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.

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.

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.

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

I [Jeff Killeen] found I had to be precise and resist my natural temptation to use too many superlatives when describing the accomplishments in the business. John would say, ‘You spin things all the time. You make everything sound good.’ I’d say, ‘John, that was good.’ And he would say, ‘But you make it sound like it’s even better than it is. We’re engineers. We don’t use words like terrific and outstanding. We say, “You did your job.” When you say that the team did a terrific job, they don’t believe you.’ We finally agreed that whenever he thought I was spinning, he would tell me. And whenever I thought he was underwhelming, I would tell him.”

Killeen elaborates on how he learned to communicate in an engineering culture. “The perspective from which John comes to the business is obsessive in a wonderful way. He harks back to the philosophy that he’s building a bridge and that a bridge cannot fail. I said, ‘John, but we’re not building a bridge, and failure is okay if we fail fast and incorporate that learning so that we can grow as fast as possible. It’s preferable to me to get eight things done well and fail a two versus doing three or four things to perfection.’ John said, ‘We’re not trained to accept a lot of failure or welcome it into the process.’ I said, ‘That’s a management concept we have to work on.