Time to add some Friktion

Sometimes it just makes sense to change. Reinvent yourself. Pick a new name. Update your style. Move into a new place. So we did.

It’s not that we’ve changed radically since yesterday. It’s that we chose an outfit 10 years ago that didn’t feel quite right anymore. We’d outgrown it. Evolved into something different. Something a bit less easygoing and a bit more demanding. Tough love. And that’s why we’re called Friktion now.

“Why not pick a name with more positive associations?”, we imagine some of you thinking as you shake your head in disbelief.

Well, it’s partly about honesty. Finding the right problem, making changes, and trying out novel ideas will inevitably create friction. Better to set people’s expectations right from the beginning.

And it’s partly because the mere idea of naming the company Friktion made (almost all of) us giggle. A lot and for a really long time.

Also, we want to attract corporate troublemakers and extensive empirical research tells us they just love friction.

As for the weird spelling. Well, we’re from Sweden and friktion means friction in Swedish. Perhaps we thought we could outweigh some of the negative associations by making you think of IKEA, ABBA, meatballs, and midsummer. (Well, maybe not the last one, but you get the idea.) But then again, that might just be us trying to rationalize an irrational choice.

PS 1. Feel free to reach out and tell us what you think of our new name. No need to hold back—we love friction.

PS 2. You should of course also reach out if you have a big, hairy problem that you need help solving. We may have changed our name and logo, but our drive is still helping people and organizations solve the right* problem (as it has been since 2015).

PS 3. *We define the right problem as the one keeping you from creating real value (without harming people or planet, of course). You might recognize it as that big, hairy problem that must not be mentioned or that your company has failed to solve a gazillion times.