Friction Project Quotes

The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement. […] It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.

Onboard People to the Organization, Not Just the Job

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.

The uncomfortable truth is that the majority of women are going to have high degrees of friction and projection when you meet them. With most of the women you meet, things are simply not going to work no matter what you do or say. This is to be expected. And this is fine. You are going to be incompatible with most of the women in the world and to hold any hopes of being highly compatible with most is an illusion of grandeur and a figment of your own narcissistic tendency.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the elementary equations of the world,13 the arrow of time appears only where there is heat.* The link between time and heat is therefore fundamental: every time a difference is manifested between the past and the future, heat is involved. In every sequence of events that becomes absurd if projected backward, there is something that is heating up. If I watch a film that shows a ball rolling, I cannot tell if the film is being projected correctly or in reverse. But if the ball stops, I know that it is being run properly; run backward, it would show an implausible event: a ball starting to move by itself. The ball’s slowing down and coming to rest are due to friction, and friction produces heat. Only where there is heat is there a distinction between past and future. Thoughts, for instance, unfold from the past to the future, not vice versa—and, in fact, thinking produces heat in our heads. . . .

By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering ... an iron curtain between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, Totalitarian Propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals. But silence is not enough. If persecution, liquidation and other symptoms of social friction are to be avoided, the positive sides of propaganda must be made as effective as the negative. The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored inquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientist will call 'the problem of happiness' - in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude ... The love of servitude cannot be established except as the result of a deep, personal revolution in human minds and bodies.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why can the ego never bring happiness? Tolle’s argument here echoes the Stoics, who concluded that our judgments about the world are the source of our distress. But he takes things further, suggesting that these judgments, along with all our other thoughts, are what we take ourselves to be. We’re not only distressed by our thoughts; we imagine that we are those thoughts. The ego that results from this identification has a life of its own. It sustains itself through dissatisfaction – through the friction it creates against the present moment, by opposing itself to what’s happening, and by constantly projecting into the future, so that happiness is always some other time, never now. The ego, Tolle likes to say, thrives on drama, because compulsive thinking can sink its teeth into drama. The ego also thrives on focusing on the future, since it’s much easier to think compulsively about the future than about the present. (It’s really quite tricky, when you try it, to think compulsively about right now.) If all this is correct, we have inadvertently sentenced ourselves to unhappiness. Compulsive thinking is what we take to be the core of our being – and yet compulsive thinking relies on our feeling dissatisfied.

There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays); it is demonstrably inefficient - and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude … If persecution, liquidation [killing] and other symptoms of social friction are to be avoided, the positive sides of propaganda must be made as effective as the negative. The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored inquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientists will the call 'the problem of happiness' - in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude … The love of servitude cannot be established except as the result of a deep personal revolution in human minds and bodies.

Before the pitches began, David reminded people that IDEO’s philosophy was “enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects.

In 2013, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and his top team used their powers over all employees of this file-sharing company to cancel hundreds of time-sucking meetings. Employees were wasting so much time in meetings that they kept missing crucial deadlines, especially shipping dates. Drew’s team decided to help Dropbox employees avoid heaping unnecessary meetings on themselves. Dropbox IT folks removed nearly all standing meetings from employees’ calendars and made it impossible for them to add new meetings to their calendars for two weeks. Employees were notified via an email titled “Armeetingeddon has landed.” After explaining why their calendars were “a bit light,” the email asked, “Ahhh, doesn’t it feel fantastic?

Rohm and Haas teaches its leaders that when they face a decision with broad and enduring consequences, taking speedy, narrow, and impulsive action is a recipe for disaster. Instead, Rohm and Haas preaches the Five Voices method. 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.

Patty was a Netflix senior executive for the company’s first fourteen years and helped drive its remarkable growth through 2012. Patty believes the company’s long stretch of success was fueled by this “very deliberate” strategy of “making it easy to leave and come back.” Patty notes that, while “pissing off consumers” may have short-term benefits, “a subscription model creates the most profit over the long term—over years, generations.” Eric, who went on to serve as chief algorithm officer at online fashion retailer Stitch Fix, added that companies that make it easy to quit get better data about how to keep customers satisfied and loyal. That’s because the “time to feedback” is faster for the company and the evidence is less noisy because most customers are keeping the service because they want it, not because they are trapped in a roach motel.

Yet, when we dug into the entries on Patrick’s Fast List, we found that many he celebrated were ultimately successful because—at key junctures—friction fixers slowed things way down and did necessary, difficult, and inefficient things. They hit the brakes to prepare for putting the pedal to the metal later, or to clean up problems caused by racing ahead too fast for too long in the past.

Other challenges require people to master the art and science of friction shifting, to transition constantly and instantly between hitting the gas and the brakes. This skill includes moving fast and taking risks one moment, then slowing down, reflecting, and avoiding dangerous mistakes the next.

As Google grew, this practice devolved into a sacred cow that was unnecessary for most job searches, drove away top candidates, and burdened the six, eight, ten, twelve, or fifteen Googlers who interviewed, evaluated, and discussed each candidate. Sometimes it was even worse. Laszlo told us, “People had up to twenty-five [!] interviews before being rejected.” So, he made a simple rule: if more than four interviews were to be conducted with a candidate, a request for an exception had to be approved by him. Most Googlers were hesitant to ask an executive vice president such as Laszlo for an exception, so the gauntlet disappeared for most job candidates. Laszlo added, “It was one of my first lessons in the power of hierarchy to actually do some good.

Jillian and Anita found that heaping a bit of “process friction” on those doctors forced them to pause and think about whether patients’ symptoms indicated they really needed an ultrasound—or if that test would provide little or no useful information. Patients who were spared unnecessary ultrasounds spent less time waiting in a crowded emergency department and avoided the stress and hassle of another test. Eliminating unnecessary ultrasounds also reduced patients’ hospital bills and the workload on hospital radiologists, who are often busy and beleaguered.

Most of us, for example, are victims of the “roach motel” or “one-way-door” problem where it is nearly frictionless to get into a situation, then is mighty hard or impossible to escape.

leave.” Nir proposes the “regret test” for The New York Times, and any other company, whose leaders can bring themselves to squelch their greed and instead want to save users from a visit to the roach motel: “If people knew what it would take to cancel, would they still subscribe?” Friction fixers who take this question seriously can respect customers’ time, avert hypocrisy, and possibly repair their organization’s reputation.

Joe found, rather than thinking of their strategy as distributing sheet music, it’s often better for leaders who want to unleash large-scale change to encourage people to “play jazz,” to adapt to circumstances and try new things “without ever entirely abandoning the original theme.

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.

The first symptom is privilege that spares you from the hassles, humiliations, and barriers heaped on everyone else.

Like leaders who are convinced the only way to be a star performer in their company is to work harder than their colleagues, and who believe that—since they are the boss and get all the best information—they can distinguish the slackers from the hardworking stars. Yet, in one prestigious consulting firm, although leaders were sure that working long hours (and neglecting one’s family) was the path to success, and they knew who worked like dogs and who didn’t, they turned out to be wrong on both counts.

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.

at Distributed, a British software company, when they cut most meetings to fifteen minutes. Cofounder Callum Anderson explained, “When you do the maths and realize that a one-hour meeting for eight people equals one full business day, along with serious costs associated with that for a business, these shorter, more focused meetings are a no-brainer.

remind yourself and press others to act as if making a decision is the beginning rather than the end of your work.

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. This lopsided attention is adaptive because more powerful creatures dispense rewards and punishments. Human bosses often don’t realize how closely underlings monitor their every word and deed—and are oblivious of the gyrations that subordinates go through to protect themselves from and please those at the top of the pecking order.

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 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. Academics call this the fallacy of centrality

The top two levels in our Help Pyramid are about wielding your influence to put the right amounts of friction in the right places—the main mission of The Friction Project. Keep in mind that adding reframing, navigating, and shielding to the mix can fortify people to start and sustain local or systemic changes.

When Steve Jobs returned to lead Apple in 1997, he fired every general manager of every business unit in the first few weeks (all in the same day). As we detail in chapter 5, within a year Steve’s rebuilt senior team had discontinued all dozen or so computers that Apple was selling when he first returned—and replaced them with four new models.

Proud friction fixers like Sandra taught us that their craft entails helping others in two ways. The first way to help is prevention and cure—implementing little and big changes in organizations to make the right things easy and the wrong things hard. That’s the organizational design part, and it’s the main mission of every friction fixer.

The second way is dealing with the symptoms of friction troubles. This work includes the “therapy” that Sandra talked about: keeping others and yourself sane and motivated so that you can survive broken systems together and be fortified with the grit and gumption to repair them. Friction fixers also help others deal with symptoms by guiding them through the best—or least bad—paths through the muck. Friction fixers serve as shock absorbers, too: doing routine chores, dealing with reasonable and unreasonable demands and interruptions, and enduring unwarranted cruelty so that others don’t have to.

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.

Reframing is at the bottom of our Help Pyramid because every friction fixer can comfort themselves, their colleagues, and customers in ways that bolster their mental health, maintain resolve, and strengthen social bonds—even when they are bogged down by ridiculous rules, red tape, and petty tyrants.

The second level of the Help Pyramid entails serving as a trail guide. That means steering colleagues, friends, customers, and citizens to find the fastest, most rewarding, cheapest, least upsetting, most fun, or safest path through a system—without altering the system itself.

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 sounds like a great idea—leaders visit employees where they work, ask about challenges they face, and try to make things better.

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. So, by chipping away at the little troubles, friction fixers can eliminate those pesky little annoyances and reduce the chances of big, overwhelming problems that are difficult or impossible to repair.

We suggest taking inspiration from the elephant’s giant ears and small mouth—and stifling your inner HIPPO. Like the vice president who kept his talking in check by making his phone’s background picture a hippopotamus with its giant mouth wide open.

One first-time CEO was surprised to learn that, during an eleven-minute stand-up meeting with eight employees, he talked 50 percent time, made ten statements, and asked only two questions. He was disturbed by the team’s low energy (which perked up after he asked questions) and that his employees told our students (anonymously) that these stand-ups were a waste of time. This feedback helped that rookie boss to talk less and ask more questions—and to devote more attention to the five employees who talked the least.

Such leaders yielded to subordinates’ technical and cultural expertise by deferring to their judgment and delegating authority. Like the Brazilian leader who told his Singapore team, “Let’s invert the jobs here, right? You don’t work for me. I work for you.

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.

As the late great comedian George Carlin put it, “My shit is stuff. Your stuff is shit.” That line explains much about why we humans can’t resist adding more and more stuff to our workplaces: staff, space, gizmos, software, meetings, emails, Slack threads, rules, training, the latest management fad. We are wired to see stuff we add as righteous and essential. And to see stuff that others add as annoying and unnecessary.