Here’s something most people don’t know about curling: if the ice were perfectly smooth, the stone wouldn’t glide. It would stop dead.

A curling stone has a concave bottom. Place it on a flat, polished surface and it creates a vacuum — a suction effect that kills all momentum. A 20kg granite stone, going nowhere.

So ice makers do something counterintuitive. Before every game, they scrape the surface completely flat, removing all the old texture and debris. Then they deliberately add fresh imperfections — tiny frozen water droplets called “pebble” — across the entire sheet. These bumps reduce the contact area between stone and ice, breaking the suction and allowing the stone to travel 45 metres on a breath of momentum.

The stone needs friction to move. Not random friction. Intentional friction.

I’ve been watching the UK curling team at the Olympics and I can’t stop thinking about how precisely this maps to what I see in organisations every week. Not as a loose metaphor. As an almost exact structural parallel to the diagnostic challenge at the heart of transformation work.

The suction problem

When leaders decide to “become agile,” the instinct is almost always the same: remove constraints. Flatten the hierarchy. Strip out process. Get out of the way.

It sounds right. It feels progressive. And it creates smooth ice.

Teams lose traction. Without clear decision rights, decisions either stall or get escalated back up. Without lightweight governance, work drifts sideways. Without intentional rhythm — regular points where teams share what they’ve learned and what’s blocking them — people default to working in isolation and hoping for the best.

I see a specific version of this pattern often enough that I’ve given it a name in my work on turbulence navigation: applying Agility to Insecurity. A leader recognises that teams need to move faster, experiment more, fail safely. So they strip away structure and demand agile behaviours — transparency, rapid iteration, candid feedback. But the team doesn’t feel safe enough for any of those behaviours. Psychological safety is absent. People are withholding information, protecting territory, avoiding the candour that agility requires.

The intervention is correct. The diagnosis is wrong. And the result is smooth ice — a frictionless environment where everything sticks.

Then leaders look at the stalled stone and conclude the team needs more oversight. More reporting. More check-ins. Which is just adding the wrong friction back — the old, worn pebble covered in debris that the ice makers scrape off before every game.

The diagnostic discipline nobody sees

The part of curling that fascinated me most isn’t the throwing or the sweeping. It’s the preparation.

Before any stone is thrown, ice makers go through a meticulous diagnostic process. They scrape the surface flat — removing old pebble that’s worn down, gone frosty, collected dirt. They level out microscopic dips and hollows that would pull stones off course. They assess the temperature, the humidity, the condition of the sheet. Only then do they apply fresh pebble: clean, consistent, purpose-built texture.

This is the transformation work that most organisations skip entirely.

They inherit structures, approval chains, reporting cadences, and governance rituals from a previous era — old pebble, worn smooth in some places, rough in others, covered in accumulated debris. Then they try to throw new ways of working across that surface and wonder why everything veers off course. Or sticks. Or both.

In my experience across 200+ transformation engagements, 60% of teams misdiagnose what’s actually causing their transformation to stall on the first attempt. Not because they’re incompetent, but because identical symptoms can demand opposite interventions depending on the underlying condition. A team drowning in work-in-progress looks very similar to a team paralysed by anxiety — but one needs capacity protection (Resilience) while the other needs decision velocity (Agility). Apply the wrong lever and you make things worse.

Treatment without diagnosis is malpractice. In medicine and in transformation.

Each misdiagnosis costs 4-8 weeks of misdirected effort. And the cost compounds. The intervention window data from my work is uncomfortably clear: catch a misdiagnosis in weeks one to two and recovery takes three weeks with an 80-90% success rate. Let it run to week thirteen and you’re looking at 6-18 months of recovery with a 15-25% chance of success. The ice makers scrape and assess before every single game because they know that starting on a compromised surface doesn’t just slow things down — it makes the entire game unpredictable.

Five conditions, five textures

Here’s where the curling parallel gets specific.

Curling ice isn’t uniform. Different sections of the sheet behave differently. The pebble wears at different rates depending on where stones have been thrown. Temperature gradients create subtle variations. The ice near the hack behaves differently from the ice in the house. Good curlers read these variations constantly and adjust their throws accordingly.

Organisations experience turbulence the same way — not as a single undifferentiated state, but as distinct conditions that require distinct responses.

I work with five: Complex, Insecure, Rapid, Contradictory, and Anxious. Each feels like friction. Each slows things down. But the type of friction is different, and the response that helps for one will make another worse.

When a team is navigating Complexity — where cause and effect are obscured by overwhelming interdependence — the friction comes from not knowing what you don’t know. The matched response is Learning: build collective intelligence through systematic exploration. That’s fresh, deliberate pebble. It creates just enough texture for the stone to grip without directing where it goes.

When a team is Insecure — where trust deficits prevent candid information flow — the friction comes from people withholding truth. Demanding agility here (faster decisions, more experiments, radical transparency) is like sweeping the ice aggressively when the stone is already veering off course. You make it travel further in the wrong direction. The matched response is Empathy: rebuild psychological safety through leadership vulnerability before asking for the behaviours that safety enables.

When a team faces Rapid change — where the pace of change overwhelms decision and delivery capacity — the friction comes from too much work in motion. Teams drowning in WIP need Resilience: protect capacity through rigorous discipline about what enters the system. In curling terms, this is the ice maker removing debris and worn pebble before adding fresh texture. You can’t create useful friction on top of chaos.

When a team is navigating Contradictory mandates — where multiple legitimate stakeholders have structurally incompatible priorities — the friction comes from impossible binds. Everything is urgent, but the urgencies conflict. The matched response is Clarity: force-rank competing priorities through transparent trade-offs and establish decision rights. Fresh pebble with a clear, consistent grain.

And when a team is Anxious — where uncertainty paralysis prevents decisions despite available information — the friction is internal. Teams are frozen by “what if?” The matched response is Agility: reduce decision latency through time-boxed decisions and small reversible experiments. Get a stone moving. Any stone. The act of throwing — of committing to a direction and adjusting in flight — breaks the paralysis more effectively than more analysis ever will.

The point isn’t that friction is bad. The point is that the wrong friction is catastrophic, and the right friction is what makes movement possible. Just like pebble on ice.

One broom at a time

There’s a discipline in curling that maps directly to one of the hardest principles in transformation work.

When sweepers work in front of a moving stone, they’re doing something remarkably precise. The friction from the broom generates just enough heat to momentarily melt the tips of the pebble, creating a thin film of water that can stretch a stone’s path by two to three metres and reduce the amount it curls. But here’s what matters: the sweepers change one variable at a time. They control the intensity of their sweeping, the area they cover, and the duration. They don’t simultaneously try to redirect the stone, change the ice temperature, and alter the pebble pattern. They make one adjustment, observe the effect, and decide whether to continue.

In transformation work, I call this single-lever discipline. Test one intervention at a time. Keep cadences short — design in two days, execute for one to four weeks, retrospect for two hours, then iterate. When you pull multiple levers simultaneously, you lose attribution clarity. If things improve, you don’t know which intervention helped. If things get worse, you don’t know which one hurt. You’re sweeping and throwing and scraping all at once, and the stone ends up somewhere nobody intended.

Single-lever discipline feels slow. Leaders who are accustomed to launching comprehensive transformation programmes — ten workstreams, fifty initiatives, all running in parallel — find it uncomfortable. But it’s the difference between navigating turbulence and creating more of it.

Sweeping as leadership

The sweepers don’t pick up the stone and carry it. They don’t redirect it by force. They temporarily change the conditions around it so it can travel further on its own momentum.

That’s the leadership model I spend most of my time coaching towards.

The best leaders I’ve worked with don’t steer the work. They don’t grab the stone mid-slide. They ask five questions:

What is the desired outcome? Not “what does the plan say?” but “what are we actually trying to achieve?”

What have we learnt? Not “are we on track?” but “what do we now know that we didn’t before?”

What will we learn next? This is the question that forces a learning posture. It assumes there’s always something unknown and positions the team to go find it rather than defend what they’ve already committed to.

How soon can we learn it? Speed of learning beats precision of diagnosis. A fast cycle with a reversible experiment teaches more than a month-long analysis.

How can I help? This is the sweep. It’s a leader saying: I can see where you’re heading. What friction can I temporarily reduce so you can get there?

I’ve watched teams light up when a senior leader shifts from “let me approve this” to “what’s in your way?” One team told their leadership, quite directly, to “stop diving in” and instead “clear obstacles and give us space to work.” The leaders who listened — who picked up the broom instead of grabbing the stone — saw those teams accelerate in weeks.

The shift is from reporting lines to supporting lines. From oversight to obstacle removal. From directing the stone to changing the conditions that determine how far it can travel.

Reading the ice as it changes

Curling ice isn’t static. It changes throughout a game. The pebble wears down in high-traffic areas. Temperature shifts alter how stones behave. Paths that worked in the first end won’t work in the sixth. Good curling teams constantly re-read the ice — not just reacting to what happened, but sensing how conditions are evolving and adjusting their strategy end by end.

This is the discipline most organisations struggle with — and it’s where leading indicators change the game.

Most organisations rely on lagging metrics: quarterly OKR reviews, monthly financial reports, retrospective velocity charts. These tell you what already happened. By the time the numbers show a problem, the ice changed three ends ago.

In my framework, two paired leading indicators provide 2-4 weeks of advance warning before traditional metrics register a problem. ThroughFlow measures the ratio of completed work to completed-plus-rework — not how much you’re producing, but how much of what you produce actually sticks. Human Pulse captures three weekly signals about clarity, pace sustainability, and psychological safety. Together, they function like the curler’s read of the ice: not a comprehensive survey, but enough signal to sense when conditions are shifting and adjust before the stone veers off course.

The pairing matters. Track only ThroughFlow and teams might sacrifice sustainability for output quality. Track only Human Pulse and teams might feel great while delivering nothing. Together, they create the same discipline as a curling team reading both the pebble wear pattern and the temperature gradient — two different signals that triangulate a more accurate picture than either alone.

The friction most organisations miss

If there’s one thing curling makes visible that organisations consistently miss, it’s this: friction is not the enemy. The wrong friction is the enemy. The absence of friction is equally dangerous.

Every transformation I’ve recovered — and I’ve recovered initiatives that had been stalling for years across banking, government, retail, and technology — has involved the same fundamental pattern. Somewhere along the way, someone decided that friction was the problem. They removed governance. Or they added governance. They stripped out process. Or they added process. They flattened hierarchy. Or they added layers. And they did all of it without first diagnosing which specific friction was causing the stall and which friction was actually keeping things moving.

The ice makers don’t just scrape. They don’t just pebble. They scrape specifically — removing worn texture and debris while preserving the level surface. Then they pebble specifically — adding fresh texture with a consistent, intentional pattern. The entire process is diagnostic before it’s interventional. You have to understand the current surface before you change it.

What does intentional organisational friction look like? Clear decision rights — so teams know what they own and what they don’t. Lightweight funding cadences that release investment based on evidence, not annual budget theatre. Regular learning rhythms where the question isn’t “are you on track?” but “what have you learnt and what will you learn next?” WIP limits that protect teams from drowning in simultaneous demands. Short feedback loops that make the consequences of decisions visible before those consequences become expensive.

These aren’t bureaucratic constraints. They’re pebble. They create just enough texture for work to grip, travel, and reach where it needs to go.

The real game

You cannot control the stone after you’ve released it. You can prepare the surface. You can make a good throw. You can sweep with precision and timing. But the stone is going to interact with the ice in ways you can’t fully predict.

The organisations that move well — the ones I’ve seen compress timelines by 75%, recover multi-million-pound stalled transformations in months, eliminate late nights within eight weeks — aren’t the ones with the best strategy documents or the most detailed plans. They’re the ones that diagnose before they intervene, apply the matched response to the actual condition rather than the assumed one, and then put all their energy into reading conditions and reducing friction in real time.

They scrape specifically. They pebble deliberately. They sweep with single-lever discipline. They read the ice constantly. And they never, ever try to grab the stone.

The question isn’t whether your organisation has friction. It always does. The question is whether that friction is worn debris from a previous era or fresh, intentional texture that helps work flow.

If you can’t tell the difference, that’s where the diagnostic work begins.