The Friction Project Quotes

“Time pressure was most destructive when people felt they were “on a treadmill” because their schedules were packed with fragmented and unimportant tasks, unnecessary meetings, and constantly shifting plans. The resulting frustration, anxiety, and inability to concentrate on their work undermined creativity. In contrast, time pressure didn’t undermine creativity when people felt their team was on an important mission and members had long stretches to focus on essential solo work.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“As business author David Burkus argues, the genius of zeroing in on safety is “you can’t improve safety without understanding every step in the process—understanding each risk—and then eliminating it.” As a result, hundreds of process improvements “made the plants run more efficiently,” and Paul “gradually changed the systems and the culture” so that “executives began sharing other data and other ideas more rapidly as well.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“reciprocal interdependence is most demanding. That’s when people, teams, silos, and such must constantly adjust back and forth in response to one another as the work unfolds. Football (aka soccer) is a great example. Players constantly change what they do in response to passes and shots from teammates and competitors—who, in turn, constantly adjust to others’ passes and shots.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“Pooled interdependence is least demanding. That’s when organizations combine, or “roll up,” the separate and independent efforts of people or parts. They have little need—or it is impossible—for them to communicate or collaborate. Think of the team gymnastics competition at the Olympics. Teammates give one another advice and support. But team performance is based solely on adding up individual scores on the floor exercise, parallel bars, and such.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“Onboard People to the Organization, Not Just the Job”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“One of Satya’s first moves was to abolish stack ranking. He worked to reverse the traditional emphasis on rewarding the smartest person in the room, who dominates and pushes around others. He encouraged people to ask questions and listen—to be “learn-it-alls” not know-it-alls. He pressed people to live the One Microsoft philosophy, that the company is not to be “a confederation of fiefdoms” because “innovation and competition don’t respect our silos, so we need to transcend those barriers.” To support this new culture, Satya changed the reward system so that the superstars were people who worked across silos and teams to build products and services with pieces that meshed together well. And so that people deemed as superstars were those who helped others succeed in their careers. The backstabbers who’d flourished under Ballmer changed their ways, left the company voluntarily, or were shown the door.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“Specialists are also prone to overconfidence, to believe their narrow knowledge makes them experts in all other areas. They overestimate their understanding of others’ work, oversimplify it, and denigrate the dedication and skill of people outside their area.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“The Cancer Center suffered from two hallmarks of organizations that are plagued with coordination snafus. First, powerful people ignore, dismiss, denigrate, and even undermine people and groups they need to mesh their work with. Oncologists saw themselves as being at the top of the pecking order at the center and the work of other specialists as secondary, trivial, or downright useless. They dismissed side effects, including fatigue, diarrhea, and cramps, caused by chemotherapy that they prescribed as “normal” and left it to patients to find specialists to treat such problems. Second, powerful people devote little attention to solutions for coordination problems. Executives, consultants, and physicians who launched the center gave lip service to collaboration across silos. Yet they focused on building strong teams and departments in areas such as brain tumors, breast cancer, and skin cancer—and ignored how to help the units work together.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“Leaders use the “ride-along” or “shadowing” method when they watch, follow, and question employees, customers, and citizens. This usually means going deeper than MBWA, which entails strolling around and having brief chats with people about their troubles. Taking the time to watch, talk to, and follow people as they try to do their work and struggle with the broken parts of an organization can shatter a leader’s delusions about the causes, costs, and cures for friction troubles.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“We help leaders uncover and repair HIPPO problems by measuring two key behaviors. The first is talking time, how much the leader talks (versus other members). The second is the ratio of the questions the leader asks to the statements the leader makes.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“Leaders often lament that followers resist change—such as the CEO who complained to us that his company’s innovation efforts were undermined by middle management “trolls.” Yet as organizational theorist James March observed, leaders rarely notice the opposite problem: when employees pursue their leaders’ instructions “more forcefully than was intended” or inaccurately infer their bosses will be pleased by moves that never occurred to their bossses (and their bosses may not want).”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“The third symptom of power poisoning is selfishness. People who are puffed up with self-importance are prone to devote little attention to the burdens they inflict on others, and to care little about the plight of people with less privilege.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“prestigious leaders who spend their days interacting with colleagues and clients, reading internal reports, and studying spreadsheets, conclude, “It is my organization, I spend my days learning about the details, I know everything important that is going on here.” Yet they often don’t know, or they reach the wrong conclusions, about what is (and ought to be) harder and easier in their organizations—and cling to their flawed beliefs.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“Joe adds the best change agents are “almost playful” about “finding many ways there.” That means, he says, they look for signs their “sheet music” isn’t working. That it’s time to “play jazz” by experimenting with different messages, tools, people, and partnerships—and to keep tweaking the mix. They resist locking in to a single theory or method. No matter how well things are going right now, they know that “what got us here won’t get us there.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“Other efforts are aimed at taming friction troubles in a large part or all of an organization, rather than making local changes in a small part—say, a team or department—without any intention of triggering broader change. We call this systemic design and repair work.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“Absorbing and deflecting friction so others don’t have to often requires more courage and self-sacrifice than reframing and navigation. Shielding is a symptom of friction troubles and, sometimes, a prevention and cure—so we rank it above navigation on our Help Pyramid. When people need intense protection to feel safe and to concentrate on their work, it’s a symptom of a bad system. But designing roles and teams to shield people so they can work unfettered by intrusions and insults is a hallmark of healthy organizations, too.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“As our Stanford colleagues Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas show in Humor, Seriously, people also suffer less emotional and physical harm when they frame distressing situations as silly, absurd, or ridiculous. Focusing on the funny side enables people to release tension and to see their troubles as less threatening. As people laugh together about the madness of it all, their bonds become stronger. Others joining the laughter affirms people aren’t alone in their suffering, they aren’t weak, or to blame. It is the system that sucks.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“These reappraisals include learning to identify and avoid negative and distorted thinking, such as catastrophizing (jumping to the most dire conclusions about threats and risks), focusing on the upsides of bad experiences, accepting that you aren’t to blame for bad news and failures, seeing the humor and absurdity in crummy situations, and construing frustrations and setbacks as temporary troubles that won’t haunt you for months or years.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“Or wrestling matches with rules, procedures, traditions, and technologies that once made sense but are now so antiquated, pointless, and inefficient that they make you want to pull your hair out.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“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).”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“You have to make sure you never confuse the hierarchy that you need for managing complexity with the respect that people deserve. Because that’s where a lot of organizations go off track, confusing respect and hierarchy, and thinking that low on hierarchy means low respect; high on the hierarchy means high respect. So hierarchy is a necessary evil of managing complexity, but it in no way has anything to do with respect that is owed an individual.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“Third, and finally, Clara designated certain team members to clean up messes, such as “fixing bugs in real time.” She assigned other engineers to focus on developing new features and other promising solutions.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“The second method echoes Becky Margiotta’s Times Square approach in the 100,000 Homes Campaign—getting the prototype right (or at least less wrong) before you go big.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“Clara suggests three methods to fortify people for impending messes, which she used when Hearsay Systems launched its first product and continues to refine at Hearsay and Salesforce. The first is “We had every team member brainstorm ahead of time what might go right and what might go wrong.” That prepared people to be on the lookout for unexpected opportunities and troubles,”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“Clara Shih is the founding CEO and executive chair of Hearsay Systems and the CEO of Salesforce AI. She agrees “with the notion of embracing the mess while working to clean it up.” Clara adds that, especially when you are doing something new, even though you don’t know which messes will arise, it’s best to expect that things will go wrong. Rather than being shocked or freaking out, be ready to make repairs if you can, but as David Kelley suggests, keep moving forward through the muck.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“Our last lesson, then, is that smart friction fixers expect organizational life to be messy, try to clean up what they can, and embrace (or at least endure) the rest. That means accepting that, as those lawyers did, no matter where you are, there will always be unavoidable and aggravating friction.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“For example, when a worker died from a preventable accident at an Alcoa plant in Arizona, he flew to the plant that day and told the executives who ran it, “We killed this man.” And added, “It’s my failure of leadership. I caused his death. And it’s the failure of all of you in the chain of command.” He didn’t muddy that message with any convoluted crap, bullshit, in-group lingo, or “random scatter” of jargon.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“Paul said, again and again to different groups, that this focus on safety would inspire employees to choose to devote more of their “discretionary energy” to their jobs, that “you don’t actually have to ask for, you need to turn them loose.” He argued that creating a place where no one ever gets hurts is a “down payment” on treating people with dignity and respect—which creates pride “that swells up into everything you do.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“We are big fans of the agile software movement. In 2001, seventeen software developers met in Snowbird, Utah, and published the “Manifesto for Agile Software.” The four main values in the manifesto remind us how the best friction fixers think and act: (1) “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”; (2) “working software over comprehensive documentation”; (3) “customer collaboration over contract negotiation”; and (4) “responding to change over following a plan.” Agile software teams deliver their work in small increments rather than in one “big bang” launch. Rather than following a rigid plan, they constantly evaluate results and constraints and update the software, and how they work, along the way.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“Apple employees are spared such intrusions because they are “scared silent.” As Adam Lashinsky reports in Inside Apple, employees know that revealing company secrets will get them fired on the spot. This penchant for secrecy means the small teams that do most of the work at Apple are given only the slivers of information that executives believe they need. A few years ago, we talked to a senior Apple executive who speculated—but, of course, didn’t know—that CEO Tim Cook might be the only person who knew all the major features of the next iPhone.”
― Robert I. Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder