The Hidden Cost of Cognitive Friction in Energy Operations
- Ron Swartz
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
It’s 6:03 AM.
The ISO market just moved 12%. The trader’s flipping through dashboards.
The scheduler’s checking an outage across three systems.
Risk is already sorting through conflicting signals from overnight.
Sound familiar?
This isn’t about bad data. Or bad tools.
It’s about what happens when your team runs into friction in how they think, act, and move together.
Cognitive Friction: What Slows Us Down
Every time someone has to:
Copy data between Excel sheets and hope nothing got misaligned
Re-enter the same values across multiple systems
Track down the “correct” version of a shared file
Double-check curtailments between systems or in buried ISO notices
Piece together past trades to explain today’s exposure
Rely on tribal knowledge because no formal process exists
Manually reformat data just to make it usable
That’s not just inefficiency... That’s cognitive friction — and it wears down even your best people.
We don’t always see it. But we feel it: in slower reactions, missed signals, and decision fatigue.
So the question is:
Why are we still asking humans to fill in the gaps our systems don’t cover?
Different Roles, Same Story
Even at organizations with the most capable, modern ETRM platforms, these types of friction still show up — just in more subtle, harder-to-detect ways.
You might recognize it if you’re a:
Trader: flipping between dashboards and pasting the wrong curve into a bid sheet after a late ISO refresh
Scheduler: managing bids through XML, juggling browser tabs, and pulling PDFs for pricing
Risk Analyst: trying to explain a VaR spike with a patchwork of spreadsheets
Settlements Analyst: reconciling mismatched invoice lines across disconnected systems
These aren’t tech failures... They’re friction points — and they scale with pressure.
The ISO Submission That Went Sideways
Here’s one I’ve heard more than once:
A last-minute copy/paste error sends the wrong offer to the ISO.
Everything looked fine. The spreadsheet updated. The numbers were copied. But a row shifted.
A tab wasn’t refreshed. By the time it’s caught — if it’s caught — it’s already live.
That’s not a system bug. That’s cognitive.
Even with a Strong ETRM, Friction Stays
Maybe you’re thinking:
“We’ve got a modern, well-integrated ETRM. Doesn’t that solve this?”
And to be fair, a lot of them do an excellent job:
Clean data pipelines
Strong transactional logic
Even AI to support analysis and operations
But even in the best systems, friction lingers — not because of what they lack, but because of what they prioritize: Transactions over decisions.
These systems weren’t built to reduce mental load. They weren’t designed to help someone in the moment of pressure figure out: what should I do next?
Here’s where friction still shows up:
Slow time-to-clarity — You see the signal, but it takes minutes to figure out why it matters
Unclear accountability — VaR alert hits, but no one knows who owns the response
Hard-to-retrace decisions — Explaining what happened still takes hours
Mental context-switching — Risk, position, pricing all split across tabs
Shadow systems — Users build side-trackers because they don’t fully trust the tools
You can have great data, clean reports, and even helpful insights — and still feel friction when it counts most.
Because what your team needs isn’t just information.
It’s something that moves the decision forward.
And maybe the real shift isn’t in the data — it’s in how we support the moment of decision. I’ll explore that in my next post.
Even the best systems don’t eliminate friction — they just push it upstream.
Why It Matters
These aren’t everyday mistakes — but when they hit, they hurt:
Missed trades
Internal breakdowns
Regulatory exposure
And they’re getting more expensive as volatility grows and decisions get faster.
So here’s the question:
How do we help teams think and act more clearly — without adding more dashboards or more complexity?
That’s the direction I’ve been thinking about.
Don’t Rethink Everything — Just One Thing
Where does your team feel the most grind?
Switching tools for context?
Second-guessing a judgment call?
Slowing down on handoffs?
Start there.
Sometimes the first fix is simply naming the friction.
If this resonates — I’d love to compare notes.
We don’t have to treat friction like it’s inevitable.
There are better ways to work. I believe we can build them.
— Article by Ron Swartz