Sutton, Rao

The Friction Project

Introduction

“Sometimes, it seems as if Peter Drucker was right when he said, “Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.

The Friction Project

“Michael then left the United Way and joined two students he met at Stanford—Adam and Lena Selzer—to start Civilla, a Michigan-based nonprofit design firm. As Adam put it, they focus on getting “friction out of institutions and replacing it with greater humanity.

1. A Trustee of Other’s Time

“Rohm and Haas teaches its leaders that when they face a decision with broad and enduring consequences, taking speedy, narrow, and impulsive action is a recipe for disaster. Instead, Rohm and Haas preaches the Five Voices method. Before making a big decision, leaders slow down, do careful research, and talk to people until they understand five key stakeholders: the customer, the employee, the owner, the community, and the process. Time at this leadership finishing school helped alum Pierre Brondeau as CEO of the FMC Corporation.

But David still reminds folks at IDEO and elsewhere to treat organizations as imperfect and unfinished prototypes. When some policy or practice annoys or drives people crazy, friction fixers need the courage and sway to try something different. And if that doesn’t work, to change it, or toss it out, and try something else.

2. Friction Forensics: The Easy Way or the Hard Way?

“Friction Forensics

Do You Want Something to Be Easy or Hard to Do?

• Is it the right—or wrong—thing for you to do?

• Do you have enough skill and will to do it well—or do you need to learn how to do it or crank up your motivation?

• Is failure cheap, safe, reversible, and instructive?

• Is delay wasteful, cruel, or downright dangerous?

• Are people already overloaded, exhausted, and burned out? Or do they have the bandwidth to add more to their plates?

• Does it require people to work alone or together? To do it well, how much do different people, teams, and organizations need to coordinate (work together) and cooperate (be willing to work together)?

• Will reducing or eliminating friction for some people result in it being heaped on others? Are you making things easier and harder in the right places? Is the redistribution of friction ethical and fair? Or is it heartless, destructive, exploitive, and cruel?

• Are the commitment, learning, and social bonds that can result from hard work, frustration, suffering, and struggle worthwhile given the human and financial toll?

Psychologist Teresa Amabile has studied creativity for more than forty years. She says, if you want to kill creativity, insist that people standardize their work methods, spend as little time as possible on every task, have as few failures as possible, and explain and justify how they spend every minute and dollar. Imaginative people, because they live in a cognitive minefield, do poor work when they are forced to be fast and efficient and to avoid mistakes. If they aren’t constantly struggling, feeling confused, failing, and arguing, and trying, modifying, and rejecting new ideas, they are doing it wrong.

The manual provides hundreds of “Specific Suggestions for Simple Sabotage.” Here are a few of our favorites:

• Engineers should see that trains run slow or make unscheduled stops for plausible reasons.

• Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.

• When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committee as large as possible.

• To lower morale and, with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.

• Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, paychecks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do

Eric, who went on to serve as chief algorithm officer at online fashion retailer Stitch Fix, added that companies that make it easy to quit get better data about how to keep customers satisfied and loyal. That’s because the “time to feedback” is faster for the company and the evidence is less noisy because most customers are keeping the service because they want it, not because they are trapped in a roach motel.

That’s why we are smitten with Patrick Collison’s Fast List. Patrick is CEO and cofounder of Stripe, a San Francisco–based financial services company.

3. How Friction Fixers Do Their Work: The Help Pyramid

“Our Help Pyramid has five levels, which are based on the amount of influence you need to help people in your cone of friction. The bottom three levels focus on ways you can dampen the wallop packed by symptoms: reframing, navigating, and shielding. The top two levels are about preventing and curing friction troubles: neighborhood design and repair and system design and repair.

Rumana also uses the “this too shall pass” method, or what psychologists call temporal distancing.

Rumana’s method is supported by six intertwined studies by psychologists Emma Bruehlman-Senecal and Özlem Ayduk. Emma and Özlem found that, when bad things happen to people (e.g., the end of a long-term relationship or a lousy grade on a test), if they focus on how they will feel about such troubles in the distant future (rather than the near future), they experience less worry, fear, anxiety, anger, and guilt. Savvy friction fixers coach others to harness the human capacity for imaginary time travel.

Research on newcomers including lawyers, engineers, prison guards, and military personnel shows that when employees are tutored and supported by one or more caring and savvy insiders, the newcomers experience “greater work satisfaction and performance, higher retention, better physical health and self-esteem, positive work relationships, stronger organizational commitment, career motivation, professional competence, and career recognition and success.

As chapter 5 shows, the Million Hours Campaign led by Pushkala Subramanian at pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca succeeded because it blended the two approaches to free up employees’ time. Top-down changes included adding steps before employees could “reply all” to more than twenty-five email recipients—users had to pause, read a warning, and do an extra click. That little speed bump saved employees from thousands of unnecessary emails.

4. Oblivious Leaders: Overcoming Power Poisoning

“By making things too easy on themselves, GM prevented leaders from coming to grips with the bad friction that their system imposed on customers —and with other drawbacks of their offerings.

If you are more powerful than your colleagues or customers, you are at risk of being clueless about their friction troubles, and of how you add to their misery. Beware of three symptoms of such power poisoning. The first symptom is privilege that spares you from the hassles, humiliations, and barriers heaped on everyone else. Privilege, as psychologist and former National Basketball Association player John Amaechi explains, provides an “absence of inconvenience” from obstacles and challenges that others cannot escape.

The second symptom of power poisoning is the belief that, because you are powerful and a connected insider, you automatically know everything that matters about your organization. Academics call this the fallacy of centrality. It was uncovered by Ron Westrum in a study of why pediatricians did such a lousy job of diagnosing child abuse in the 1950s and 1960s. The limited self-awareness of these experts, their failure to see through parents’ lies, and the silence of terrified children led the doctors to conclude, wrongly, “If parents were abusing their children, I would know about it; since I don’t know, it isn’t happening.

The third symptom of power poisoning is selfishness. People who are puffed up with self-importance are prone to devote little attention to the burdens they inflict on others, and to care little about the plight of people with less privilege. In The Power Paradox, Dacher Keltner from the University of California at Berkeley shows that, in numerous studies—on everything from donating money, to teasing, to how much people talk, to negotiation strategies, to sharing cookies—when people lord over others or feel powerful and prestigious, they (1) focus more on satisfying their own needs, (2) focus less on others’ needs and behaviors, and (3) act as if the rules don’t apply to them.

A similar study of driver behavior in Las Vegas found that, for every $1,000 increase in their car’s value, drivers were 3 percent less likely to stop for pedestrians who had the right-of-way at a crosswalk. In short, if you wield influence over others or just feel powerful, you may become oblivious of “inconveniences” that you heap on the people below you and that your organization heaps on customers and clients.

Consequences of Cluelessness

1. Executive Magnification...

Executive magnification also strikes in smaller ways. Like when bosses send out emails at night or on weekends. Eight experiments by Laura Giurge and Vanessa Bohns on “email urgency bias” show that when people receive emails outside of work hours, they overestimate how fast the sender expects a reply—and feeling such pressure triggers stress and burnout. The problem is pervasive. More than 50 percent of U.S. employees send or respond to work emails outside of work hours, and 76 percent of email recipients routinely respond within the hour. This pressure is especially pronounced when emails come from powerful people. Dozens of employees have told us, no matter how disturbed they are by their bosses’ emails, they feel compelled to answer right away—a pattern supported by studies of power, status, and online behavior. The good news, however, is that once bosses are aware of urgency bias, they can dampen it. Laura and Vanessa found that when senders write, “This is not an urgent matter so you can get to it whenever you can,” receivers answer more slowly and feel less distress. Wise leaders keep reminding themselves that their charges are wired to respond to their words more strongly than they intend—and their privilege can render them clueless to such magnification. When they make offhand comments, write missives with unfinished ideas, or get pissed off, they pause to add, “Please do nothing, I was just thinking out loud.

More broadly, they argue that “an easy-to-solve prioritization approach” is more likely to lead to long-term improvements because it is easier to nip small problems in the bud and because many, perhaps most, big problems result from a complex and hard-to-predict combination of a bunch of little problems. So, by chipping away at the little troubles, friction fixers can eliminate those pesky little annoyances and reduce the chances of big, overwhelming problems that are difficult or impossible to repair.

We help leaders uncover and repair HIPPO problems by measuring two key behaviors. The first is talking time, how much the leader talks (versus other members). The second is the ratio of the questions the leader asks to the statements the leader makes. We worked with our Stanford colleague Kathryn Velcich to develop a “meeting audit,” which our students used to assess all-hands meetings at five early-stage start-ups.

Leaders use the “ride-along” or “shadowing” method when they watch, follow, and question employees, customers, and citizens. This usually means going deeper than MBWA, which entails strolling around and having brief chats with people about their troubles. Taking the time to watch, talk to, and follow people as they try to do their work and struggle with the broken parts of an organization can shatter a leader’s delusions about the causes, costs, and cures for friction troubles.

Researchers Tsedal Neeley and Sebastian Reiche tracked 115 senior leaders in a global technology consulting company who were responsible for selling and implementing projects in countries where they had limited prior experience. Tsedal and Sebastian found that leaders who were rated as top performers and got more promotions practiced “downward deference.” They reduced “social distance” and gained employees’ trust by taking time to learn about their lives and working “side by side”—rather than lording over them. Such leaders yielded to subordinates’ technical and cultural expertise by deferring to their judgment and delegating authority.

The lesson, and perhaps the irony, of Tsedal and Sebastian’s study is that executives who deferred to subordinates moved up the pecking order faster than those who refused to bend to their underlings’ will and wisdom: Leaders were granted more power because they gave it away. Yet deference and “flattening” the hierarchy aren’t always the right moves. The University of Michigan’s Lindy Greer shows that the best leaders are adept at “flexing” the hierarchy.

After Lindy’s team analyzed more than a hundred hours of observations and sixty interviews from ten start-ups, they found the best CEOs shifted between accentuating and flattening the hierarchy—and the worst ones treated the hierarchy as static. When one CEO was asked if her team was flat or hierarchical, she explained, “You have to have both. If you don’t have that flat piece where you’re taking everyone’s input, you’re dropping expertise on the table, and if you don’t have a hierarchical piece, then you’re just heading in all different directions.” The best leaders “activated” their authority to squelch destructive conflict, when discussion and debate became repetitive, and time pressure necessitated immediate decisions. These flexible leaders “flattened” the hierarchy when creativity, problem-solving, and buy-in were top priorities. Another lesson from Lindy’s research is that to avoid confusion and missteps, leaders and teams ought make explicit when to activate or flatten the hierarchy. Navy SEALs take off their stripes. In one start-up Lindy’s team studied, when the CEO wanted everyone to speak, he passed around a football, and “whoever has the ball has the right to speak and everyone needs to listen to them.

Mark Templeton, former CEO of the software firm Citrix, makes a lovely argument about the difference between the need for hierarchy versus how people ought to be treated:

You have to make sure you never confuse the hierarchy that you need for managing complexity with the respect that people deserve. Because that’s where a lot of organizations go off track, confusing respect and hierarchy, and thinking that low on hierarchy means low respect; high on the hierarchy means high respect. So hierarchy is a necessary evil of managing complexity, but it in no way has anything to do with respect that is owed an individual.

5. Addition Sickness: Putting the Subtraction Mindset to Work

“A study of 137 U.S. public universities by economist Robert E. Martin found that, in 1987, there was a one-to-one ratio of administrators to tenure-track faculty. By 2008, there were two administrators for every faculty member. Robert explained, “Those who hold the purse strings have a natural incentive to hire more employees like themselves.” A 2021 study of 117 universities in the United Kingdom by Alison Wolf and Andrew Jenkins found that such administrative bloat keeps getting worse—and growth is especially rampant among the most highly paid managers, professionals, and executives. Recent studies in the United States, Germany, France, and Australia show that their universities suffer from the same disease. Alison Wolf concludes that administrators are added at a higher rate, in part, because there is “far less scrutiny of nonacademic than academic hiring.” All those administrators aren’t just expensive. Like most of us, they feel the need to justify their existence. Many of the organizational changes they understand, value, and implement entail heaping rules, processes, forms, training, and metrics on faculty, fellow administrators, and students. Timothy Devinney, chair of international business at Alliance Manchester Business School, says, as a result, “Universities are basically strangling the capabilities of the people within them.” The road to such hell is paved with good intentions—administrators who add friction believe they are improving universities.

Venture capitalist Michael Dearing fires up this way of thinking by urging leaders to act as “editor in chief” of their organizations. When Michael was a guest on our Friction podcast, he argued, much like skilled text and film editors, the best leaders are relentless about eliminating or repairing things that distract, bore, bewilder, or exhaust people.

Good Riddance Reviews

Methods for Finding Subtraction Targets

• Identify “stupid stuff.” Lisa Bodell, CEO of FutureThink, asks, “If you could kill all the rules that frustrate you or slow down your efficiency, what would they be?” A similar spirit propelled the Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff effort at Hawaii Pacific Health. Dr. Melinda Ashton asked healthcare workers to nominate anything in the electronic patient records system that “was poorly designed, unnecessary, or just plain stupid”—which generated 188 subtraction targets.

• Figure out the value and cost of your meetings. In their Meeting Reset, sixty Asana employees rated each of their standing meetings. They identified more than five hundred meetings that were of low value. And don’t forget the time that people spend getting ready for meetings. Bain, the management consulting firm, calculated that one company devoted three hundred thousand hours a year preparing for a weekly executive team meeting.

• Measure the burdens imposed by performance measurement. Are you spending so much time evaluating one another that you don’t have time to do your work? Deloitte’s leaders were appalled after they “tallied the number of hours the organization was spending on performance management— and found that completing the forms, holding the meetings, and creating the ratings consumed close to two million hours a year.”

• Catalog sources of email overload. The average employee spends 28 percent of their time dealing with emails. Is this true at your company (or is it worse)? Review the number, length, recipients, and timing of the emails that people send and receive. What can you subtract? Perhaps an email policy like that used at the consulting firm Vynamic will help. They call it zzzMail, as in catching some z’s: “team members are to refrain from sending emails to other team members between 10pm and 6am Monday through Friday, all day Saturday and Sunday, and all Vynamic holidays. In urgent matters, a call or text is preferred over email.”

• Observe and interview users. To identify unnecessary and confusing questions in a benefits form completed by more than two million Michigan residents each year, Civilla researchers conducted over 250 hours of interviews with residents and civil servants—and observed them as they filled out and explained the form. Civilla identified dozens of obstacles that jeopardized residents’ ability to get benefits.

• Build a journey map. Diagram the stages that customers or clients travel through as they try to get information, obtain services, or buy products from an organization—and how they, and employees, feel along the way. Our students Elizabeth Woodson and Saul Gurdus used interviews and observations to map the slow and bewildering process imposed on families of disabled children who sought services from the Golden Gate Regional Center, a social services agency in the San Francisco area. They identified numerous bottlenecks that marred clients’ journeys—especially botched handoffs between silos.

• Try a perfectionism audit. In The Systems Bible, John Gall proposed the Perfectionist’s Paradox: in complex systems, “striving for perfection is a serious imperfection.” Pressures for perfection cause needless effort and delay, interfere with learning from imperfect prototypes, and provoke despair. Many things that are worth doing—or are required by others—aren’t worth doing well. Or, as Gall preaches, ought to be done poorly. In that spirit, ask people to identify tasks where the standards are too narrow or too high, or that are enforced with too much zeal.

When Rebecca launched Asana Labs in 2022, she was inspired by Armeetingeddon to recruit a small group of colleagues for a pilot program called Meeting Doomsday. All participants started by removing all standing meetings with five or fewer people from their calendars for forty-eight hours. They used the break to think about which meetings were valuable, deciding which to subtract, modify, or keep. As we detail later in this chapter, this prototype “meeting repair and removal” tool showed much promise. We worked with Rebecca to scale lessons from Meeting Doomsday to sixty employees who participated in the subsequent Meeting Reset program. We learned that people wanted a fine-grained but simple way to assess meetings. We asked them to use a three-point scale to rate how much effort each meeting required and its value for helping them achieve goals. Of over 1,100 standing meetings, those Asana employees rated more than 50 percent as low value and identified more than 150 that required great effort and had low value.

Subtraction Tools

Means for Spotting and Removing Destructive Organizational Friction

• Simple subtraction rules. Building on Don Sull and Kathy Eisenhardt’s Simple Rules, these are simple shortcuts and crisp constraints that help people focus their attention on what ought to be removed from their organizations.

• Subtraction rituals. These are scripted actions that people take to mark routine or rare changes when they remove or lose people, places, and practices that have been part of their work lives. These choreographed packages of words and deeds can be simple or elaborate, are imbued with meaning for the people who practice them, and can provide comfort, guidance, and stronger social bonds.

• Subtraction specialists. People or teams charged with keeping life as simple, easy, delightful, and cheap as possible in the organization and have the authority, skill, time, and money to subtract (or add) as they fit.

• Subtraction games. Exercises in which people begin with solo brainstorming about organizational obstacles that slow their work and drive them crazy. Then they meet to share “subtraction targets,” select one or a few to remove, and outline implementation plans. Subtraction games can be as short as thirty minutes or extend for months when people are determined to remove destructive friction.

• Meeting repair and removal tools. These are methods to help people identify and eliminate bad meetings. For meetings that remain, these methods help people make them shorter and less frequent, with fewer attendees, and give people permission to decline invitations and leave meetings that are a poor use of their time.

• Purges. Deep, focused, rapid, and sometimes downright authoritarian efforts to remove an organization’s broken parts.

• Subtraction movements. These are enduring, participative, and multipronged efforts to spread the subtraction mindset throughout an organization, to teach people and reward them for making systemwide and local changes that, taken together, eliminate unnecessary burdens inflicted on employees, customers, partners, and community members.

P.S. Celebrate people who don’t add unnecessary stuff in the first place. Don’t forget those precious people who abhor and resist adding needless stuff, which averts the need for subtraction.

Simple Subtraction Rules: In Simple Rules, Don Sull and Kathy Eisenhardt document how many leaders and workplaces benefit from “shortcut strategies that save time and effort by focusing our attention and simplifying the way that we process information.

Another simple subtraction rule is, when you write or revise the core values for your organization, don’t list more than four. And use vivid imagery to describe each value. If you are running a nonprofit, for example, don’t talk about “excellence in fundraising.” Instead, talk about donors who tell friends and neighbors that their gift was “among the best decisions they have ever made.” A short list of vivid values triggers a shared sense of purpose in employees, customers, and other stakeholders, which in turn fuels effort and coordination. That’s what University of Pennsylvania’s Andrew Carton and his coauthors concluded after studying patients treated for heart attacks in 151 California hospitals. When a hospital had four or fewer values and used vivid imagery, patients were far less likely to be readmitted for further treatment within thirty days—a key indicator of the quality of care. Carton’s team found similar results in an experiment where they assembled sixty-two virtual teams to design new toys.

Michael Dearing’s advice that leaders act like editors doesn’t mean they’ve got to do it alone. They can recruit people and give them the authority, staff, and money to make changes. Here’s how Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes did it. In 2015, when the company’s director of technology, Noel Pullen, tried to send a customer a $15 company T-shirt, so many approvals were required that Noel calculated it cost $200 to send the single shirt. Noel hounded people in finance and marketing to scrap this ordeal and trust employees to send T-shirts.

To help people apply this lesson, we’ve run the Subtraction Game with at least a hundred organizations, including: the top eight executives at Bloom Energy;100 credit union executives; 150 Netflix film postproduction employees; 300 partners in a big law firm; 400 Microsoft executives; and 60 Stanford staffers at a “Help Center” workshop. We ask people to start with solo brainstorming, to “think about how your organization operates. What adds needless frustration? What scatters your attention? What was once useful, but is now in the way?” For some organizations, we add, “Identify impediments that are within your sphere of influence and that are systemic at your company.” Next, people meet in small groups or online rooms for ten minutes or so, discuss the impediments each member generated, and brainstorm more potential subtraction targets. Then, to focus their attention, they select a couple of targets and outline rough implementation plans—who would lead the charge to eliminate these obstacles, whose support they would need along the way, and which people and teams might push back against the change.

Based on our prompts, some groups pick a practical idea (e.g., the CEO who vowed to keep his emails under five hundred words) and a crazy one (e.g., the engineers who proposed disbanding HR). Others select a target that is easy to remove (e.g., the managers who decided to get rid of the unused telephones in their offices) and a tough one (the top team that agreed their company would run better, and their mental health would improve, if they removed two micromanagers from their board of directors).

Some organizations fight back with strategic subtraction. Like the monthlong Meeting Doomsday pilot program that Rebecca Hinds at Asana ran with that small group of marketing employees. As we explained above under “Good Riddance Reviews,” the first stage was a meeting audit, where employees studied their calendars and identified recurring meetings that lacked value. The second stage was the Meeting Doomsday part, in which employees removed all of the standing meetings with less than five people from their calendars for forty-eight hours. Then, as Rebecca put it, after people lived “with their newly cleansed calendars” for a couple days, they repopulated them “only with those meetings that are valuable—according to their own meeting audit.” Employees eliminated some meetings, reduced the frequency of others, and made many shorter—cutting thirty-minute meetings to fifteen minutes, and sixty-minute meetings to forty-five minutes. Meeting Doomsday packed a wallop. Rebecca reports participants saved an average of eleven hours per month. One Asana employee, Francesca, in the marketing group, believed her calendar was already in “top shape” before participating in the pilot. But she turned out to be the Doomsday “all-star,” saving thirty-two hours a month.

In a classic study by Harvard’s Leslie Perlow, she embedded herself in a software company in which engineers met and interrupted one another so much that they felt compelled to work nights and weekends to finish projects. Leslie nudged them to experiment with “quiet time”: two periods each day when interruptions were banned, 8:00 A.M. to 11:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. to 5:00 P.M. Leslie found productivity increased 59 percent during the morning quiet time and 65 percent during the afternoon break.

IBM’s marketing train wreck and Apple’s bewildering product lineup were fueled by a similar cause: decentralized businesses each had enough power to add stuff, but not enough to stop others from doing so, too. This is a twist on Hardin’s tragedy of the commons. Each business had incentives for adding yet another campaign or product, but each addition hurt IBM and Apple by confusing customers and wasting money. Although management gurus often bad-mouth leaders who exercise “command and control,” as Lou Gerstner and Steve Jobs did, sometimes that’s just what a broken organization needs.

Our Stanford case study on how pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca scaled simplicity shows how one such movement blended an array of subtraction tools. It was led by Pushkala Subramanian, who launched the company’s Center for Simplification Excellence in 2015. The center launched the “million-hour challenge” to give back thirty minutes a week to each employee—to free up time for clinical trials and serving patients.

Our Stanford colleagues Perry Klebahn and Jeremy Utley made the “add nothing unnecessary” philosophy a cornerstone of their ten-week LaunchPad class. As we said in chapter 3, more than a hundred companies have been founded by LaunchPad students since 2010, and more than 50 percent are still alive in some form. Perry says each founding team is taught to experiment with one or a few narrow prototypes at a time and to assume they won’t be able to predict which offerings customers will want. That means most teams will need to keep abandoning and changing offerings before creating an offering that customers want and will pay for—and will generate enough revenue over the long haul to build a company. As a result, Perry and Jeremy teach students not to take or to delay, many steps that other entrepreneurial classes and investors preach as essential for starting a company. For example, many start-up experts recommend writing a detailed business plan to help founders flesh out and explain their product or service, financial model, target market, and backgrounds. Perry and Jeremy do teach students to keep iterating a three-to-five-minute pitch, because potential investors, employees, and customers will want to know what your company does. Perry and Jeremy also coach strategic inaction, because they believe that writing a detailed business plan is useless or worse. That’s because the company’s offering (and target customers) will almost certainly keep changing. Founders who work hard on writing a perfect plan, Perry and Jeremy argue, waste time that is better spent prototyping, iterating, and learning. And—since labor leads to love—all that effort can cause founders to become irrationally attached to bad early ideas. Perry and Jeremy aren’t alone in their dim view of business plans. A study of seven hundred start-ups led by David Kirsch of the University of Maryland found no relationship between the quality of business plans and whether start-ups received venture-capital funding. Carl Schramm, economist and author of Burn the Business Plan, argues that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft never had business plans, and “empirically, it appears as if you don’t need a business plan.” In short, before you heap some burden on people and eventually figure out that it wastes their time (or worse), slow down and ask, “Suppose we did nothing?

When we started this friction adventure, we believed that nearly everything in organizational life ought to be as quick and easy as possible. We were wrong. We now believe that subtraction is beautiful because it clears our minds and gives us time to focus on what ought to be hard, inefficient, complex, and frustrating. Subtracting unnecessary distractions and burdens creates time to develop the deep relationships that are essential for doing great work—and living a fulfilling life.

Yet, the best work happens after collaborators develop deep “emotional trust,” which requires working, talking, and failing and succeeding together over long stretches of time.

Subtraction also clears the way for the necessary, time-consuming, and inevitable failure, confusion, and messiness that are the hallmarks of creative work.

Research on effective rules, or “green tape,” reveals that the best rules aren’t always the simplest and shortest. A study by Leisha DeHart-Davis in four Midwestern U.S. cities showed that civil servants and citizens found rules to be most effective when they were written down explicitly, with the nuances and key details spelled out, rather than being informal guidelines subject to bureaucrats’ whims. More explicit and comprehensive rules were seen as fair because they left less room for exceptions or alternative interpretations.

You and your fellow friction fixers need a “good friction review” to go along with your “good riddance review.” You might ask, “What is too simple, easy, fast, and cheap around here?

6. Broken Connections: On Preventing Coordination Snafus

“Coordination troubles, like other kinds of destructive friction, are often orphan problems that everyone knows about, but no one feels accountable for fixing.

The Cancer Center suffered from two hallmarks of organizations that are plagued with coordination snafus. First, powerful people ignore, dismiss, denigrate, and even undermine people and groups they need to mesh their work with. Oncologists saw themselves as being at the top of the pecking order at the center and the work of other specialists as secondary, trivial, or downright useless. They dismissed side effects, including fatigue, diarrhea, and cramps, caused by chemotherapy that they prescribed as “normal” and left it to patients to find specialists to treat such problems. Second, powerful people devote little attention to solutions for coordination problems.

Stanford’s Chip Heath and the late Nancy Staudenmayer showed that people are prone to suffer from coordination neglect: they fixate on parts of organizations and ignore how the parts ought to work together. Chip and Nancy distinguish between two modes of coordination neglect. The first mode is component focus, where people in a team or silo devote too much attention to their own work and too little to how it will shape and be shaped by others’ work. Like the Ford Motor Company engineer who admitted his group was so fixated on designing car chassis that “when I saw a car driving down the road, all the rest [other than the chassis] disappeared.

As Chip and Nancy put it, for people afflicted with component focus, “wholes are not the ‘sum of their parts,’ they are a function of one part.” The deeper a person’s expertise, the worse this narrow focus gets. Chip and Nancy show how “the curse of knowledge” accentuates the coordination troubles caused by component focus: Experts wrongly assume that—because a subject comes so easily to them after learning about it for years—what they know is obvious and can quickly be grasped by others. Experts unwittingly create coordination snafus by failing to pass along essential information to people in other positions and fields because they assume it is self-evident. Or, when they try to pass information along, experts provide explanations they believe are easy to understand but are incomprehensible to people who aren’t indoctrinated into their circle.

Specialists are also prone to overconfidence, to believe their narrow knowledge makes them experts in all other areas. They overestimate their understanding of others’ work, oversimplify it, and denigrate the dedication and skill of people outside their area. Overconfidence is another reason that the technical people Deborah studied designed flawed products. They were sure their narrow technical knowledge was all that was required to design great products—and believed that talking to and listening to manufacturing people, salespeople, or customers was a waste of time.

Partition focus, the second mode of coordination neglect, happens when decision-makers devote too much attention to assembling an organization with great parts—and too little attention to how the pieces ought to work together. That’s what happened when Cancer Center leaders fixated on assembling the best specialists in the world and supporting them with excellent staff and technologies—and thought little about linking their work with that of other departments and specialists.

U.S. leaders failed to take the additional step of adopting the British solution of integrating people, equipment, and information: an intelligence center that tracked ships and planes, gathered photographs and prisoner interviews, and intercepted German messages.

To help assess if an organization suffers from destructive competition and conflict—and to figure out how to fix it—we ask, “Who are the superstars here?” Followed by “Do people get ahead by doing great work and helping others succeed? Or doing great work while ignoring and even undermining colleagues?” When people are rewarded for helping others, many of the ugly dynamics that infected Microsoft—and so many other places—disappear.

Brandi is famous for scoring the winning goal for the U.S. soccer team at the Women’s World Cup in 1999 and throwing off her jersey in celebration. Brandi credited her grandfather for teaching her to be a good soccer player and person. This included his reward system, in which he paid Brandi $1 for scoring a goal but $1.50 for an assist. Because, as Brandi put it, “it is better to give than receive.

He encouraged people to ask questions and listen—to be “learn-it-alls” not know-it-alls.

Friction fixers energize people by turning such goals into emotionally “hot causes,” especially goals that crank up shared anger and pride, which they use to fuel the creation and implementation of “cool solutions”—concrete and coordinated actions. That’s what happened with the cancer tax. Once patient activists convinced Cancer Center leaders that they were heaping debilitating burdens on the people they wanted to help, the upset and determined hospital staffers began working with patients and their families to fix such problems.

As a friction fixer, to dampen coordination troubles, your job is to find and test new solutions, teach them to others, and keep updating your tool kit. Here are six solutions that might work for you.

1. Onboard People to the Organization, Not Just the Job

Friction fixers who are intent on building a culture of coordination go beyond training newcomers to perform their narrow job responsibilities. They teach newbies how their work meshes with that of others, how the organization functions, and how to use the system to help them do their work. This saves a lot of trouble down the road....

2. Get Up Close and Personal with People Who Make the System Tick..

Yet, as Wired reported, they developed grudging respect for one another. Together, they patched HealthCare.gov by bringing “order to the site through careful monitoring, automated testing, and a collaborative, methodical, commonsense approach to bug fixing.” There is nothing sacred about L6. Elsewhere, traveling down three or four levels is plenty. The key is locating the people—such as employees, customers, or vendors—who understand how a system works and why it doesn’t...

3. Good Stories Stoke Coordination

Hubert believes the stories that he told strengthened connections between Best Buy employees and customers, and employees and management. Like the one about Jordan, a three-year-old in Florida who loved his T. rex toy and called it his “dino baby.” When dino’s head snapped off, Jordan was heartbroken. Jordan’s mother found the same T. rex at Best Buy, ordered it online, and drove Jordan to a store to pick it up. She told the Best Buy associate that they needed a “dinosaur doctor.” The associate, T, recruited a colleague, Stephanie, and they took Jordan’s headless dinosaur to “surgery” behind the counter out of Jordan’s view. “Just a few more stitches,” the pair said as they replaced the broken T. rex with the new one. When they handed Jordan the “cured” dinosaur, he squealed with joy...

4. Build Roles and Teams Dedicated to Integration...

5. Fix Handoffs...

One rule is “never hand over a fire in the heat of the day.” Firefighters learned this lesson from the Dude Fire in Payson, Arizona, in 1990. Six firefighters were burned to death after a botched handoff, which occurred at “1:00 P.M. on a hot, windy day with temperatures in the high nineties while the fire was making spectacular runs.” Crews now do handoffs at night, when it is easier to see fires and “low winds, high humidity, and cool temperatures stabilize the fire.

Crew chiefs use a briefing for such handoffs to help pass along the “big story,” steps that could by adopted by friction fixers in other settings. During a forest fire, the outgoing chief goes through five steps during a conversation with the incoming chief:

• Here’s what I think we face.

• Here’s what I think we should do.

• Here’s why.

• Here’s what I think we should keep an eye on.

• Now talk to me (i.e., tell me if you (a) don’t understand, (b) cannot do it, (c) see something that I do not).

That last step places responsibility on both chiefs to assure that messages are received and to resolve clashing perceptions...

6. Coordinate on the Fly...

Friction fixers are of two minds. First, they labor to prevent unpleasant surprises. To build workplaces where people aren’t exhausted by one emergency after another and don’t live in fear of system failure. Second, they know, as Beatle John Lennon put it, that “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans...

These teams started with a provisional plan, the “sheet music.” Film crews had a detailed daily schedule. The SWAT team outlined a plan for each mission—which specified, for example, who would cover the exits of a house, where snipers would be stationed, and when officers would bust down the door. But when things didn’t go as expected, because people understood one another’s roles so well and how their roles fit together, teams were adept at revising their plan on the spot....

Role shifting helped them make such rapid adjustments. It happens when a surprise leaves a critical role empty and someone else fills in...

Reorganizing routines is another improvisational practice. It’s triggered when a surprise reveals that the planned sequence or methods aren’t working and something different ought to be done.

In James Thompson’s classic 1967 book, Organizations in Action, he shows that reciprocal interdependence is most demanding. That’s when people, teams, silos, and such must constantly adjust back and forth in response to one another as the work unfolds. Football (aka soccer) is a great example. Players constantly change what they do in response to passes and shots from teammates and competitors—who, in turn, constantly adjust to others’ passes and shots.

Pooled interdependence is least demanding. That’s when organizations combine, or “roll up,” the separate and independent efforts of people or parts.

Fewer Parts, Fewer Snafus

The fewer people and units that you need to weave together, the fewer opportunities for botched communication and collaboration. Simpler systems also overload people less, so they have more bandwidth to focus on their work and coordinate when necessary.

When Rob examined the networks of the top ten thousand people in the company, Scott “was the Number 1 most overloaded person.” More than 118 people came to Scott every day for information from the three units he ran. Rob learned in one unit “78 people—some 50 percent—of the 150 top managers in that one unit felt they couldn’t hit their business goals unless they got more of Scott’s time.

7. Jargon Monoxide: On the Drawbacks and (Limited) Virtues of Hollow and Impenetrable Babble

“We have no idea what leaders mean by “let’s leverage our core competencies to create synergies that move the needle.” When you ask them to explain what it means for how people ought to act, it becomes clear they have no idea what they are talking about either. We also don’t know what consultants from places such as McKinsey mean by “the helix organization,” “squad-to-squad meetings,” or “fit-for-purpose accountable cells.” Of course, professors are not immune from such crimes against clarity—many of us take perverse pride in baffling our students and colleagues with highfalutin language.

Second, building on chapter 5, friction fixers who battle jargon monoxide embrace venture capitalist Michael Dearing’s advice to embrace the “editor in chief” role.

The second solution is for people to slow down and translate their in- group lingo for one another—and, when possible, to agree on a common language.

The third solution is to translate in-group jargon into plain English to avoid confusing or alienating outsiders who need to understand it.

As Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his coauthors show in their book Noise, when a system devolves into such a “random scatter of ideas” (their definition of noise), decision-making and coordination suffer, and dysfunctional conflict may abound, because people can’t agree on what to do, how to do it, and what bad or good work looks like.

Behavioral scientists have conducted hundreds of studies about the differences between powerful and powerless words and phrases. We are especially smitten with research led by Jonah Berger at the University of Pennsylvania and by our Stanford colleague Jennifer Aaker. We draw mostly on their work to generate five tips about the kind of talk that provokes people to act, persist, and develop imaginative solutions.

Powerful Words

Talk That Prompts Others to Act, Persist, and Generate Imaginative Solutions

Say This

Not That

Why

“We’ve shortened all thirty-minute meetings to twenty-five and sixty-minute

meetings to fifty.”

“We’ve made our meetings shorter.”

Concrete language is more persuasive than vague

language because it demonstrates more knowledge about the details of a situation and gives more tangible guidance about what to do.

“The subtraction game is great.”

“The subtraction

game was great.”

The present tense is more persuasive than the past tense because it suggests greater confidence and

certainty about what is best to do now and about how to respond to current challenges.

“I don’t want to waste your

time.”

“I am not allowed to waste your time.”

Use terms that suggest you have chosen to act this way, that you are doing it because you have the power to do it, and you believe it is the right thing. Avoid terms that imply your actions are imposed against your will by rules, laws, or norms you can’t change or by powerful people.

“Your employees are

cold and callous and made my mom cry [:( ].”

“Your employees

are unpleasant

and hurt my mom’s feelings.”

Sensory metaphors, words and phrases that express concepts by linking them to bodily experiences such as touch, smell, pain, hearing, smiles, and tears, are easier to remember, more persuasive, and more contagious.

“We’ve completed our

journey, but our friction fixing will continue.”

“We’ve reached our destination, and we did some mighty fine friction fixing.”

People who frame accomplishments as a journey are more likely to think about and learn from the path they took and persist after reaching a milestone; people who focus on the destination tend to treat it as “mission accomplished” and disengage.

Paul did a lot more at Alcoa than use powerful words. He and fellow company leaders dismissed managers who didn’t turn knowledge about process improvements into action or, worse yet, covered up safety problems. As business author David Burkus argues, the genius of zeroing in on safety is “you can’t improve safety without understanding every step in the process— understanding each risk—and then eliminating it.” As a result, hundreds of process improvements “made the plants run more efficiently,” and Paul “gradually changed the systems and the culture” so that “executives began sharing other data and other ideas more rapidly as well.” Paul was effective not only because of the powerful language he used to fire up employees and focus their attention on the details of Alcoa’s production processes. What Paul didn’t say provides an equally important lesson for friction fixers: we can’t detect even a whiff of jargon monoxide in his words after reviewing numerous speeches, interviews, and written statements.

8. Fast and Frenzied: When and How to Apply Good Friction

“Putting the pedal to the metal is dangerous for organizations, too. London Business School’s Dana Kanze and her colleagues compared managers who were urged by their leaders to rush ahead, to focus on “locomotion goals,” to managers who were urged to slow down and evaluate their actions, to focus on “assessment goals.

When participants “read a mission statement that emphasized urgent action over thoughtful consideration,” it quadrupled their odds of taking unethical actions, including age discrimination against a sixty-one-year-old job applicant.

Here are five ways that excessive speed brings out the worst in people, which in turn damages organizations.

1. Burnout

Burned-out employees feel tired, down, frustrated, hopeless, cynical, and numb—and their performance and productivity suffer...

2. Selfishness

When people are in a big hurry, they fixate so much on tasks that they don’t slow down to offer a kind word or lend a hand to others and become oblivious to people who need their help....

3. Bullying

Ohio State’s Ben Tepper developed a measure of abusive supervision more than twenty years ago, which has since been used in many studies on the causes and consequences of such nastiness. Ben’s measure lists fifteen behaviors that nightmare bosses heap on subordinates, including “is rude to me,” “expresses anger at me when he/she is mad for another reason,” “tells me I am incompetent,” and “puts me down in front of others.” Once again, time pressure is a major culprit. Dozens of studies that use this and related measures find that exhausted bosses stressed by constant struggles with deadlines are prone to abuse their subordinates—who respond by becoming anxious, depressed, physically ill, and less productive, and by quitting their jobs...

4. Bad Decisions

When people try to accomplish things too fast, don’t pause to think, and trigger a cycle of recrimination and anxiety, the frenzy imposes a “bandwidth tax” that results in lousy decisions. Worse, their narrow focus on current troubles hinders them from confronting new problems before they get out of control and prevents people from doing the kinds of long-term thinking and planning that separates good friction fixers and organizations from bad ones...

Daniel Kahneman’s research, cited in chapter 2, shows that when you are in a “cognitive minefield,” when you don’t know what to do or things are going badly, it is best to slow down, ask for advice, and weigh pros and cons. The first decision that pops into your mind is probably flawed because it’s based on biases and a shallow understanding of your choices. The hazards of time pressure also pervade research on locomotion, which, as we saw earlier in this chapter, shows that when people fixate on speed, they take shortcuts and even break laws...

5. Kills Creativity

Teresa Amabile and her colleagues reached a similar conclusion after analyzing nine thousand daily diary entries from 177 employees on twenty-two project teams. Theresa’s team developed a nuanced measure of daily creativity based on employee reports of discovery, generating ideas, thinking flexibly, learning, and enhanced self-awareness. Their findings revealed that “when creativity is under the gun, it usually ends up getting killed.” Each day, participants rated how much time pressure they felt on a seven-point scale....

As the damage caused by excessive speed ripples throughout an organization, it can turn into a vicious downward spiral that, once it gains momentum, is hard for leaders to reverse. As harried leaders make bad decisions and errors that create more pressing problems that are left unsolved, and one overwhelmed member after another burns out, turns selfish and nasty, makes more flawed decisions, and becomes less creative, everyone tangled up with the organization suffers.

Similarly, veteran tech executive Steve Blank wrote that many fast- moving and growing companies have excessive “organizational debt”—which “can kill the company even quicker” than technical debt. Steve defines organizational debt as compromises made to “just get it done.” Sometimes it’s necessary, and smart, to prioritize the most important work and get to the rest later. Yet, like borrowing too much money, so much organizational debt can accumulate that your company struggles to pay it down.

As individual teams kept racing ahead, Uber’s overall “organizational velocity” kept getting slower. There were three signs that the company was stalling. First, engineers were spending more time “wrestling with fixing things or dealing with mundane maintenance issues” and less time writing new code. Second, more teams had trouble implementing new features because they needed help from other teams, but weren’t getting it. Or were blocked by other teams that were opposed to the new feature. Third, software outages were on the upswing. “Engineers and developers were responsible for their own code and on call for their services. That meant one proxy for technical debt was sleep debt.” The sleep debt kept getting worse. Skilled engineers “mired” in such “grunt work” kept leaving for companies such as Google, because they didn’t like being “woken up in the middle of the night fifteen times a week.” As Thuan explained, this “technical debt” resulted from a structure that was too decentralized and norms that encouraged people to charge ahead without collaborating and coordinating with other teams—so more and more employees engaged in firefighting to make temporary and local repairs that kept the system running but didn’t fix root causes. Thuan added that further organizational debt was created because, as the company raced to scale fast, it hired and promoted too many inexperienced managers. These inexperienced managers were too focused on racing ahead and achieving short-term wins and were not focused (or skilled) enough to understand when to slow down and do things right and to coordinate their work with other teams.

Hitting the Brakes: On Creating Constructive Friction

“For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.” That advice from actress and comedian Lily Tomlin captures the essence of this chapter.

“1. Pause to Start Right

When you launch a new project, team, or organization, pause to consider the talent, roles, norms, and resources that you will need to succeed. A great way to begin is to harness the human capacity for imaginary time travel: Pause to pretend that you have succeeded (a “previctorem”) or failed (a “premortem”) and write a story about the events that led to your wonderful or awful fate. Then build those lessons into how you design and do your work. Psychologist Gary Klein uses premortems to help teams identify dangerous risks and delusions. Gary asks teams to imagine that it is, say, a year after they’ve made a decision, and it is a massive and unambiguous failure. People look back from that terrible future and develop lists and stories to explain what happened. Gary’s research finds that premortems are “a low-cost, high-payoff” method for making better decisions and running better projects. Huggy Rao and his Stanford colleagues conducted a “back to the future” study that suggests doing a previctorem, in which you pause to look back from an (imaginary) successful future, may be even more effective than doing a premortem. Both forms of time travel can improve decisions and designs because treating an event as if it did rather than might happen—thinking about it in the past tense—makes it seem more concrete and likely to happen, which motivates people to unpack its nuances....

2. Ask Questions That Make People Stop to Think—Before They Do Something Stupid...

3. Where’s Your Times Square?

We learned this lesson from Becky Margiotta, who led the 100,000 Homes Campaign that we talked about in chapter 1. Becky is now CEO of the Billions Institute, where she advises leaders of nonprofits and government organizations on how to imagine and implement large-scale change. Becky has many impatient clients who want to go big with half-baked and unproven ideas. She asks them, “Where’s your Times Square?” That’s because, before she led the nationwide 100,000 Homes Campaign, Becky was hired by Rosanne Haggerty, founder of the nonprofit Community Solutions, to reduce the homelessness problem in New York City’s Times Square by two-thirds over a three-year period. That goal turned out to be unrealistic—it took five years. Becky’s team spent from 2003 to 2007 on the Street to Home initiative in Times Square. It took them until 2007 to develop the mindset, skills, and methods for tackling the problem, but that year, they surpassed their original goal and achieved an 87 percent reduction in street homelessness. It was a long, frustrating slog. Becky’s team tried many methods that failed before they figured out what worked. For example, it took them years to identify who was homeless in Times Square. They finally learned the best way to “get the count” wasn’t to visit Times Square during the day and to ask people if they were homeless. It was to go out at 5:00 A.M. and count the people sleeping there. They also learned to find homes first for people who had been homeless the longest and who suffered from the most severe health problems—because they faced the greatest risk of premature death. Becky says that, without those five years of frustration, failure, and—eventually—development of a “playbook” that would work elsewhere, she and Rosanne couldn’t have launched the 100,000 Homes Campaign in 2010. And the campaign wouldn’t have reached its goal of finding homes for one hundred thousand chronically homeless Americans as it did on June 14, 2014....

At Rippling, Parker’s approach was the opposite of what he did at Zenefits. In 2021, Parker admitted, “it was almost too easy for us to close customers early on” at Zenefits, and leaders made the mistake of believing that their employees could do the manual work for clients “with an eye toward automating those processes afterward.” They were wrong. The bigger Zenefits got, the harder it was to automate processes. Parker said that employees were doing so much manual work that costs soared and profits plummeted, and “that’s when a lot of things started to come apart.” In contrast, during Rippling’s first two years, Parker said, it was “basically me and like fifty engineers.” They focused on building a robust product, on “pruning any operational function and trying to replace it with software.” Parker prohibited employees from doing the manual chores that Zenefits employees did. Parker insisted, instead, that Rippling employees work with customers until they developed sound automated solutions. To assure that engineers understood customers’ needs and challenges (and to save money), Rippling didn’t hire any customer support staffers in those early years. Parker said, “I was personally doing—and the engineering team was personally doing—all of the customer support.” Parker learned other lessons from Zenefits that he applies at Rippling, including selling bundles of software to customers rather than individual products—and developing each kind of software, from the start, so it is easy to integrate with other Rippling products. Parker’s focus on getting things right before going big, and other lessons he learned the hard way at Zenefits, seems to be working. By May of 2022, venture-capital firms had invested almost $700 million in Rippling, and it was valued at $11.25 billion—nearly twice as much as Zenefits’ $6.5 billion in its (brief) heyday...

The struggles that we’ve seen in so many teams provoked us to suggest, and sometimes coach and lead, an exercise that Harvard Business School’s Tsedal Neeley calls “a team relaunch.” This intentional pause entails convening one or two meetings in which a team considers its goals, norms, rhythms, rituals, and use of resources. The team starts by discussing what is working and what isn’t. Then members decide what ought to change and how to implement their decisions...

Members generate wild and practical ideas about norms and practices that once worked but now get in the way. The team then selects up to three of these “targets” and commits to getting rid of each. Next, Kathryn guides them in “the strengths game,” following Gallup research that shows the best employees and teams play to their strengths. The team identifies and rallies around a few cherished norms, skills, or strategies that are (and will continue to be) crucial to their performance and sanity...

5. Use Friction to Create Cadence

Friction fixers can dampen confusion, reduce wasted effort, enhance coordination, and strengthen relationships by slowing down to implement routines and rituals that create a shared cadence...

John emphasizes that, as Mozilla grew from one team to multiple teams, rather than adding a lot of rules and specialized roles to bolster coordination and communication, his leadership team developed a “drumbeat that the organization marches to.” As Mozilla grew to roughly fifty people, confusion emerged—especially among newcomers—about how to fit in, whom to talk to and work with, and when to ship changes in code. Life got less chaotic after Mozilla’s leaders added a “closed” meeting every Monday where they made decisions and plans. Later that day, the leadership team convened a company lunch and an all-hands meeting where they announced goals, answered questions, and talked about challenges Mozilla faced. When Mozilla grew to about eighty people, the leadership team added more “pacing mechanisms,” including data reports every night at seven (to help people make short-term decisions) and quarterly company goals (to help people blend individual and collective efforts). Then, when Mozilla grew to about 120 people, and companywide goals were too vague, the top team added quarterly group goals. Mozilla also started holding a worldwide summit every two years for employees, people from outside the company who wrote open-source code for Mozilla, and other key stakeholders, as a “time to see everyone, reconnect, and remember humanity.”...

6. Communicate a Lot, or Not at All

Shared rhythms also help people get work done and avoid exhaustion because they know when to work with others and when to work alone...

Patty McCord, who was Netflix’s chief talent officer for the company’s first fourteen years, told us, “The most important role I played at Netflix was, at the end of every executive meeting, to say, ‘Have we made any decisions in the room today, and if we have, how are we going to communicate them?’”...

The differences between well-crafted and badly crafted endings are striking during employee layoffs. If you must lay people off, pause and remember there is a difference between what you do and how you do it.

The lesson for friction fixers, in the words of UCLA’s legendary basketball coach John Wooden (who won ten national championships in his final twelve years as coach), is “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?

9. Your Friction Project

“We wrote The Friction Project because organizations that are filled with people who make the right things easier and the wrong things harder are more humane, productive, and innovative.

The first principle such leaders follow is we serve as trustees of others’ time. As chapter 1 shows, thinking and acting like a trustee means focusing (and guiding your colleagues) on finding and repairing obstacles that squander others’ time and money, frustrate them, and leave them pissed off and worn-out.

The second leadership principle is that our project is powered by ownership and accountability for friction fixing. To paraphrase former Yum! Brands CEO David Novak, the idea is to build workplaces where accountability is a two-way street, where people feel “I own the place and the place owns me.” When it comes to friction fixing, skilled leaders are keenly aware that, all too often, making the right things easier and the wrong things harder are treated as orphan problems, obstacles and ordeals that everyone on a team or organization believes are important but that no one takes responsibility for averting or repairing.

The third leadership principle is organizational design is the highest form of friction fixing. Most of the time, leaders don’t have the luxury of designing a workplace from scratch. So most must find ways to manage in existing and imperfect systems. The bottom three levels of the Help Pyramid in chapter 3 show how leaders can reduce the damage inflicted by badly designed teams and organizations—problems they can’t fix (at least for now). This work entails reframing friction troubles as less soul crushing for victims of lousy systems, helping people navigate bewildering and broken systems, and shielding others from inefficiencies and indignities. This is essential work for leading any friction project because all systems have flaws.

Research by the late J. Richard Hackman, who devoted much of his fifty-year career to understanding what drives team performance, shows why team design decisions are so important. Richard’s years of research led him to develop the “60–30–10 rule.” He found that the day-to-day “tweaking” by team leaders and members only determines about 10 percent of performance. That 30 percent stems from the design at the launch—at least in teams that have a short life, such as the cockpit crews in commercial airlines. And a whopping 60 percent of performance is determined by what Richard called “prework”: ongoing design choices including strategy, size, rewards, norms, routines, rituals, how work is divided up and coordinated, and who makes which decisions. For teams that endure for months and years, ongoing design choices pack an even bigger wallop.

Lessons for Leaders to Live By:

1. Focus on the Journey, Not the Destination

“The journey is the reward” is ancient Chinese wisdom that, thanks perhaps to Steve Jobs’s affection for it, you’ve probably heard before...

2. Link Little Things to Big Things...

3. Put “Grease People” and “Gunk People” in the Right Places ...

Even if your organization is well designed in other ways, friction problems will fester and flare up if the right people aren’t in the right roles. To avert such troubles, skilled leaders work to put “grease people” in places where friction ought to be low and “gunk people” in places where friction ought to be high. Research on personality and culture reveal differences in responses to rules, risk, and monitoring that can help you figure out where people (including you) fall on our grease-gunk continuum:

Grease People

Gunk People

Rules: “Unbureaucratic personalities” or “Chaos Muppets” who ignore, bend, defy, and remove rules, norms, and traditions.

Rules: “Bureaucratic personalities” or “Order Muppets” who follow, create, and enforce rules, norms, and traditions.

Risk: Comfortable with taking chances, focus on the upside of trying new things. Encourage others to take risky actions.

Risk: Uncomfortable with taking chances, focus on what can go wrong, hesitate to try new things. Discourage others from taking risky actions.

Monitoring: Scrutinize others lightly. Quick to trust others and assume good intent. Downplay and encourage errors, setbacks, and rule breaking.

Monitoring: Scrutinize others closely. Wary about trusting others and assume bad intent. Call out and punish errors, setbacks, and rule breaking.

So, if your organization is plagued by vigilantes who make you jump through hoops akin to “Say, ‘I am filthy,’ five times” consider how they are treated. Are they ignored or underappreciated? If so, firing them isn’t the answer; their replacements will probably act the same way. Try what Larry’s boss did and show them some respect...

4. The Best Friction Fixers Are Friction Shifters...

Leading friction shifting in your team or organization also requires sending clear signals that it’s time for more or less friction, making sure your intentions are understood and shape behavior. You may believe that others hear your message, but as chapter 4 shows, people, especially those with a lot of power, often have a dim understanding of how others interpret and respond to their decisions, orders, and suggestions. Organizations muddy the waters further by pummeling people with confusing, conflicting, and excessive information—making it tough to distinguish “signal” from “noise.” That means, to trigger friction shifting, a leader’s job is to craft simple and crisp signals that it’s time to work in grease or gunk mode...

Paul told us, when you take charge of a troubled company, “you have to assess the situation rather than act quickly. Everyone wants you to do something, so the first thing you say, very calmly, is, ‘We’re not going to do anything today.’” During his first months on the job, Paul hit the brakes and asked “each of the top eighty people in the company to write a two-page document that answered, first, ‘Who are you? What are you responsible for?’ And then: ‘What issues do you believe are most pressing? What would you do if you were me?’” After speaking to all eighty and figuring out what was broken, who the best (and worst) people were, and what was required to fix BHP, Paul let his charges know that it was time to shift gears and start those changes, which, in just a few years, turned the company around...

5. Friction Fixing Is Fueled by Civility, Caring, and Love

A related leadership lesson we’ve implied is that friction fixing is accelerated by shared civility, caring, and love. When such emotions pervade an organization, people form stronger bonds, develop trust, focus on the best qualities of colleagues and customers, and devote more energy to helping others and less to satisfying their selfish needs. Civility, caring, and love reflect a rough hierarchy of collective compassion. As Christine Porath documents in Mastering Civility, when organizations are plagued with rudeness, it causes employee commitment, cooperation, and coordination to plummet...

As Peter Drucker said, “It is a law of nature that two moving bodies in contact with each other create friction.” But civility can help bring out the best in people because, as Drucker put it, “manners are the lubricating oil of an organization.” When employees—and the customers and citizens they serve—treat one another with outward respect, it helps everyone avoid open warfare and backstabbing, resolve (or at least tolerate) tensions, and be more amenable to collaboration. Christine’s research confirms that when civility is pervasive, employees get more done; they go the extra mile to help others and enjoy better physical and mental health. Christine dissects how leaders build civil cultures by modeling desired behaviors, hiring, rewarding, and promoting people for civility, and developing programs that spread respectful actions. She shows how seemingly small interventions pack a wallop. Like the upswing in civility at Ochsner Health in Louisiana. It was sparked partly by the “Ochsner 10/5 way,” which means if an employee is within ten feet of a colleague or patient, the employee is expected to make eye contact and smile. And to say hello if the employee is within five feet. Every organization (and family) would be more civil if we all followed Christine’s advice when we encounter a difficult person: “Before shutting down, saying no, or displaying frustration, try to appreciate where the other person is. You might even go one step further and ask yourself, How can I help them?” Caring is a more powerful form of collective compassion than civility. It entails deeper empathy and concern than surface civil behavior. In caring cultures, people feel obligated to help others avoid and overcome obstacles —they expect one another to take that extra step Christine suggested.

Parting Thought: Expect and Embrace the Mess

Our last lesson, then, is that smart friction fixers expect organizational life to be messy, try to clean up what they can, and embrace (or at least endure) the rest. That means accepting that, as those lawyers did, no matter where you are, there will always be unavoidable and aggravating friction.

That’s the advice we’ve heard from David Kelley again and again over the past twenty-five years about the organizations he’s founded and led. He tells frustrated and confused people (including us) at IDEO and the Stanford d.school, “Life is messy sometimes. Sometimes the best you can do is to accept that it is a mess, try to love it as much as you can, and move forward.

Appendix

“We wrote a friction article for Gallup.com, “Too Many Teams, Too Many Bosses,” and for Times Higher Education, “Our To-Do Lists Can’t Grow Forever. It’s Time to Try Subtraction.

And the LinkedIn pieces “Why Your Job Is Becoming Impossible to Do” and “How Do You End a Meeting?

A piece for Harvard Business Review, “Meeting Overload Is a Fixable Problem,” provided a “playbook” for “meeting resets” that we helped develop and test.

A similar conclusion was reached by Frederick Brooks, Jr., in his 1975 classic, The Mythical Man-Month.

Like Cass Sunstein’s Sludge. A book, Cass reports, that was born out of his failure to reduce government paperwork when he led the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs during the Obama administration.

Administrative Burden by Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan digs deeper into the problems of bad government bureaucracy, paperwork, and convoluted regulations.

We are smitten with Leidy Klotz’s Subtract, his book on “the science of less.

We also learned what to make harder and slower from works including The Necessity of Friction by Nordal Åkerman, a collection of essays on the virtues of blocking, delaying, and stopping action that draws on fields including economics, organizational theory, physics, and artificial intelligence.

The team received 188 nominations and implemented 87 improvements by the time Dr. Ashton’s “Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff” article appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2018.

Or you might be inspired by Salesforce’s experiments with “async week” in 2021 and 2022.

In Military Misfortunes, historians Eliot Cohen and John Hooch describe how the United States tried to stem U-boat attacks by imitating British solutions, including using sonar and destroyer escorts, which were operated by specialists.

Military Misfortunes reports, “In the eighteen months before the creation of the Tenth Fleet, the U.S. Navy sank thirty-six U-boats. In the six months after, it sank seventy-five.