“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?