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January 31 - March 23, 2024
Yet, as piles of studies show, to do creative work right, teams need to slow down, struggle, and develop a lot of bad ideas to find a rare good one.
Administrators who used to shield doctors, lawyers, and scientists from red tape such as approving budgets, expenses, and time sheets now use software that heaps such chores on the people they once served. Arizona State’s Barry Bozeman shows that more and more of us are bogged down by such “robotic bureaucracy”—those relentless computer-generated administrative demands that cause “death by a thousand 10-minute tasks.”
Removing too much friction also can be a mistake because, as studies of everything from military boot camps to assembling IKEA products show, “labor leads to love.” The harder we humans work at something, and the more we suffer, the more we come to value it (independent of its objective value) because of our need to justify all that work to ourselves and others.
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.”
members devoted their first meeting to writing a prenup or a “charter” to spell out agreements about the team’s roles, norms, rules, and values. That way, rather than being mired in confusion and conflict about who ought to do what, and what was good and bad behavior, they were ready to charge ahead and develop their business plan.
Parkinson’s Law, proposed the “coefficient of inefficiency”: Once a committee grows to more than eight members, it becomes less efficient with each new member added, becoming useless once it hits twenty.
Brooks observed that, when projects are running late, leaders often add more people to speed things up—but the burdens of onboarding newcomers and coordinating more people make late projects run even later.
Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff program (yes, the acronym is GROSS).
The first conviction is I am accountable for friction fixing, and so are you.
The Friction Project dissects five prevalent and destructive traps: Oblivious Leaders, Addition Sickness, Broken Connections, Jargon Monoxide, and Fast and Frenzied.
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.
Friction fixing works best when people are encouraged, praised, and rewarded for banding together. The antics of lone heroes are rarely sufficient for averting and repairing such vexing and messy problems.
1. It’s like Mowing the Lawn
2. Organizations Are Malleable Prototypes
IDEO’s philosophy was “enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects.”
3. Celebrate and Reward Doers, Not Posers
Poser Tricks Hollow Acts That Undermine Friction Fixing Promises as substitutes for action. Offering to help fix friction troubles, then behaving—and perhaps believing—that no further effort is required. Holding and attending meetings to talk about friction fixing as substitutes for actually doing it. Eloquent but useless talk. Spewing out impressive ideas and compelling stories about friction—which are so vague, impractical, or convoluted that no subsequent action or learning results. Mission statements and lists of shared values as substitutes for friction fixing. Bad-mouthing as a
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“Only pessimism sounds profound. Optimism sounds superficial.”
“Rather than approach conversations with blame or accusation, we’ve found that giving folks the benefit of the doubt and recognizing the complexity of their jobs to be a lot more helpful in sparking partnerships and opening the door for constructive discourse.”
We realized this savvy organizational politician had outsourced friction fixing in part because the consultants were handy scapegoats for inaction and other failures on his watch. That executive had hired high-priced consultants, so he had spent money as a substitute for action—a favorite move by rich and powerful posers.
4. Focus on Fixing Things, Not Who to Blame
When friction troubles abound, ruminating and ranting about who is to blame saps energy that is better di...
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friction fixers make it safe for “noisy complainers” who repair problems and then tell many others where the system failed. Friction fixers praise and protect “noisy troublemakers” and “self-aware error makers,” who point out mistakes they and others make so people can avoid repeating such failures and improve the system.
be loud and proud about the mistakes that you and others make and flaws that you spot and fix, and reward that behavior in others. And don’t stop questioning what your organization does and pressing others to figure out how to do it better.
5. Honor People Who Avert Friction Fiascoes, Not Just Firefighters
driven by what psychologist Jessica Tracy and her coauthors call “authentic pride,” the self-esteem gained from being a conscientious and caring person who accomplishes good things by treating others well. And who earns their admiration and respect as a result.
Jessica’s research also found that authentic pride has an evil twin, “hubristic pride,” where people feel endowed with enduring qualities such as being really smart, athletic, or gorgeous that anoint them as superior to others—which unleashes their arrogance, conceit, and self-aggrandizement. Authentic pride depends on working to earn and sustain prestige over the long haul. Hubristic pride “is more immediate but fleeting and, in some cases, unwarranted.” It depends more on taking shortcuts and less on doing hard work.
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
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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.
If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way.”
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.
they know that “what got us here won’t get us there.”
Don’t worry about traps that annoy people but are less menacing. And try to avoid the all-too-human temptation to tilt at windmills that are impossible to topple no matter how much time, energy, and goodwill you squander.
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.
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.
The third symptom of power poisoning is selfishness.
In all primate groups, members direct attention up the hierarchy rather than down. We humans are a lot like baboons and chimpanzees, who check every twenty or thirty seconds to see what the alpha male in their troop is doing.
anthropologist David Graeber explained, “The powerless not only end up doing most of the actual, physical labor required to keep society running, they also do most of the interpretative labor as well.”
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.”
One reason that leaders keep revisiting decisions is that they lack confidence in themselves, their team, and their organization.
Another reason for such amnesia was that the company rewarded empty talk rather than action.
If your organization is plagued with decision amnesia and other symptoms of the smart talk trap, the long-term solution is to recruit, reward, and promote doers rather than posers.
Our first tip is to remember, talk, and act as if a decision by itself changes nothing.
In other words, remind yourself and press others to act as if making a decision is the beginning rather than the end of your work.
“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?’”
Some leaders use sham participation in hopes of fooling others into rubber-stamping decisions. Others see it as a necessary if empty ritual given local traditions and procedures. And some believe that, even when people realize their input doesn’t count, the mere opportunity to voice their opinions somehow makes them feel better about their leaders and workplaces. Yet research on organizational justice suggests the deception and disrespect that define sham participation will alienate and anger employees and other stakeholders.
the Dalai Lama said, “If you can help, by all means do so. If not, don’t make it worse.”
Research on “management by walking around,” or MBWA, suggests that, a bit like bloodletting two hundred years ago, this much-ballyhooed practice sometimes does more harm than good.
MBWA did improve performance when leaders used it for problems that were easy to solve (e.g., moving nurses who prepared medications to a less cramped room). MBWA backfired, however, when leaders used it for more difficult problems (e.g., lab results that came back too slowly). Nurses reported that these regular chats with the boss about big recalcitrant problems wasted their time, rarely led to improvements, and drew attention to leaders’ failings. Nurses complained that, instead of blabbering and wasting staff’s time, bosses ought to focus on fixing the broken parts of their organizations.
