The Hidden Tax of Friction is the cost an organisation pays for every unnecessary handoff between information, decision and action. It never appears on a P&L, because it is paid in delay, in rework, in decisions not taken and in opportunities that expire.
The tax is hidden because each individual handoff looks reasonable: a review, a signoff, a clarification, a second opinion. Compounded across a decision loop, the same reasonable steps produce a quarterly retrospective out of a real-time signal.
Naming the tax is the first act of reducing it. Zero-Gravity measures it as accumulated Decision-to-Action Latency per domain, and treats every intervention as a deliberate reduction of tax at a named handoff.