The Friction Principle gives you three options for any source of drag in your business: remove it, delegate it, or change it. Most of what I write about focuses on the first two — removing what doesn’t need to exist, delegating what doesn’t need to be yours. But the third lever, change it, is where the real complexity lives. And it’s where most founders get stuck.
Because “change it” contains a decision that almost nobody makes explicitly. Change what, exactly? The structure around you — the system, the process, the team configuration, the business model? Or change you — your skill, your capacity, your response to something that’s currently difficult or uncomfortable?
Both are valid. Both are sometimes the right answer. Applying the wrong one is one of the most expensive mistakes a scaling founder can make.
Why “Change It” Is the Lever Most Founders Misuse
The two directions “change it” can go
When you hit a blocker, the Friction Principle says it can be changed. What it doesn’t tell you automatically is which version of change applies.
The structural version means redesigning the situation. Changing the process, the system, the team structure, or the business model so the blocker either disappears or stops landing on you.
The personal development version means changing your capacity — building a skill, working through a psychological pattern, or raising your threshold for something that’s currently uncomfortable.
Both are still friction reduction. Neither is about willpower. But they’re fundamentally different interventions, and applying the wrong one costs time, energy, and sometimes years.
Why founders default to one without thinking
Most founders I work with have a bias. They lean heavily toward one direction — either “there’s something I need to fix about myself” or “I need to redesign the system.”
The first bias tends to show up in founders with a strong internal critical voice. People who’ve absorbed the message, somewhere along the way, that difficulty means deficiency. If something is hard, it must be a personal failing. The answer is always to work on themselves.
This isn’t conscious. It’s a posture. And coaches can reinforce it unintentionally — because the coaching industry has a strong cultural lean toward inner work as the default response to struggle. The questions themselves point inward. “What does this bring up for you?” leads somewhere. So does “what would a braver version of you do?” These aren’t bad questions. But asked without a prior question — does this even need to be on your plate? — they presuppose the answer.
The second bias — assuming every blocker is structural — tends to show up in founders who’ve learned enough about ADHD to know that neurodivergent brains need redesigned systems, not more willpower. That’s true. But it can become its own trap: using structural redesign as a sophisticated way to avoid development that’s actually needed.
Neither bias is wrong in principle. They’re being applied without the question that should come first.
Framework: The Critical Path Test
The question that tells you which lever to pull
The Critical Path Test is a single triage question. Before deciding whether a blocker needs structural change or personal development, ask:
If you never got better at this — if it stayed exactly as hard as it is now — could you still get where you want to go?
If yes: the structural lever applies. Build around it, route past it, or redesign the situation so it stops landing on you. Personal development here is optional at best, unnecessary at worst.
If no: personal development is the answer. The thing you’re struggling with is genuinely on the critical path to your goal. You can’t delegate your way past it. The question becomes how to develop through it — not whether.
This sounds simple. It isn’t always. But it cuts through the bias in both directions, because it isn’t asking “do I want to work on this?” or “do I believe in growth?” It’s asking a factual question about the route to the outcome.
The three ways founders get this wrong
Misapplying the Critical Path Test creates three specific failure modes.
Doing personal development on things you could route around. A founder spends two years working on their discomfort with a particular kind of conversation — sitting with the anxiety, getting better at it, making genuine progress. Meanwhile, a structural change in month three could have removed the need entirely, freeing that energy for work only they can do. Getting from an 8 to a 4 on something that isn’t on the critical path is a poor return on development investment.
Looking for structural fixes on critical-path problems. A founder who needs to be the public face of their business — on stage, on camera, in rooms with investors — keeps finding ways to redesign around it. The avoidance feels productive. It isn’t. If the path to the outcome genuinely runs through this, no amount of structural creativity will get you there.
White-knuckling through things that could be engineered. Recognising correctly that development is needed, but treating it as a test of character rather than an engineering problem. Throwing yourself at the hardest version of the challenge, repeatedly. When a progressive approach — designed to reduce friction at every step — would have got you there in half the time with half the cost.
How to apply the test when the answer isn’t obvious
Some blockers sit in genuinely ambiguous territory. A useful follow-up question:
In the business you’re trying to build — not the one you have now — would this still be on your plate?
Sometimes a founder is doing personal development work to get better at something that a slightly larger or differently structured business wouldn’t require them to do at all. The development work isn’t wrong. But it’s solving a problem that growth itself will solve — and in the meantime, it’s absorbing energy that could be accelerating that growth.
When Personal Development Is the Answer — and How to Do It Right
The Friction Principle still applies — to you
Here’s what the Critical Path Test does not say: that personal development is for people who’ve failed the structural test.
When development is the right lever, the Friction Principle still applies — applied to you. The goal is still to find the path of least resistance to the outcome you need. It’s just that the path runs through development rather than around it.
Take public speaking as an example. Many founders building a personal brand, raising investment, or leading a team through significant change need to develop their presence — on stage, in investor conversations, on camera. The goal is real. The path runs directly through it. There’s no structural workaround that holds.
But the progressive path through it matters enormously.
A short informal talk to your own team. A session at a local Toastmasters group. A small external event with a familiar audience. A medium-sized talk once those are absorbed. A larger stage once the smaller ones have built the foundation. Each step is sized so the friction is manageable — not comfortable, but not overwhelming. You’re not white-knuckling through the hardest possible version. You’re engineering the route.
This is how I approach any blocker that sits on the critical path. Not: how do we route around this? But: what is the minimum viable step that builds genuine capacity? And then: what comes after that?
The destination requires you to change. The method is still friction reduction.
Why this matters for ADHD brains specifically
ADHD brains have a particular relationship with friction. Tasks that feel overwhelming don’t just feel hard — they often don’t start at all. The gap between “I need to do this” and “I’m doing this” can be enormous, regardless of how much the founder wants the outcome.
Applying brute-force development to a critical-path blocker — deciding you’ll just push through — tends to create avoidance, shame, and eventually a reinforced belief that you can’t do the thing. Progressive friction reduction creates forward movement, evidence of capability, and a track record your nervous system can actually trust.
Getting from 8 to 4 on something you genuinely need is real progress. Getting from 4 to 2 is also real progress. The issue is spending two years getting from 8 to 4 on something that wasn’t on the critical path in the first place.
What Good Coaching Should Do With This
The question that should come before the inner work
One of the patterns I see in founders who come to me after working with other coaches is that they’ve been gently directed toward self-change without the structural question ever being asked.
The coaching conversation started from the assumption that the difficulty was inside them — and went from there. For a founder who already has a strong “I’m not okay” orientation, that confirmation is easy to absorb. It fits the existing story. It doesn’t challenge the posture.
Good coaching asks the structural inventory question first. What here can be removed? What can be delegated? What genuinely needs to change — and is it you, or is it the situation you keep finding yourself in?
Think about the blocker you’ve been working on longest. If your business could route around it entirely — if it stopped landing on you tomorrow — would you still need to solve it? Or does your goal genuinely require you to get through it?
That question doesn’t make development work less valuable. It makes it more precise.
What a founder realised about the options she hadn’t seen
I worked with a founder who was handling all escalated client issues personally — directly involved whenever something became difficult, whenever expectations weren’t being met, whenever a hard conversation needed to happen. It was taking a significant emotional toll, and she’d been working on her confidence and resilience in those situations for some time. Making genuine progress.
When we looked at it through the Critical Path Test, the question became: does this business need you to have those conversations? Or does it need someone capable to have them?
Once asked clearly, the answer was obvious. The business needed difficult conversations to be handled well. It didn’t need the founder in the room for them. Her team could carry the operational relationships. Her role was upstream — new partnerships, strategic direction, the work that genuinely required her.
The development work she’d been doing wasn’t wasted. But it had been applied at the wrong level. She’d been building a capability to tolerate something she didn’t need to be doing.
I always assumed that if something was hard for me, I needed to get better at it. It hadn’t occurred to me how many of those things I didn’t actually need to be doing at all.
What Changes When This Lands
The “more options” realisation
The shift I see most often isn’t dramatic. It’s a quiet recalibration.
Founders — particularly those who’ve absorbed a strong “work on yourself” narrative — realise for the first time that they have more options than they thought. That the business they’ve built is full of structural levers they haven’t been pulling. That difficulty isn’t always a signal to develop; sometimes it’s a signal to redesign.
Business ownership changes what’s available to you. As an employee, your options for redesigning the situation around you are limited. As a founder, the structure is something you can change. Many founders are running a business with the same posture they had before they owned one — assuming the constraints are fixed when they aren’t.
The business you’ve built gives you more options than you think. Most founders are still operating as if they don’t.
Where development energy goes when it’s pointed correctly
The other side of this — for founders whose default has been to route around everything — is a different kind of clarity.
When the Critical Path Test confirms that something genuinely needs development, it removes the ambiguity. Not “you should work on yourself” as a general life principle. Just: this is on the route. There’s no road around it. Let’s find the best path through.
That framing tends to produce more genuine engagement with development work than a moral argument for growth ever does. It’s not about who you’re supposed to become. It’s about what the outcome requires.
What We Now Know
The Friction Principle gives you three levers: remove it, delegate it, or change it. The “change it” lever contains a decision that most founders skip — whether to change the structure or change themselves.
The Critical Path Test is the triage question: if you never got better at this, could you still get where you’re going? If yes, redesign. If no, develop — but still via progressive friction reduction, not willpower.
The common error is defaulting to one without asking. Founders with a strong inner-critic bias assume the work is always on themselves. Founders who’ve learned about structural design can use it to avoid development they genuinely need. Both bypass the question that should come first.
Getting this right changes where development energy goes — pointing it at the blockers that will actually determine the outcome, rather than the ones that feel most uncomfortable to sit with.
If you’re a founder with ADHD who’s been working hard on yourself without the business moving as fast as you expected — or redesigning systems to avoid something that keeps finding its way back to you — this is the work I do.