Every agency and enterprise I've worked inside over the last decade has had the same quiet problem, and almost none of them had a name for it.

On paper, the operation looks healthy. The right platforms are in place, the org chart is filled in, someone ran a marketing transformation program a few years back and there's a deck about it on a shared drive. Leadership is doing the work. Teams are doing the work. And yet everything takes longer than it should, costs more than it should, and wears people down faster than anyone will say out loud.

I've come to call it Operating Resistance, and once you start looking for it, you see it everywhere.

What Operating Resistance does

In an electrical system, resistance is the buildup that accumulates in the connections over time. Corrosion at the terminals. Loose wiring nobody re-seated after the last renovation. Undersized conductors carrying loads they were never rated for. Too many things drawing off the same circuit because it was easier than running a new one.

The system still runs. It just runs hot. It wastes energy as heat, trips breakers under load, and eventually something burns out. You don't notice resistance until you measure it, or until something fails in a way you can't ignore.

Organizations accumulate resistance the same way, and in the same three places every operating model lives: People, Platforms, and Process. Every reactive hire, every tool bought in a hurry, every workflow that evolved around a problem the business no longer has — all of it adds resistance to the circuit. The business keeps running, but with more friction than it should.

You can usually hear it before you can measure it, if you listen for the right things.

The 'People' resistance sounds like "that's not my job." Or its quieter cousin — one person doing the work of three because two roles quietly collapsed into one during the last restructure, and every handoff is now a single point of failure. Nobody planned that part; it just happened over years keeping it moving.

The Process tell sounds like "this is how we've always done it." Which usually means the workflow was designed for a problem the company doesn't have anymore, by people who aren't there anymore, and nobody has had permission or bandwidth to question it.

The Platform tell is the most colorful. It's the sentence that goes "LeadFusion reads Flapjack and SideGlance, but only writes to NoteForge, so we mirror the data in Smokestack." Every organization has its own version. It's the sound of five or six years of reactive tool purchases without a content supply chain or platform strategy underneath them.

None of these show up on a P&L as a line item. They show up as missed deadlines, blown scopes, talent walking out the door, and a CFO asking why last year's platform investment didn't deliver the ROI the business case promised.

The uncomfortable part about internal chat and email

I want to plant a flag here, because this is where I part company with a lot of the conventional wisdom.

Most of what moves through corporate chat and email in a given day is Operating Resistance in disguise. It's the workflow the organization should have had, running informally through channels that were never designed to carry it. People spend two, three, four hours a day finding the work, clarifying the work, reminding each other about the work, re-reminding, re-clarifying, and then finally doing the work in whatever time is left.

If something is important enough to need a documented internal communication, it shouldn't live in a thread that scrolls off the screen in 10 minutes. It should be a task in the work management platform, routed to the right person, with the approvals baked in and a status anyone can see.

I've actually removed certain chat platforms entirely from more than one organization, and I've threatened the same for internal email. Not because the tools are broken, but because using them as the primary surface where work happens is the loudest possible signal that the real workflow doesn't exist yet.

When the workflow is right, chat gets quiet. Internal email gets quiet. Then watch the work move.

Three patterns I keep seeing

Resistance looks different at different stages of maturity, but the patterns are similar. A few I've seen up close:

The first is a technology team inside a large organization that's been running on spreadsheets and shared drives since inception, putting out fires, and has started to suspect they need "better project management." When we actually look together, the issue isn't what they thought. Process management for the entire function, not just the PM team — every request from the business running through a single intake, a single workflow, a single set of approvals, with real visibility into total workload. The distinction sounds theoretical, until you see the process moving the way it should. The team stops being always-on-fire, and leadership can finally plan around them instead of apologize for them. This pattern shows up constantly in post-merger integration work, where two technology functions have been bolted together without anyone redesigning how the combined group actually operates.

The second is a service business with a strong client roster, where every account team has evolved its own process, its own rhythm, and its own definition of "done." Leadership can't forecast resourcing or profitability with any real confidence because no two engagements are measured the same way. The fix everyone hopes for is a new platform. The fix that actually works is building the intake, the workflow, the resourcing, and the financial model inside the work management platform they already own — and then training every team on it, together, so there's one way work moves. The unlock isn't the technology. It's that leadership can finally price and staff a piece of work with the real numbers in front of them before they say yes to it.

The third is an organization in the middle of becoming something different than what it used to be. The leadership team has a vision for the new version of the business, but the operating model is still the one that served the old version. The transformation roadmap they hand you on day one is usually about half of what the work actually requires, because the rest only becomes visible once you're inside. End-to-end workflow, resourcing integration, new service lines, brand and positioning work, sometimes a new website — all of it connected, because trying to transform one piece at a time just moves the resistance from one part of the circuit to another.

In every one of these, the resistance isn't a single broken thing. It's the accumulated drag of decisions that each made sense in isolation and stopped making sense together.

Why it usually gets misdiagnosed

Leadership teams almost always reach for one of three explanations when performance slips, and none of them are quite right.

The first is "we need better tools." This is the most expensive misdiagnosis, because it usually leads to buying another platform on top of the ones that aren't being used well, which adds more resistance rather than clearing it.

The second is "we need to hire more people." Sometimes that's true. More often, the team is the right size, but they're spending half their capacity compensating for workflow that doesn't exist. Adding headcount to a high-resistance operating model just creates more hands doing the same compensating.

The third is "we need a reorg." Occasionally necessary, but the reorg rarely addresses the platforms or the process — which means six months later, the new structure is running through the same broken connections as the old one, and everyone wonders why nothing changed.

The real fix is almost never one of those three in isolation. It's looking honestly at People, Platforms, and Process together, and being willing to rewire the parts that stopped working for the business you are now — not the business you were when you designed them.

The honest version

Operating Resistance is the most under-diagnosed drag on business performance I know of. It sits underneath every underperforming platform investment, every missed forecast, every retention problem, every "we need to hire more people" conversation. It almost never shows up as a line item, which is why it almost never gets addressed directly.

It's also entirely fixable, and the fix usually doesn't require buying another new platfrom to throw in the mix. It requires the honest look, the willingness to step back from the way its always been done, and the discipline to keep the circuit clean after the work is done.

That's the work I do. If the tells in this post sounded like your hallway, I'd enjoy the conversation.

For the methodology I use to clear it, subscribe for the next article The SPARK Method.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Operating Resistance?

Operating Resistance is the accumulated drag that builds up across an organization's People, Platforms, and Process over time. It's the invisible cost of reactive hiring decisions, tools bought without a platform strategy, and workflows that were designed for a version of the business that no longer exists. The organization keeps functioning, but it runs hot — wasting energy on rework, handoffs, searching for information, and compensating for gaps that should have been closed years ago.

How is Operating Resistance different from technical debt?

Technical debt is a software engineering concept — it describes the shortcuts taken in a codebase that have to be paid back later. Operating Resistance is broader. It includes technical debt, but it also covers role ambiguity, workflow decay, platform sprawl, and the organizational habits that accumulate around all of the above. Technical debt lives in the code. Operating Resistance lives in the way the whole organization runs.

What is a marketing operating model?

A marketing operating model is the connected system of People, Platforms, and Process that determines how marketing work actually gets done — from campaign intake through production, approval, delivery, and measurement. A healthy operating model has clear roles, a work management platform configured to route work to the right resources, workflows that match how the business actually operates, and reporting that gives leadership real visibility into cost, capacity, and output. Most organizations have the components but haven't designed the connections between them, which is where Operating Resistance builds up.

How do I know if my organization has Operating Resistance?

Listen for the tells. If your team frequently says "that's not my job," you have People resistance. If the answer to why something is done a certain way is "that's how we've always done it," you have Process resistance. If describing your tech stack requires a sentence like "System A reads from System B, but System C only looks at System D, so we mirror the data in System E," you have Platform resistance. If your leadership team can't confidently forecast resourcing, margin, or delivery dates, you almost certainly have resistance across all three.

Can't we just buy a better platform to fix this?

Almost never. Most organizations I work with already own the platforms they need — they just haven't configured them to support how the business actually operates, and haven't built the workflows on top of them that move work through the organization. Buying a new platform before fixing the underlying operating model usually adds resistance rather than clearing it, because now you have another system drawing off the same overloaded circuit. Layering AI on top of a high-resistance operating model has the same effect. It just moves electricity through the bad connections faster.

Does this only apply to agencies?

No. The language in this post leans agency because that's where I've done the most recent work, but Operating Resistance shows up in every organization where People, Platforms, and Process have drifted out of alignment — which is nearly every organization past a certain size. I've seen the same patterns in mid-market B2B, healthcare marketing, and enterprise technology functions. The vocabulary changes; the diagnostic doesn't.

How do you clear Operating Resistance?

Through a process I call the SPARK Method: Spot the resistance, Prioritize the unwind, Align People, Platforms, and Process, Rewire how work actually moves, and Keep the circuit clean over time. The full methodology will be detailed in our next article.

Jayson Powers is the founder of SPARK Tech Advisory. He spent a decade inside agencies and enterprise organizations diagnosing and clearing Operating Resistance, and now does it full-time for leaders whose tools have outrun their operating model.