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.

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.

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.

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.

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.