We’ve all been there. The meeting ends, and as you walk back to your desk, you lean over to a colleague: “Can you believe what the launch team just asked for? They’re clueless. They have no idea how long the work itself actually takes.” Or maybe it’s: “Those design guys always do this. They never consult with us first to get the actual consumer point of view. ” These moments can feel like harmless venting, a natural release valve for workplace frustration. But they’re actually symptoms of something more insidious: we’ve stopped trying to collaborate and started telling stories instead.
When working together gets too difficult, when we feel exhausted or burnt out by the effort, we default to story-telling instead of problem-solving. There’s a friction threshold, and when the difficulty of collaborating exceeds that threshold, our brains shift into narrative-making mode. And we can be very creative. We create stories about the other team, the other department, the other office. And those stories, once formed, become more intractable than the original friction ever was.
The Tipping Point
Collaboration is inherently difficult. Every cross-functional project comes with built-in friction: different priorities, competing deadlines, misaligned incentives. Add in communication style differences, personality clashes, and the competing languages of different departments and you’ve got a recipe for constant low-level tension.
This friction isn’t inherently bad. It’s the natural result of diverse teams with different functions trying to create something together. The problem comes when the psychological cost of working through that friction exceeds our capacity to do so.
Think of it like a threshold. Below it, we engage: we schedule the extra meeting, we ask clarifying questions, we assume good intent and work to understand constraints. Above it, something shifts. Instead of thinking, “This is too hard” we think, “They don’t care.”..It’s not a conscious thought, but a cognitive shortcut. Why engage in the exhausting work of navigating complexity when we can simplify everything into a character flaw?
And here’s the kicker: stress lowers our threshold dramatically. Tight deadlines, organizational uncertainty, personal pressures all shorten our fuse. Suddenly, friction that we’d normally work through feels insurmountable. The other team isn’t just operating under different constraints; they’re being difficult. They don’t care. They don’t work as hard as we do.
The Stories We Tell
Everyone tells the same stories about the “other:”
“ They don’t understand what really matters.”
“They’re territorial.”
“They never follow through.”
“They’re just not good”
The stories are efficient, satisfying, and socially bonding. They turn complex systemic friction into simple explanations. What makes these stories so sticky is that they’re usually some kernel of truth: a missed deadline, a miscommunication, a difference in priorities. But we’ve stopped being curious, and we attribute intent where there may only be circumstance, and malice where there’s merely misalignment.
When Stories Become Organizational Lore
The real damage happens when these stories calcify into organizational folklore. They spread, get repeated, and get refined. They become a team’s bonding ritual, where venting shared grievances create in-group cohesion. They get passed down to new employees: “Oh, you’re working with the digital team? Good luck. Here’s what you need to know about them.”
Soon, the stories become self-fulfilling prophecies. We approach the other team with defensiveness, skepticism. We already know about them. And then they sense it, respond to the signals we’re sending, and that confirms our story. See? We knew they were difficult.
This is how the sales team decides that product development “promises things we can’t deliver,” while product development believes sales don’t take the time to learn about the product so they can sell it. It’s how regional offices become convinced that “HQ doesn’t understand our market,” while headquarters thinks “the field offices don’t follow process.” The stories become part of the organizational DNA, shaping behavior for years.
The Real Cost
What are the costs of this? There’s an emotional tax, the frustration and cynism we carry that erodes our ability to cooperate. Teams become siloed, information only when forced to, and conversations become more careful and political. And with all of that, there is less synergy, creativity and innovation.
Finding a Way Forward
So how do we break the cycle? It starts with recognizing when we’re above our threshold. When you notice yourself telling stories, running a narrative about the other team’s incompetence or laziness. When you notice that, pause. Ask yourself: Am I approaching them with curiosity or with a script already written? Am I considering their constraints or only my own?
Then challenge your story. Consider their context. Tell the story from their perspective. What pressures are they under? What constraints might explain their behavior that have nothing to do with intent? “Help me understand why this is hard from your side.”
Of course, we can make changes at the organizational level as well. We need to make collaboration easier. We can make sure to align incentives across teams through shared goals. Create clear decision-making frameworks for when teams disagree. Build in buffer time for cross-functional work instead of treating coordination as free. And crucially, reduce stress where possible, realistic timelines that actually account for collaboration overhead.
And small investments in your relationships pay enormous dividends. Make time to meet with people you have to work with before deadlines loom, before you ask them to put aside their work to deliver what you need. Take time to learn about their world. Be curious about their constraints, their goals and the pressures they’re working under. .
The stories aren’t the root problem—they’re a symptom of unmanaged friction that exceeds our capacity to work through it. We can’t eliminate friction entirely, nor should we. Creative tension is valuable. But we can choose curiosity over certainty, complexity over comforting narratives.
No organization is friction-free. But we can learn to notice when we’re at a threshold. At the moment we can choose to be curious, to engage rather than retreat into a story about the other.
The next time you feel that familiar frustration rising, that impulse to vent about the other team, pause. You’re not wrong to feel the friction. But this is a critical leadership moment. You have a choice about what comes next: will you revert to a story, or will you stay curious long enough to solve the actual problem?