The Teams That Stopped Struggling
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
A leadership team I know runs their weekly sync the same way every week.
An AI tool summarizes the Slack threads from the prior few days. Another generates the agenda from open items. A third has pre-drafted the decisions that need to be made. The meeting runs 23 minutes. Everyone leaves feeling productive.
Six months in, they still don't know how each other thinks under pressure.
I've been sitting with that observation for a while. And then I came across a concept from brain health researcher Marc Milstein - friction-maxxing. Unlike other "maxxing" practices that lean towards more extreme and unhealthy practices, friction-maxxing is really about bringing intentional and thoughtful friction into our modern workplaces.
The idea is simple and a little counterintuitive. When individuals stop challenging their brains, through memory, attention and deep thinking, those capacities erode. Cognitive offloading, essentially outsourcing our thinking to tools and convenience, might feel like efficiency. But over time it quietly hollows out the very skills we rely on. The antidote, Milstein argues, is to intentionally reintroduce productive difficulty.
I read that and immediately thought, teams are doing this too. And we haven't named it yet.
The Same Problem, Only Bigger
Milstein's research focuses on individual cognitive function: working memory, attention, the capacity for deep reflection. His argument is that we've built a world so optimized for ease that the brain stops being asked to do hard things. And a brain that doesn't practice hard things loses the ability to do them well.
The organizational parallel is almost exact. Teams have spent years optimizing for the removal of friction. Cleaner processes, faster synthesis, AI-generated summaries, pre-structured decisions, meeting norms designed to minimize conflict. Individually, each of these is a reasonable choice. Collectively, they represent something worth examining. What is the team no longer being asked to do? What happens when a group stops practicing the cognitive and relational work that used to happen inside of those frictions?
Collective Cognitive Offloading
I want to give this pattern a name because naming it makes it visible - collective cognitive offloading. It's what happens when a team systematically shifts its hardest thinking, its synthesis, its judgment calls, its conflict navigation, onto tools, processes, and structures. The cognitive load goes down. The calendar gets cleaner. And something else quietly goes with it.
Research on transactive memory systems, first articulated by Daniel Wegner in the 1980s, shows that teams develop a shared sense of who knows what, and rely on that distributed knowledge to function. It's one of the ways teams are smarter than individuals. But that system only works if the team actively uses it, tests it, and stretches it.
When teams offload their thinking, the transactive memory system atrophies right along with it. People stop knowing how each other reasons. They stop trusting each other's judgment in ambiguous situations because they haven't watched each other work through ambiguity.
The research on group cognition supports this. Woolley and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon found that high-performing teams demonstrate a capacity they call collective intelligence, the ability of the group to solve novel problems together. That capacity isn't just an attribute of who's on the team. It's built and maintained through practice. Teams that stop practicing hard thinking together get weaker at it, even if every individual on the team is sharp.
The Cohesion Connection
Here is where I think it gets most interesting. And most under-discussed.
Cohesion doesn't just enable teams to tolerate friction. Cohesion is partly built through it. The struggle together, the discomfort of not knowing yet, the repair after a hard conversation, those are not side effects of team life. They are the substrate of belonging and trust. When teams optimize away all productive friction, they also optimize away the very experiences that create deep relational infrastructure.
I think about this through the lens of our 2:1 coaching work. The partnerships that show up for coaching are often ones that are technically functional. No major conflict, no broken trust. But there's a flatness to them. A politeness that has calcified into distance.
When we start asking about their history together, one of the patterns we find is that they've never actually had to work through anything hard together. Every rough edge got sanded down before it became a real conversation. Every disagreement got resolved by process before it became a real disagreement.
That kind of smoothness feels like a sign of a good relationship. Sometimes it is. But often it means two people haven't built the repair capacity that only comes from having needed to repair something.
Teams are the same. The ones that never struggle together haven't yet learned what they can do when it gets hard. They don't know their own resilience. And the people on those teams don't know each other at the level that real cohesion requires.
To Be Sure
Not all friction is productive. There's an important distinction between the kind of difficulty that builds capacity and the kind that just creates noise, inefficiency, or harm. Chronic conflict, unclear decision rights, broken trust, unnecessary complexity: none of that is what I'm describing. A team that is fighting constantly is not friction-maxxing. It's just fighting.
The distinction worth holding is whether the friction is in service of the work. Does it require the team to think harder, disagree more honestly, or build something together that they couldn't have built alone? That's productive friction. Does it deplete energy without generating anything? That's something to fix.
The goal isn't maximum difficulty. It's deliberate difficulty, introduced intentionally, in the service of building something the team actually needs.
The Groops Take
At Groops, we see the cost of collective cognitive offloading show up most clearly in two places: in teams preparing for high-stakes moments they haven't practiced for, and in leadership partnerships that are technically functional but relationally thin.
The teams that come to us after a crisis, a failed product launch, an unexpected departure, often discover in retrospect that the early warning signs were there. But the machinery of efficiency had been handling those signals before anyone could sit with them. The friction that might have surfaced the problem earlier had been optimized away.
Building cohesion means building the conditions where productive difficulty is possible. That includes psychological safety, yes. But it also includes a willingness to let the hard conversations happen before they become emergencies. To let the team actually think together, not just execute together. To introduce enough friction that the relational and cognitive infrastructure gets used, tested, and strengthened.
Frictionless teams aren't the goal. Teams that know how to work through friction together are.
Something to Try: A Friction Audit
Take one upcoming team meeting or decision process and ask three questions before you run it.
1) Where has the thinking already been done for us?
Notice where AI tools, pre-built templates, or established processes have already resolved what might otherwise be a question worth sitting with together. That's not always a problem. But it's worth knowing.
2) Where are we avoiding a real conversation?
Most teams have a topic they route around. A tension that gets tabled, a disagreement that gets resolved offline before it can surface in the room. Name it, not to blow it up, but to decide consciously whether avoiding it is serving you.
3) When did we last struggle through something together?
If you can't remember, that's data. Not all teams need more friction. But teams that never struggle together haven't yet found out what they're capable of.
Ready to Build That Capacity Intentionally?
The Groops Cohesion Diagnostic is designed to surface exactly this kind of pattern - where your team's relational and cognitive infrastructure is strong, and where it's been quietly eroding. It gives you a shared language for what's happening, and a starting point for what to do about it.
If you're working with a leadership team that has optimized for efficiency but suspects something important has been lost along the way, this is where that conversation begins.
References
Milstein, M. (2025). As cited in The Washington Post.
Wegner, D. M. (1987). Transactive memory: A contemporary analysis of the group mind. In B. Mullen & G. R. Goethals (Eds.), Theories of group behavior (pp. 185–208). Springer-Verlag.
Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330(6004), 686–688.