Creating positive friction to drive change.
Bringing the heat 🔥
This week I’ve been thinking about a comment from Tobias Lütke, co-founder and CEO of Shopify, and how it relates to the work I’m doing with enterprise marketing teams and AI.
A few months back he said something about organisations and teams needing sources of heat. It was about how heat drives change, and is useful to challenge the status quo in a business.
It makes sense. According to the second law of thermodynamics, the universe pays for every act of creation with a bit of heat. Without it there is nothing new.
Friction is your friend.
It’s a powerful metaphor. Heat represents energy, motion, and friction, the spark that makes newness possible. But what’s it got to do with marketing and technology?
Right now, everything.
Positive friction in teams happens when different backgrounds, perspectives, and ways of thinking collide. It’s that creative abrasion, sometimes uncomfortable, always productive, that turns consensus into genuine progress.
In the right context, friction is where the fun lives. It’s what starts journeys, challenges assumptions, and forces something new to happen. At work, at home, in life, a little heat keeps things alive.
And in moments of major technological shift, like the one we’re living through right now, it’s essential.
The best organisations use friction as fuel. They don’t avoid it; they channel it, to adapt, invent, and to actively shape the future.
The right amount of heat?
There’s a balance to this art though: enough energy to transform, not enough to combust. Too much heat, and you get badly burned.
In my early days at Ford Motor Company, all the talent was top-drawer. Smart people with top degrees from top universities. But homogenous. Same suits, same worldview. Little diversity of thought, and very little friction. One of the reasons most big corporates need outside help, to inject the heat.
Today, working with marketing tech vendors chasing fresh ideas as AI rewrites the playbook, and with enterprise teams looking for people unafraid to experiment, the challenge is the same; organisations full of brilliant specialists who all look, think, and work a little too alike.
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Sometimes that’s the paradox: the most skilled domain experts can be the least comfortable with disruption. The deeper the experience, the harder it can be to see past the now and on to the next.
But progress depends on mixing mastery with fresh perspectives.
Creating a culture grounded in deep domain expertise, yet rich in difference, with enough heat to spark change without burning out.
Blending cultures & perspectives.
My amazingly talented wife and co-Renegade-founder Tracy Wood, summed up perfectly what enterprise teams over the next few years need to be about:
Creativity + Computerability + Compliance
She’s talking about a blend of interdependent disciplines, brought together to bring creative heat, technical expertise, and enterprise control:
Creativity: innovative thinkers with the spark, imagination, and intuition to shape meaningful new ideas.
Computerability: technical specialists with the knowledge and confidence to harness AI, data, and automation as co-creators, not competitors.
Compliance: custodians of those real world disciplines of brand governance and legal compliance, that ensure things work when the rubber hits the road.
In an age of technical revolution, human heat can be your competitive advantage.
The real, and often overlooked, challenge is building cultures where creativity, computerability, and compliance can coexist, challenge each other constructively, and evolve together.
The big question: where is your heat coming from? 🔥
Continue the conversation?
I’m Andy Wood, founder at Renegade Agency. I help marketing & technology teams navigate tech change to deliver better, faster, cheaper customer experiences.
Currently working on AI Proof-of-Value, augmenting marketing workflows for enterprise clients across Europe. I can help you navigate what comes next, with strategic depth and a people first mindset.
Get in touch to build what’s next. Connect on LinkedIn.
