Why our best intentions get stuck in the corridors

Written By Per Grankvist

We all know the feeling: a bold climate strategy is passed with cheers in the council, yet a year later, nothing has changed on the ground. Let’s talk about the "internal friction" that lives in city hall corridors and that is quietly killing ambitions.

Friction in city hall is seldom seen, only felt. But a lot of

When you and I walk into the office in the morning, we’re not just stepping into a workplace. We’re stepping into a complex ecosystem of competing priorities, inherited silos, unwritten rules and invisible obsticles.

In my years in urban governance, I’ve seen countless practitioners struggle—not because you lack technical knowledge, but because of what researchers call the “implementation gap.” That’s the wide gap between high‑level policy goals and the messy reality of getting things done.

To close that gap, we first need to name what’s in our way: friction. Sarah Burch is one of many researchers who highlight that the barriers to climate action are often institutional rather than technological. shows that the real barriers to climate action are often institutional rather than technological.

In our mid‑sized cities, that friction tends to show up in three specific ways.

  • First, there’s formal friction. You see this in rigid budget cycles and legal mandates that were designed for a stable world—not for the rapid transformation the climate crisis demands. When your department’s KPIs don’t match your city’s sustainability goals, the system is, in practice, setting you up to fail.

  • Second, we have structural friction—the classic silo problem. Our cities are organised like 19th‑century factories: planning in one building, transport in another, social services in a third. But climate change doesn’t care where the org chart draws the lines.

  • Finally, and often most importantly, there is relational friction. This is the lack of trust, the “blame culture,” and the quiet turf wars that pop up as soon as a project crosses departmental boundaries.

My view is that we’ve been looking for solutions in the wrong places. We buy more data and bring in more technical consultants. But, as I argued in my 2022 paper, data alone doesn’t move people. Action does.

That’s why I developed the Actionable Consensus Framework (ACF). The ACF isn’t another software package. It’s a kind of social lubricant for municipal machinery. It recognises that you’re working in a system designed for stability, and it gives you a structured way to introduce change without breaking the gears.

The ACF is all about creating what we call actionable consensus. This is not a lukewarm compromise where everyone is equally unhappy. It’s a shared commitment to a concrete path forward, built on a common understanding of why we’re doing this.

When we use the ACF, we start by mapping the friction. We ask questions like: Where does the paper stop moving? Who needs to say “yes” for this to happen? Why are they currently saying “no”?

By facing these human and institutional frictions directly, we can start to turn the implementation gap into a bridge. You’re not alone in your frustration—and you’re not powerless either. We just need to change how we talk and work with each other across those corridor walls.

Sources:

Advice for Action:

Take ten minutes today to identify one "point of friction" in your current project—not a technical problem, but a person or a process that is slowing things down—and ask yourself:

"What is the unwritten rule they are following?"

That simple question is often the first step toward changing the system from within.

Per Grankvist https://pergrankvist.se