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.

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.

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.

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.

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.