Execution Friction: What Marine Corps Warfighting and Peak OS Share About Operating Through Uncertainty

A good plan does not remove friction from execution.

The leadership team can be aligned. The priorities can be clear. Roles can be defined. The organization can have capable people. The strategy can make sense.

And execution can still become difficult.

A dependency appears that nobody anticipated. A decision takes longer than expected. A supplier slips. A technical assumption proves wrong. A customer changes a requirement. Two capable teams interpret the same priority differently. A key employee leaves. Capital takes longer to raise. Information arrives late. What appeared straightforward during planning becomes much harder once people begin doing the work.

The Marine Corps has a name for this fundamental reality: friction.

MCDP 1, Warfighting, describes friction as the collection of factors that make apparently simple actions difficult. It can come from indecision, lack of coordination, unclear goals, complicated plans, organizational relationships, technology, environmental conditions, chance, or other sources. The doctrine makes an especially important distinction: organizations should reduce self-induced friction where possible, but they must ultimately become capable of operating effectively despite friction, because friction cannot be eliminated.

That idea creates one of the most useful parallels I have found between military thinking and Peak OS.

Peak OS was not developed from Marine Corps doctrine. It emerged from more than two decades of working with hundreds of founders, CEOs, leadership teams, and investors and observing what allowed some organizations to keep executing as complexity increased. Peak Teams describes Peak as a repeating system of habits designed to keep teams aligned, coordinated, empowered, learning, and moving toward a common Mission as conditions change.

The environments are very different.

But the underlying execution problem is recognizable.

A strong operating system does not create an organization without friction. It creates an organization capable of continuing to execute when friction inevitably appears.

For aerospace, defense, robotics, advanced manufacturing, autonomy, physical AI, and other frontier-tech companies, that distinction matters enormously.

What Is Execution Friction?

I use execution friction here to describe the resistance that appears between organizational intent and organizational action.

Leadership decides what the organization intends to accomplish.

Then reality gets involved.

The objective requires more resources than expected.

One function depends on another function whose timeline changed.

A decision does not have a clear owner.

A KPI reveals something leadership did not anticipate.

A customer request conflicts with the product plan.

An engineering issue affects Manufacturing.

Manufacturing affects delivery.

Delivery affects revenue.

Revenue affects capital.

None of these situations necessarily means the plan was poor.

They mean the organization has entered execution.

MCDP 1 describes friction as something that can be external, physical, mental, or self-induced. Particularly relevant to organizations, the doctrine identifies unclear goals, lack of coordination, complicated plans, complex organizational relationships, and complicated technologies as potential sources of self-induced friction.

Those examples translate surprisingly well to companies.

A company creates friction when nobody knows who owns a decision.

It creates friction when Sales and Engineering operate from different assumptions.

It creates friction when the company has 15 priorities and calls all of them critical.

It creates friction when meetings repeatedly surface problems without resolving them.

It creates friction when every decision escalates to the CEO.

It creates friction when teams have different versions of the plan.

It creates friction when important information cannot cross functional boundaries.

It creates friction when leadership changes priorities faster than teams can absorb them.

Some execution friction comes from the environment.

Some comes from the organization itself.

The latter is where an operating system can have the greatest effect.

Friction Is Not the Same as Execution Drift

This distinction is important.

Friction is inevitable.

Execution Drift is not.

Execution friction is the resistance an organization encounters while pursuing its intended direction.

Execution Drift begins when the organization does not adequately see, process, or respond to that friction and its actual trajectory starts separating from its intended trajectory.

That can happen gradually.

An OKR slips for one week.

Then another.

A cross-functional dependency remains unresolved.

A hiring constraint changes the capacity assumed in the One-Year Plan.

Another team continues operating as if the original assumption were still true.

The KPI still looks acceptable.

The quarter still looks recoverable.

Everyone remains busy.

But the organization is slowly moving away from the plan.

This is why Peak uses visible plans, OKRs, KPIs, and recurring operating cadence. Peak Teams describes the Three-Year Vision and One-Year Plan as the shared direction, with OKRs and KPIs acting as recurring waypoints that help teams recognize early when they are moving Off-Course.

The operating system cannot stop friction from occurring.

It can help prevent friction from silently becoming drift.

Uncertainty Makes Perfect Planning Impossible

MCDP 1 treats uncertainty as another inherent condition.

Its point is not that organizations should stop gathering information. Rather, the doctrine argues that complete certainty is impossible: decisions will often need to be made with incomplete, inaccurate, or contradictory information. The response is not paralysis. It is to create simple and flexible plans, prepare for likely contingencies, establish repeatable ways of operating, and foster initiative.

Growth companies experience their own version of this problem.

A Three-Year Vision contains assumptions.

A One-Year Plan contains assumptions.

The hiring plan contains assumptions.

The product roadmap contains assumptions.

The revenue plan contains assumptions.

The capital plan contains assumptions.

Leadership should work hard to make those assumptions intelligent.

But it should not mistake planning quality for certainty.

This is particularly obvious in frontier technology.

How long will a new technical capability actually take?

Will a supplier perform as expected?

Will the government program move on the predicted schedule?

Will the next round of financing occur when expected?

Will a hardware architecture perform at scale?

Will a customer requirement change during development?

Will the specialized people the company needs be available when the plan assumes they will be?

Leaders can reduce uncertainty.

They cannot eliminate it.

This changes the job of the operating system.

It cannot merely preserve the original plan.

It has to help the organization recognize when new information matters and respond without losing alignment.

The Plan Creates Direction. The Operating Rhythm Handles Friction.

This is where Peak's planning and operating rhythm work together.

The Mission provides the North Star.

The Three-Year Vision defines where the organization is heading.

The One-Year Plan creates a nearer definition of success.

Those layers establish direction.

Peak then uses OKRs to define the capabilities and outcomes the organization needs to build during the current execution horizon. KPIs help teams understand how important parts of the business are performing. Peak Teams describes the One-Year Plan as a clear map, with OKRs and KPIs providing measurable waypoints along the route.

Then execution starts.

And friction appears.

The company does not need to rebuild the One-Year Plan every time something gets difficult.

Instead, Weekly Camp creates a recurring point where teams can see what is happening.

Which OKRs are On-Course?

Which are Off-Course?

What do the KPIs show?

What changed?

Where is a dependency appearing?

What requires attention?

Then Triage creates a response mechanism for what actually needs collective thought or a decision. Peak Teams describes Weekly Camp as the recurring place where OKRs and KPIs are reviewed and Triage as the clearinghouse where consequential issues are prioritized and solved rather than allowed to generate endless reactive conversations.

That creates a simple but powerful execution capability:

Direction remains stable enough to create focus.

Feedback remains frequent enough to create adaptability.

Friction Often Appears Between Teams

The team-of-teams dimension is particularly important.

Individual teams can be functioning extremely well while the organization experiences enormous friction.

Sales is executing its plan.

Engineering is executing its plan.

Product is executing its plan.

Manufacturing is executing its plan.

Finance is executing its plan.

Yet the company is not executing one plan.

This is why Peak's concept of Symbiosis goes beyond team culture.

In Peak Teams, Symbiosis describes teams understanding their contribution, trusting one another to execute, and working collectively toward the Mission and Vision. The book explicitly extends this requirement to the company as a team of teams because cross-functional objectives cannot succeed when functions operate as isolated disciplines.

Consider a product launch.

Product changes scope.

Engineering absorbs the change.

The engineering date moves.

Marketing does not know.

Sales continues communicating the original launch.

Customer Success prepares customers around the old timeline.

Finance maintains revenue assumptions based on the original date.

Every team may be working hard.

The friction exists in the interfaces.

That is why visibility across teams matters.

The organization does not need everyone involved in every decision.

It needs enough shared understanding that one team's change does not unknowingly create friction for five others.

Complexity Multiplies Friction

MCDP 1 also identifies complexity as an inherent characteristic of its operating environment. It describes organizations as composed of nested parts in which each element has its own responsibilities while remaining part of a larger whole; each can encounter friction and uncertainty at its own level and can create friction for others.

That is a useful description of a scaling company.

At 20 people, a company may function largely as one group.

At 100 people, it has functions.

At 300 people, those functions may contain multiple teams.

The number of interfaces grows.

Engineering no longer means one engineering team.

Product may contain several groups.

The company may have multiple business units, locations, programs, products, or customer types.

A board sits above the executive team.

Sub-teams operate below it.

Customers, regulators, investors, partners, and suppliers interact with the system from outside.

Each additional relationship creates another place where execution friction can appear.

This is why informal coordination often stops scaling.

The organization has not suddenly hired worse people.

It has created more interfaces than informal communication can reliably manage.

A team-of-teams operating system becomes necessary because complexity itself changes the execution problem.

Self-Induced Friction Is Often More Fixable Than Leaders Think

MCDP 1 makes a useful distinction between friction that must simply be endured and self-induced friction that should be minimized.

Companies should make the same distinction.

Some problems are genuinely external.

A customer changes strategy.

A supplier fails.

Capital markets shift.

A regulation changes.

A technical experiment does not work.

Those conditions may be outside management's control.

But many execution problems blamed on "growth" or "complexity" are internally generated.

Unclear priorities.

Unclear ownership.

Poorly designed meetings.

Incompatible functional plans.

Too many objectives.

Weak metrics.

Decisions that repeatedly return to the CEO.

Lack of visibility into dependencies.

Teams working from stale versions of the plan.

Problems being discussed repeatedly without anyone taking action.

Those are not unavoidable consequences of growth.

They are organizational friction.

Peak's five SCALE behaviors—Symbiosis, Communication, Alignment, Learning, and Empowerment—were developed from observing recurring differences between teams that could operate effectively through growth and teams that could not.

The purpose is not to make work frictionless.

It is to remove enough unnecessary organizational friction that people can apply their energy to the actual mission.

Focus Is a Response to Friction

MCDP 1's treatment of focus provides another useful connection.

The doctrine describes focus as concentrating effects toward a particular objective rather than spreading resources across unnecessary or secondary efforts. It explicitly notes that focusing on what matters requires economy elsewhere: resources devoted unnecessarily to secondary efforts weaken the primary objective.

That principle matters enormously in growth companies.

Friction consumes organizational energy.

Every additional priority requires coordination.

Every new initiative creates dependencies.

Every additional OKR consumes attention.

Every cross-functional project creates another interface.

Every change of direction requires teams to stop, interpret, communicate, reorganize, and begin again.

Therefore, focus does more than improve productivity.

Focus reduces the surface area on which organizational friction can occur.

This is one reason Peak emphasizes a limited number of important objectives.

In Peak Teams, the planning process is built around narrowing potential priorities to the most important objectives and anchoring OKRs in the One-Year Plan and Three-Year Vision. The goal is not simply to create goals but to create focus around the work that matters most.

A company pursuing three meaningful company objectives still experiences friction.

A company pursuing 17 "top priorities" has intentionally multiplied it.

Speed Is Not Constant Activity

MCDP 1 pairs focus with another concept: speed.

But its definition is more nuanced than simply moving as fast as possible.

The doctrine connects speed over time to tempo, and it explicitly says a high rate of activity cannot be sustained indefinitely. The rhythm changes: there are times to operate quickly and times to gather information, replenish capability, or prepare for the next move.

That is highly relevant to companies that equate urgency with performance.

Every message is urgent.

Every project is critical.

Every customer request requires immediate response.

Every week introduces a new priority.

Everyone is moving quickly.

And yet decisions are being revisited, work is being redone, and teams are constantly waiting on one another.

That is activity.

It may not be organizational speed.

Peak's operating rhythm creates a different kind of tempo.

Teams focus on execution between Camps.

Weekly Camp creates the recurring synchronization point.

Triage concentrates decision-making on consequential issues.

Quarterly or Semiannual Sessions allow the organization to step out of weekly execution, reassess the One-Year Plan, incorporate learning, and establish the next execution horizon.

Annual planning creates a longer perspective.

The rhythm alternates between execution, synchronization, reflection, and planning.

That can create greater sustainable speed than simply asking the organization to move faster every day.

Friction Makes Empowerment More Important

Uncertainty and friction create situations that no plan can predict completely.

Someone eventually encounters a condition leadership did not anticipate.

Then what?

If every deviation requires senior approval, friction moves upward.

One question becomes ten escalations.

Ten escalations become a CEO bottleneck.

The organization slows precisely when it most needs to adapt.

MCDP 1 connects operating effectively under uncertainty with fostering initiative.

Peak reaches a similar conclusion through Empowerment.

In Peak Teams, aligned teams use shared understanding to guide hundreds of daily micro-decisions. Clear Roles and Responsibilities then give people greater freedom to make decisions and take action without constantly seeking leadership approval.

This is an important relationship:

Clarity reduces uncertainty about intent.

Ownership reduces uncertainty about authority.

Empowerment allows action when friction appears.

The objective is not for everyone to improvise independently.

It is for capable people to exercise judgment while remaining connected to the organization's Mission, plan, and outcomes.

Friction Reveals Whether Ownership Is Real

Plans often look clear when everything is going according to plan.

Ownership becomes visible when something goes wrong.

A customer milestone moves.

Who decides what happens next?

An engineering dependency threatens the launch.

Who owns the organizational response?

A major KPI is Off-Course.

Does the owner have authority to act?

Two functions disagree.

Who owns the final decision?

A critical objective will not be completed.

Does everyone wait for the CEO?

These moments expose whether Roles and Responsibilities are functioning as real decision architecture or merely as an org chart.

Peak uses clear ownership partly because ambiguity creates friction. Peak Teams describes capable people becoming hesitant or repeatedly escalating decisions when it is unclear who owns what, while clearer Roles and Responsibilities enable greater autonomy and faster action.

The moment execution becomes difficult is exactly when ownership matters most.

Friction Can Be a Signal, Not Merely an Obstacle

There is another important way to think about friction.

Not all friction should simply be removed.

Sometimes friction is telling the organization something.

Sales and Product keep disagreeing about the roadmap.

Perhaps the problem is not interpersonal.

Perhaps the company's market strategy is unclear.

Engineering repeatedly misses dependencies with Manufacturing.

Perhaps the problem is not individual accountability.

Perhaps the operating architecture between the teams is weak.

Every major decision returns to the CEO.

Perhaps the executives are not underperforming.

Perhaps decision rights are unclear.

OKRs continually go Off-Course.

Perhaps teams are not executing poorly.

Perhaps the One-Year Plan is unrealistic or organizational capacity is insufficient.

When friction repeats, leaders should become curious.

What organizational condition is producing it?

Peak's Triage and learning loops are useful because they allow teams to move beyond the visible symptom.

The point is not simply to make the immediate issue disappear.

It is to understand whether the issue reveals something about the system itself.

That is where friction can become organizational intelligence.

Fluidity Means the Environment Keeps Moving

MCDP 1 describes fluidity as another inherent condition: circumstances are continuously evolving, each situation is shaped by what came before it and influences what comes next, and success requires flexibility of thought and the ability to adapt to changing conditions.

This provides an important counterweight to organizational discipline.

Peak asks teams to create clear plans.

It also asks them to revisit those plans.

The One-Year Plan is not meant to become an artifact everyone must defend regardless of reality.

At Quarterly or Semiannual Sessions, teams review the plan from a new vantage point. New information can lead to adjustments. New OKRs can be created based on what has been learned. Peak Teams describes this cadence as an intentional process of review, course correction, and renewed alignment rather than one-time planning.

That is adaptability.

It is not changing priorities every week.

It is not refusing to commit.

It is maintaining enough stability to execute while creating deliberate moments to incorporate what reality has taught the organization.

Execution Friction Can Produce Opportunity

MCDP 1's discussion of uncertainty and fluidity does not treat unexpected events only as threats. Chance and changing conditions can also create opportunities that effective organizations are prepared to exploit.

The same is true in business.

A customer asks for something unexpected.

Initially, it looks like friction.

But the request reveals a new market.

A product constraint forces Engineering to find a better architecture.

A hiring failure reveals that the organizational design itself needs to change.

A KPI moves unexpectedly in the positive direction.

The team investigates and discovers a repeatable advantage.

A competitor exits a market.

The original annual plan did not anticipate it.

Now the company has a decision.

An organization that is too rigid cannot exploit opportunity because everything outside the plan is considered disruption.

An organization with no discipline cannot exploit it either because it is already reacting to everything.

The strongest organization can distinguish:

noise,

friction,

risk,

and

opportunity.

That requires shared context and judgment.

Frontier Tech Magnifies Execution Friction

The connection becomes particularly clear in frontier technology.

Consider a company developing a complex autonomous system.

Hardware depends on software.

Software depends on sensors.

Sensors depend on suppliers.

Manufacturing depends on engineering release timing.

Quality depends on stable processes.

Program Management depends on all of them.

Customer commitments depend on the program plan.

Revenue depends on customer milestones.

Capital planning depends on revenue timing.

Hiring depends on the technical roadmap.

One change can propagate through the entire system.

The company therefore does not simply need brilliant engineering.

It needs organizational mechanisms capable of absorbing friction across a network of specialized teams.

That is why mission-critical organizations need particularly strong:

organizational clarity,

cross-functional visibility,

ownership,

operating rhythm,

decision-making,

learning,

and adaptability.

Not because structure removes uncertainty.

Because more complex missions create more opportunities for friction.

The Strongest Teams Are Not the Teams With the Easiest Path

Across the hundreds of companies that shaped Peak OS, I have never seen a growth company execute in a perfectly straight line.

Plans miss.

People leave.

Customers change.

Products take longer.

Metrics surprise the team.

Strategies evolve.

Capital changes the pace of the organization.

New leaders arrive.

Organizational structures stop working.

That is normal.

What differentiates teams is what happens next.

Some organizations become reactive.

Priorities scatter.

The CEO gets pulled deeper into the details.

Meetings multiply.

Teams retreat into silos.

People protect their functions.

The plan slowly becomes irrelevant.

Other organizations maintain enough clarity and operating discipline to understand what changed, make decisions, adjust, and continue.

That is one reason Peak's five SCALE behaviors work together:

Symbiosis helps interconnected teams continue operating as a whole.

Communication moves the information friction reveals.

Alignment keeps the organization oriented toward common intent.

Learning helps the team improve from the experience.

Empowerment allows people to act without everything returning to the CEO.

The operating system creates the conditions through which friction can be absorbed rather than amplified.

Friction Is Inevitable. Organizational Friction Is Manageable.

This may be the most useful conclusion from comparing MCDP 1 with Peak OS.

Marine Corps Warfighting does not promise an environment in which everything unfolds according to plan.

It starts from the opposite assumption.

Friction exists.

Uncertainty exists.

Conditions change.

Disorder emerges.

Organizations must become capable of operating effectively anyway.

Growth companies should begin with the same realism.

The One-Year Plan will encounter reality.

The OKRs will not all go perfectly.

Some KPIs will miss.

Dependencies will emerge.

New information will change assumptions.

The question is not:

How do we create a plan that never encounters friction?

The better question is:

How do we build an organization that can continue executing when it does?

Peak provides one answer.

Create enough clarity that people know where they are going.

Create enough focus that organizational energy is concentrated on what matters.

Create enough visibility to recognize when execution is moving Off-Course.

Create enough Symbiosis that teams understand how their work affects one another.

Create enough ownership that decisions can happen at the appropriate level.

Create an operating rhythm that repeatedly surfaces meaningful friction.

Use Triage to convert important friction into decisions and action.

Learn from what happens.

Adjust when reality requires it.

Then continue.

That is not frictionless execution.

It is something more realistic and more valuable:

an organization capable of executing through friction without allowing friction to become Execution Drift.

For military and former-military leaders building companies in aerospace, defense, robotics, advanced manufacturing, autonomy, physical AI, and other frontier technologies, that idea may feel familiar.

The environment is different.

The underlying execution truth is not.

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