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.

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.

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.

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.

So there you have it. O Software Architect, you must see the future. You must guess—intelligently. You must weigh the costs and determine where the architectural boundaries lie, and which should be fully implemented, and which should be partially implemented, and which should be ignored. But this is not a one-time decision. You don’t simply decide at the start of a project which boundaries to implement and which to ignore. Rather, you watch. You pay attention as the system evolves. You note where boundaries may be required, and then carefully watch for the first inkling of friction because those boundaries don’t exist. At that point, you weigh the costs of implementing those boundaries versus the cost of ignoring them—and you review that decision frequently. Your goal is to implement the boundaries right at the inflection point where the cost of implementing becomes less than the cost of ignoring. It takes a watchful eye.

We’d been enticed (or perhaps duped) by what Harvard Business School’s Michael Norton and his colleagues call the “the IKEA effect,” which happens because “labor leads to love.” The upshot of their studies—building on research on cognitive dissonance that goes back to the 1950s—is that the harder we work at something, the more we will cherish it, independently of its other qualities. This happens because we humans are driven to justify our efforts to ourselves and others. We think and say, “That sure was a lot of work, but it was worth it,” whether or not it is true!

The bigger lesson for The Friction Project is that making snap judgments about what ought to be hard and what ought to be easy is risky business. Savvy trustees hit the pause button and figure out what to make easy, hard, or impossible before they turn to how to do it. They strive to get things done as quickly and cheaply as possible but keep searching for signs that it will take longer to go fast and cost more money to do things cheaply.

Research on launching new businesses and products shows that—at best—the so-called first-mover advantage is a dangerous half-truth. When markets are treacherous and uncertainty is high, first movers often flounder because consumers aren’t ready for their ideas or are put off by crummy early offerings. Companies that launch their products or services later end up as winners, in part, because they learn from the fatal missteps of eager early movers. Amazon was not the first online bookstore; the defunct Books.com and Interloc were among the earlier entrants. Netscape, the first commercially successful Web browser, was launched years before Google. Myspace was a successful social networking service before Facebook. Couchsurfing was founded before Airbnb. Being first is risky when smart fast followers can learn from your troubles and pass you

This logic also explains why creative work is and ought to be hard, frustrating, and sometimes exhausting. Skilled creators find ways to be somewhat less inefficient, for example, by generating ideas faster, testing promising ideas rather than endlessly arguing about them, and killing bad ideas fast. But piles of academic studies confirm there is no quick and easy path to creativity. 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. Imaginative people, because they live in a cognitive minefield, do poor work when they are forced to be fast and efficient and to avoid mistakes. If they aren’t constantly struggling, feeling confused, failing, and arguing, and trying, modifying, and rejecting new ideas, they are doing it wrong.

A purge happens when powerful leaders spearhead a deep and focused effort to remove broken parts of an organization. Purges were part of the renowned turnarounds by Lou Gerstner when he led IBM from 1993 to 2002 and by Steve Jobs when he returned to lead Apple in 1997.

IBM’s marketing train wreck and Apple’s bewildering product lineup were fueled by a similar cause: decentralized businesses each had enough power to add stuff, but not enough to stop others from doing so, too. This is a twist on Hardin’s tragedy of the commons. Each business had incentives for adding yet another campaign or product, but each addition hurt IBM and Apple by confusing customers and wasting money. Although management gurus often bad-mouth leaders who exercise “command and control,” as Lou Gerstner and Steve Jobs did, sometimes that’s just what a broken organization needs.

Pushkala’s team knew that top-down approaches like those used by Lou Gerstner and Steve Jobs would backfire in this company as, unlike IBM and Apple, AstraZeneca wasn’t in crisis—although revenue and profits fell between 2011 and 2016. AstraZeneca is also a decentralized company, in which local leaders have substantial authority to accept, modify, or ignore orders from on high. So, rather than telling people what to do, Pushkala’s team took “a player-coach” approach. They implemented some key companywide efforts, 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.

Celebrate People Who Don’t Add Unnecessary Stuff in the First Place As 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.

But Seinfeld’s belief that streamlining creativity can kill it is bolstered by piles of studies—especially the folly of trying to reduce your team’s or organization’s failure rate. As 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!

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.

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.

Carl’s motto was, “You can’t learn what you need to know at corporate headquarters, you’ve got to go to the stores.” For Carl, visiting stores and talking to employees wasn’t enough.

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.

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.

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.

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.

These teams started with a provisional plan, the “sheet music.” Film crews had a detailed daily schedule. The SWAT team outlined a plan for each mission—which specified, for example, who would cover the exits of a house, where snipers would be stationed, and when officers would bust down the door. But when things didn’t go as expected, because people understood one another’s roles so well and how their roles fit together, teams were adept at revising their plan on the spot.

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.

That’s what University of Pennsylvania’s Andrew Carton and his coauthors concluded after studying patients treated for heart attacks in 151 California hospitals. When a hospital had four or fewer values and used vivid imagery, patients were far less likely to be readmitted for further treatment within thirty days—a key indicator of the quality of care. Carton’s team found similar results in an experiment where they assembled sixty-two virtual teams to design new toys. Before designing the toy, team members learned their “company’s” values—and were instructed that their design should be “congruent” with the values. An “expert panel” of seven children was more enthusiastic about playing with toys designed by teams in companies with short lists of vivid values.

star,” saving thirty-two hours a month. We worked with Rebecca on a follow-up Meeting Reset program for sixty Asana marketing employees, which resulted in each employee saving an average of five hours per month. Canceling meetings had the biggest impact (37 percent of total minutes saved). But the combined impact of scheduling meetings less often, making them shorter, and relying more on written communication and less on presentations and conversations was even bigger (63 percent of total minutes saved).

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.

As Chip and Nancy put it, for people afflicted with component focus, “wholes are not the ‘sum of their parts,’ they are a function of one part.” The deeper a person’s expertise, the worse this narrow focus gets. Chip and Nancy show how “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. Experts unwittingly create coordination snafus by failing to pass along essential information to people in other positions and fields because they assume it is self-evident.

Sometimes, it’s best to structure jobs or units this way, to provide each with the resources, incentives, and freedom to charge ahead independently. So that each can operate as an island.

Onboard People to the Organization, Not Just the Job

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.

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.

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.

Paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall argues that storytelling is what makes us distinctively human and gave us an evolutionary edge over other primates because stories are such efficient and nuanced means for capturing and sharing group knowledge.

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,

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.

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.

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.

The opacity of the mind, its inability to project itself into the realm of another's personality, goes a long way to explain the friction of life. If we would set down other people's errors to this rather than to malice prepense we should not only get more good out of life and feel more kindly toward our fellows, but doubtless the rectitude of our intellects would increase, and the justice of our judgments...we are so shut away from one another that none tells those about him what he considers ideal treatment on their part toward him...nothing will probe to the core of this greatest disadvantage under which we labor--that is, mutual noncomprehension--except a basis of society and government which would make it easy for each to put himself in another's place because his place is so much like another's...we [would] need less imagination in order to do that which is just and kind to every one about us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Organizations accentuate addition sickness by rewarding it with promotions, prestige, and money. And ignoring—or even punishing—people who subtract. Leaders who start big programs are celebrated, not those who disband bad ones.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Coordination troubles, like other kinds of destructive friction, are often orphan problems that everyone knows about, but no one feels accountable for fixing.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Good stories trigger effort, cooperation, and coordination in modern corporations, too.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anyone who has tangled with organizations as an employee or customer has had moments, days, and, sometimes, months and years when it felt as if the overlords who imagined and run the place have no respect for their time.

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.

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.

The goal isn’t efficiency, it is to make something good, or even great. We iterate 7–9 times, with friction in the process.

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.

Friction fixers need to be especially wary of smart critics. Experiments by psychologist Teresa Amabile on the “brilliant but cruel” effect found that people who write nasty book reviews are seen as more intelligent and expert than people who write positive reviews. As Amabile put it, “Only pessimism sounds profound. Optimism sounds superficial.

Following Amy and Anita, 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. Sure, sometimes it’s easier to be quiet and compliant. But if your goal is friction fixing—rather than fueling the delusion that everything is just fine—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.

Friction fixers avert trouble before it happens—they don’t just repair or remove problems that flare up. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who was a powerful force in ending apartheid in South Africa, said, “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.

Jeremy was 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.

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

All are forms of friction that chip away at our initiative, commitment, and zest for work. That hurt our coworkers and the customers and clients we serve. And that undermine the productivity, innovation, and reputations of our organizations.

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.