Flywheel Diagram Maker with Friction Points

What is a flywheel diagram?

A flywheel diagram draws a business, product or program as a loop of stages. Each stage pushes the next one, and the last stage pushes the first, so the effort you put in is not used up in one pass but adds to the speed of the next. The idea comes from Jim Collins, who describes it in Good to Great as the process of "relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond" (jimcollins.com). In his 2019 monograph Turning the Flywheel he asks leaders to capture the drivers of momentum and how they link together.

The maker above draws the loop as you type: stage cards on a ring, curved arrows between them, a label in the center, and an optional red marker wherever a hand-off slows down. This page is about the business and strategy flywheel; if you came for the engine part, see the note on mechanical flywheels further down.

How to make a flywheel diagram

1. 1

   Name the engine in the center

   Use the company, product, school or team the flywheel belongs to. It sits in the hub so anyone who sees the diagram knows what is turning.

2. 2

   List the stages in the order they feed each other

   Type one stage per row. Each stage should cause the next one: "more customers" leads to "more sellers", not just "comes before". Use the arrows buttons to reorder, and the plus button to add a stage after the current one.

3. 3

   Close the loop

   The last stage must feed the first. If you cannot explain why the last stage makes the first one easier, the loop is not a flywheel yet; it is a line.

4. 4

   Add a short note to each stage

   One sentence on how the stage pushes the next one. The notes are optional but they are what turns a ring of labels into an explanation.

5. 5

   Mark the friction points

   Where does the hand-off from one stage to the next slow down? Type it in the friction field and a red marker appears on that arrow, with the text on the card.

6. 6

   Pick colors and export

   Choose a color set, then download SVG or PNG for a slide, CSV for a spreadsheet, or the list to keep the flywheel as editable text. Paste the list or CSV back later to carry on editing.

How to find the stages: Collins's method

Staring at a blank wheel is the hard part. In the same strategic tool where he sketches Amazon's loop, Collins gives a six-step process developed with executive teams, summarized here in our words:

1. List the replicable successes your enterprise has had.
2. List the failures and disappointments, including initiatives that fell far below expectations.
3. Compare the two lists: what do they say belongs in the flywheel, and what does not?
4. Sketch the loop from the components you found. Decide where it starts, what follows, and how the last stage leads back to the top.
5. Draw the whole loop with four to six components. More than six is too complicated, so consolidate.
6. Test it against your successes and failures, and adjust until the successes read as outcomes of the flywheel and the disappointments as failures to follow it.

Collins's own key point is to ask "What flywheel actually works for us, and why?", not "What flywheel would we like to have?" The source is his short article A Good to Great Strategic Tool (PDF, hosted by a third party), and he writes more about the idea on the Turning the Flywheel page of his own site (checked October 2026).

Worked example: the Amazon flywheel

Collins reports that in 2001 Amazon invited him to talk with Jeff Bezos and part of his executive team, and that the team took up the flywheel idea to describe its own business. He quotes Brad Stone's account in The Everything Store: lower prices led to more customer visits; more customers raised the volume of sales and drew commission-paying third-party sellers; that let Amazon get more out of fixed costs such as fulfillment centers and servers; and the greater efficiency let it lower prices further. The diagram below is Collins's five-stage sketch of the essence of that loop, redrawn with the maker. It is his sketch, not Amazon's own diagram, and the loop has changed as the company has grown.

Notice what makes it a flywheel. Every arrow is a cause, and the last stage, more revenue per dollar of fixed cost, is what makes the first stage, lower prices, possible. Pull any one stage forward and the whole loop speeds up.

Flywheel vs funnel, growth loop and process cycle

These pictures are often mixed up, and authors use the names differently. As this tool uses them:

HubSpot adapted the flywheel to replace the funnel with a loop around attracting, engaging and delighting customers, and uses the word friction for whatever slows the wheel. That is the reason this maker has a friction field on every stage. If you want one linear journey with drop-off numbers, draw a process flow or a SIPOC diagram instead.

From diagram to action

A finished flywheel is most useful as a way to choose what to work on. Mark the friction points, then pick the one that sits on the most important hand-off. If you are unsure why a hand-off stalls, split it with an issue tree; if you have several ways to fix it, compare them in a Pugh matrix. To find candidate stages in the first place, a mind map is a faster start than a blank ring.

Common flywheel diagram mistakes

• Too many stages. Collins advises four to six components; with more than six the loop gets hard to explain and you should consolidate. The tool allows up to eight so you can draft a long version, then merge.
• Stages that only follow each other in time. Each arrow should mean "this feeds that". "Sign up, then use, then pay" is a sequence; "free users invite teammates, which creates paying teams" is a flywheel step.
• Drawing the flywheel you wish you had. Collins asks leaders to capture the flywheel that actually works for them and why, based on repeatable successes, not the one they would like to have.
• Vague labels. "Growth" and "engagement" are not stages. "Customers publish templates" is something that happens and can be checked.
• No loop back. If the last stage does not make the first stage easier or cheaper, the diagram is a funnel with an arrow drawn on it.
• Ignoring friction. Every real flywheel has hand-offs that stall. Marking them turns the diagram from a slogan into a to-do list.

Using it responsibly

The maker draws what you enter. It does not test whether your stages really feed each other or whether the loop matches how your business works. Treat the picture as a way to state and discuss a hypothesis, and check each arrow against your own data before you present it as fact.