Rambling emails and inefficient rules; these are the kind of things that make employees go spare. They're forms of friction that chip away at initiative and grind down workers, says Stanford University Professor Robert Sutton.
For the past several years Sutton and co-author Huggy Rao have studied the bad obstacles that are meant to help but don't, as well as the good speed bumps that slow us down and prevent stupid mistakes.
Their book, The Friction Project: How smart Leaders make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder, explores the difference between good and bad friction.
Photo: Unsplash
The ill-fated Google Glass, a brand of smart glasses that launched in 2013, is an example of what good friction might have avoided, says Sutton.
“That's when you have a problem with a founder who has a little bit too much money and a little bit too much power.
"Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google and worth $20 billion if he's worth a penny... And he saw this really cool prototype. And the members of the team said, ‘Sergey, it isn't done. We need a couple years to finish this thing.’
“And he ripped it out of their hands and promoted it to all sorts of famous people. And the rest is history. It was one of the most embarrassing, worst products ever made by Google.”
His best example of bad friction happened to him at Stanford University.
“A senior Stanford administrator one afternoon sent all 2000 faculty members a 1266-word email, with a 7500 word attachment, inviting all 2000 of us to be on zoom to spend a whole Saturday brainstorming about how to make our new sustainability school better.
“And I just thought that was a spectacular example of somebody being clueless that they're wasting other people's time.”
Friction that stymies creativity can come from the top or bottom, he says.
“In a healthy organisation everybody's a friction fixer and everybody sees themselves as trustees of others’ time. So, it's something that is both caused by and fixed by both the bottom and the top.”
A little bit of pushback can be a good thing, he says.
“Sometimes we save our leaders from doing really dumb things by not implementing their dumb ideas. And I've seen this happen.”
An example in the book is a US clothing retailer that tried to push through an AI project, he says.
“The employees rejected the initial attempt to jam it down their throats, and then the designers slowly worked with the people, in this case, who ordered the clothing.
“They developed algorithms that actually helped them do their work, instead of giving them dumb answers. It came out better.”
“Sham participation” bedevils many large organisations, he says.
“I've seen this in every organisation I've ever been part of. Where your boss gets an idea and has a meeting and we're all going to discuss and talk about how to make the decision and whether or not to do it.
“But what's really happened is the boss has already made the decision. And he or she is just wasting your time by chatting about what we're going to do.”
Smart leaders avoid sham participation, he says.
“They’re really clear and say OK you have no influence over whether or not we're going to make the decision, say to sell the company, but you might have some influence over the kind of job you have after we sell the company.
“So, let's talk about what you have influence over. Smart leaders don't BS people, they tell them the truth.”
Nelson Hospital in New Zealand gets an honourable mention in the book for cutting out the “jargon dioxide”.
The Friction Project book cover Photo: supplied
“What the hospital did was they did a little experiment, where letters that were sent to patients who had serious chronic conditions, they put the language just in more simple words.
“So, I did so instead of saying, MI for a myocardial infraction, which is a heart attack, they just had a heart attack or a heart condition.
“It turned out that people liked their doctors more, they were more likely to stick to the regime, and they understood what the heck their doctors were saying.”
Pointless meetings are the bane of modern corporate life, he says.
“One of the things that I've said before is that in a good organisation, in a healthy organisation, if you are in a meeting and you're wasting your time and you're wasting other people's time, not only should the leader maybe ask you to leave, you should be able to feel free to walk out.
“There are some organisations where this this actually would just be taboo. You're just supposed to sit there and take it.”
A design company called IDEO took a different approach, he says.
“The founder and CEO, David Kelly, I used to watch him walk out and encourage people to walk out when he felt as if it was just a waste of time.
“So, I've actually seen it done, but you got to make it safe, and you got to model the behaviour. I call this management by walking out of the room. I've seen it done very effectively.”
We can all, no matter what our role in an organisation, be friction fixers, he says.
“The thing that we argue is that all of us can be if you will, a grease person rather than a gunk person.”
