Inspiração
16/06/2026
Your company invests in comfort. Offices with sofas, training sessions with gourmet snacks and mindfulness sessions to manage stress. The goal is a state of permanent harmony, a smooth flow with no obstacles. But real learning, the kind that changes behaviours and prepares teams for the future, does not come from comfort. It comes from friction.
Most corporate training is built on a false premise: that learning is like installing software. An expert presents a model, the team listens, and the skill is magically transferred. But the human brain does not work through downloads.
Learning that simply exposes people to ideas, even good ideas, creates only the illusion of competence. The team nods, fills in the satisfaction survey with high scores and, the following Monday, returns to exactly the same patterns. Because nothing forced them to leave the mental motorway they travel every day.
Comfortable learning is forgettable. Learning through friction leaves a mark.
The brain does not learn in a straight line
What happens when a team is confronted with a challenge where its usual tools fail? Where its hierarchy has no answer? Where past experience gets in the way?
A short circuit happens. A moment of cognitive dissonance. The brain, which usually looks for the path of least resistance, is forced to stop. This moment of blockage, discomfort and “this is not working” is friction.
Research on neuroplasticity suggests that this point of friction is precisely where the brain becomes more open to change. When old neural pathways turn out to be a dead end, the brain is forced to build new connections. That effort is uncomfortable. It takes energy. Often, it feels like failure. But that is exactly where learning happens. Learning is not a process of addition. It is a process of rewriting. And rewriting hurts.
Lego’s painful lesson
In the early 2000s, Lego was on the brink of bankruptcy. The company that had built an empire on a simple plastic brick had lost itself in theme parks, clothing lines and mediocre video games. They had become comfortable, diversified and irrelevant. They believed innovation meant doing more things, rather than doing their one thing better.
Friction came in the form of imminent financial collapse. The learning that followed was brutal. They had to sell assets, lay people off and, above all, make a painful decision: abandon everything that was not core to the business. They returned to the brick. They deconstructed the business in order to save it. It was a learning process forced by reality, full of friction, fear and loss.
Lego did not learn how to innovate in a creativity workshop.
It learned when the threat of disappearing forced it to question everything it had taken for granted.
From friction to creation
Many companies come to us to solve a problem of collaboration or agility. We could put their teams in a scenario where they have to defuse a bomb to feel the pressure. But sometimes, the most productive friction is not panic. It is creation.
In our OpenLab formats, we do not give teams a puzzle to solve. We give them loose pieces and a real business problem. A challenge the organisation has not yet managed to decode. The goal is not to “win a game”, but to build a functional prototype: a new process, a product outline, a concrete solution, within a limited timeframe.
The friction here is different. It is the friction between different visions within the team. It is the struggle to turn an abstract idea into something tangible. It is the negotiation around which features to cut in order to meet the deadline. It is the discomfort of presenting work that is imperfect, but real. Teams are forced to collaborate because that is the only way to build something that works.
They learn to negotiate, prioritise and lead by example. Not because they saw it on a slide, but because they felt the cost of failing to do it.
Choose your discomfort
Your team will encounter friction. The question is when, and how.
They can encounter it in the hardest possible way, when a market crisis, a faster competitor or an internal failure exposes every weakness, as happened with Lego. Or they can encounter it in an environment designed for that purpose: a laboratory where making mistakes is allowed and becomes the starting point for real learning.
The question is not whether your team needs to learn. The question is whether you are willing to create the conditions for learning to truly happen, even if the process is less harmonious than you would like.
If the answer is yes, and comfort is no longer enough, it is time for us to talk.
Tell us what is happening with your team.
We do not promise harmony. We promise progress.
And nothing will ever be the same.
