had a water treatment plant…and there was a process where water had to come into contact with a disinfectant. It’s not a complicated process…there is a vessel and the water comes in one end, is in contact with the disinfectant and then comes out the other end.
The problem is that there was a required amount of contact time. If the water flow was too efficient, it would not be in the vessel long enough. The answer was to put baffles into the vessel, creating a kind of maze the water had to complete before exiting.
The lesson: sometimes you need to slow the process down to get the best results. (Somewhere several of my former bosses are scratching their chin and recalling putting that onto my annual reviews).
This came back to me when I read about Robert Rose’s keynote address at the Content Marketing Institute….called “Rose Colored Glasses: Why You Should Embrace Valuable Friction.” It’s excellent work and I recommend it.
The need for speed is understandable.. We are under ever-increasing pressure to do more and to do it faster. But, in the quest to simply survive our workday, we risk losing something essential to the creative process: the time to challenge our thinking.
Much like that water rushing through the clearwell, projects tend to get a momentum of their own, especially when we start to smell the sweet “check the box” moment. We have to fight nature. As we look toward the future of storytelling, it's time to consider installing friction in our storytelling efforts. Could the very thing we try to avoid be the key to unleashing more compelling, authentic narratives?
I touched on this topic a while ago when I wrote about The Power of Revision. Giving examples from Broadway to the world’s best magazine, I showed how the best communications efforts come after the first draft.
The Quest for Smooth Operations
We live in a world of increasingly sophisticated tools designed to eliminate friction. These innovations delivered convenience, efficiency, and speed. We can reach our audiences faster, more effectively, and with more targeted messaging than ever before.
Something important has been lost: the experience of engaging deeply with the stories we are telling and the people we are telling them to. The very technology that makes things move from start to finish fast has inadvertently left no place for challenging our first thoughts. The result? A lot of “meh.”
According to findings in CMI’s B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks and Trends report, over half of marketers rate their content as average. Despite all the tools we have at our disposal, many marketing teams are still stuck in what Rose calls a “meh” phase—playing defense rather than taking bold, creative risks that could lead to deep connections with external and internal stakeholders.
Introducing Friction into the Process
So how can we bring friction back into the creative process? Changing that starts with a mindset shift: rather than seeking to eliminate every obstacle and streamline every task, we need to embrace the challenges that naturally arise in the creative journey across our entire practice. These moments of resistance don’t always slow us down—they fuel deeper thinking and more compelling narratives.
Adding intentional “pause points” into our processes—moments where we actively challenge our assumptions—can introduce friction that results in more thoughtful, creative content. As Gini Detrich of Spin Sucks suggests, tactics like a “devil’s advocate day” in paid media or role-playing a journalist’s critique of an earned media pitch, intentional friction creates the space to question our strategies and improve our thinking.
Avoid the Meh: Don’t Fear the Friction
In 2024 and beyond, the pressure to move faster and automate more will only increase. But the marketing teams that thrive will be the ones that understand the value of friction. By intentionally slowing down, questioning our assumptions, and deliberately introducing moments of resistance into our creative processes, we can unlock more powerful, human-centered storytelling.