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January 31 - March 23, 2024
Anita and Sara explain that their findings don’t mean that leaders should stop using MBWA. Rather, as that silly saying goes, it means “problems are like dinosaurs. They’re easy to handle when they’re small, but if you let them go, they’ll grow up to be big and nasty.”
That’s why this duo believes that MBWA worked for solving small but not big problems. More broadly, they argue that “an easy-to-solve prioritization approach” is more likely to lead to long-term improvements because it is easier to nip small problems in the bud and because many, perhaps most, big problems result from a complex and hard-to-predict combination of a bunch of little problems.
When people (especially men) gain power, they hog airtime and interrupt others. Unfortunately, the more leaders blab, the less they learn about what to make hard and easy, what drives people crazy, what works, and how to fix things.
The best leaders “activated” their authority to squelch destructive conflict, when discussion and debate became repetitive, and time pressure necessitated immediate decisions. These flexible leaders “flattened” the hierarchy when creativity, problem-solving, and buy-in were top priorities.
“when scholars attempt to find an organization that is not characterized by hierarchy, they cannot.”
Too few hierarchical levels and too little top-down control is as toxic as too much.
hierarchy is a necessary evil of managing complexity, but it in no way has anything to do with respect that is owed an individual.
“Those who hold the purse strings have a natural incentive to hire more employees like themselves.”
the best leaders are relentless about eliminating or repairing things that distract, bore, bewilder, or exhaust people.
“If you could kill all the rules that frustrate you or slow down your efficiency, what would they be?”
The team gathers and writes notes about everything they won’t miss about their departed colleague. Then they write notes about everything they will miss. Each member claims one of those good things and commits to doing it. Then both lists are destroyed—burned, shredded, or, if generated online, deleted.
the Meeting Doomsday part, in which employees removed all of the standing meetings with less than five people from their calendars for forty-eight hours. Then, as Rebecca put it, after people lived “with their newly cleansed calendars” for a couple days, they repopulated them “only with those meetings that are valuable—according to their own meeting audit.”
Meeting Doomsday packed a wallop. Rebecca reports participants saved an average of eleven hours per month.
but believed their success hinged on the cumulative impact of small systemwide and local changes. Most employees would join the effort because they wanted to, not because they had to. And the team believed that many of the best solutions would be tailored for tackling distinct local problems. As Pushkala put it, “Let us not solve world hunger; let us start eating the elephant in small chunks.”
the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu put it, “Do nothing, and everything will be done.” Smart friction fixers never forget that, if they add nothing unnecessary, excessive, or destructive, then no subtraction will be needed.
psychologist Dean Keith Simonton documents, the most creative people don’t succeed at a higher rate than others. Renowned geniuses including Picasso, da Vinci, and physicist Richard Feynman had far more successes and failures than their unheralded colleagues. In every occupation Simonton studied, from composers, artists, and poets to inventors and scientists, the story is the same: “The most successful creators tend to be those with the most failures!”
“the curse of knowledge” accentuates the coordination troubles caused by component focus: Experts wrongly assume that—because a subject comes so easily to them after learning about it for years—what they know is obvious and can quickly be grasped by others.
Friction fixers energize people by turning such goals into emotionally “hot causes,” especially goals that crank up shared anger and pride, which they use to fuel the creation and implementation of “cool solutions”—concrete and coordinated actions.
collaboration overload. They found, when employees are connected to and mutually reliant on too many others, they are pummeled by the double whammy of “surges” and “the slow burn.”
Convoluted Crap Using far too many words, longer and more complicated words, and more twisted explanations than is necessary. Meaningless Bullshit Empty and misleading communication that is meaningless to both bullshitter and bullshittee. In-Group Lingo Specialized, technical, and well-defined lingo that facilitates communication and feelings of belonging among insiders. But undermines communication and coordination with outsiders, who can’t decipher what people in the club are talking about. Jargon Mishmash Syndrome When a label or phrase means so many different things to so many different
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In the words of George Orwell, this sentence and many others in the constitution “anesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.”
“when creativity is under the gun, it usually ends up getting killed.”
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.
Cash prizes didn’t improve performance. Rather, in the best teams, people exchanged many messages for short periods and then returned to solo work for long stretches—using “bursty communication.” The worst teams communicated constantly, but at a slower pace, and switched back and forth among topics rather than tackling one at a time.
“I would argue, from a cultural point of view, it’s more important to praise the people for the nine times they fail than for the one time they succeed.”
“60–30–10 rule.” He found that the day-to-day “tweaking” by team leaders and members only determines about 10 percent of performance. That 30 percent stems from the design at the launch—at least in teams that have a short life, such as the cockpit crews in commercial airlines. And a whopping 60 percent of performance is determined by what Richard called “prework”: ongoing design choices including strategy, size, rewards, norms, routines, rituals, how work is divided up and coordinated, and who makes which decisions.
