How to Reduce the Friction that Hurts You — and Harness the Friction that Helps

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Welcome to the hbr ideacast from harvard business review. I'm alison beard. When you hear the word friction, where does your mind go? Do you think of it as a force that leads to something positive and useful, like how rubbing two sticks together can create a fire? Or do you think of it as an enemy of progress, a slowdown mechanism? Bureaucracy conflict? Our guests today have spent the past seven years investigating friction in organizations. The good kind that can lead to wiser decisions and more innovative solutions, and the bad kind that leads to inefficiency and waste, exasperated employees and unhappy customers and clients. They say that all of us, no matter our level, need to better recognize when friction is helping or hindering our success and learn how to add or subtract it as necessary. Bob Sutton is a professor emeritus at Stanford University and co founder of its center for Work, Technology and Organization and its D School and Technology Ventures program. Huggy Rao is Professor of Organizational behavior, Human Resources and Sociology at Stanford and the director of its Telus Leadership Forum. They co authored the book the Friction How Smart Leaders make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder, as well as the HBR article Rid you'd organization of obstacles that infuriate Everyone. Bob Huggie, thanks so much for joining me.

It's great to talk.

A delight to be here. Thank you so much, Alison.

So what got you two thinking together about this idea of friction as both a force for good and a force for evil?

Bob and I wrote an earlier book called Scaling Up Excellence, and as we were sharing, we found that the top and senior echelons of an enterprise, they were very drawn to the mess. But as we went lower down in the organization, employees lamented about how hard it was to get anything done in the first place. Let me give you two bookends of responses. We asked one executive a very simple question, where do you work? And the guy looks at us with a glint in his eye and he says, I work in a frustration factory. That startled us. The other bookend was a young woman. I can never forget her, and she said, I spend most of my day pouring myself into doing BS inconsequential work in my company, and when I go home, all I've got left are the scraps of myself. For my family. That was like a hit in the solar plexus for both of us.

We knew people and did even some Consulting for Facebook, Salesforce and Google. And their dream was to build a giant company. Well, they've built giant companies, but man, is it hard to get things done in those places. That's just one of the problems. When organizations get large and complex, it's harder to get things done. A lot of our work moved from focusing on how to scale organizations to how to deal with size and complexities.

As we went through the journey, we realized friction is kind of like, you know, two sided. Just as you've got bad bacteria in our microbiome, we have bad friction that infuriates people. But just as we have good bacteria in our biome, good friction actually helps people. What bad friction does is it makes it very hard for employees to choose a more curious and generous version of themselves. You're just overwhelmed by all of this. It's super hard for you to be curious, to ask questions, to search. You just give up. And generosity helping other people, forget it. You don't have any time at all. On the other side, our sense was good friction helps people to avoid choosing a myopic and overconfident version of themselves. That's why what good friction does is those obstacles, they lead to deliberation thought and as you said, they help you make wiser decisions.

Okay, so you're talking about a lot of negative friction. Examples. What is the most common type of unnecessary friction in the workplace or business that you found in your research?

The most common type, to me, it's essentially when organizations just add too much stuff on top of people. We call this addition sickness. Just to focus on One thing that's specifically driving me nuts lately is whether it's Stanford University or Google Alphabet, one of the reasons that they have friction problems, too many procedures, too much slowness, too much confusion, handoff problems, is that people at these organizations and thousands of others is the more people report to them, the more their bosses get paid. So the fiefdoms spread and that ends up being people who add complexity to justify their existence. And I'm not even necessarily blaming them. It's just a human tendency that organizations and people have to resist.

You know, if we think of obstacles that infuriate people, they range on the one hand from an endless series of back to back meetings. It could be long chains of approval, it could be delay in decision making. We opened the book, of course, with a classic email sent to all of us at Stanford by our own vice provost. How many words did it have?

1266 words. 7400 word attachment requesting all 2000 faculty members to devote a Saturday to brainstorming about a new sustainability school. And I immediately started editing it and I got it down to 400 words in about three minutes because it was mostly her anticipating criticisms or repeating criticisms she's already had before. And if you just multiply, if it had been 400 words rather than 1266 words, just think about how much time she would have saved the people in her institution.

So we're talking a lot about friction within the organization for employees. What about friction for customers, for outside stakeholders?

Well, we devoted a lot of time to thinking about friction for customers. And some organizations, they weaponize friction to make it difficult for customers to get help, to get services that they've already paid for. And this happens in much of our healthcare system. And that's one of the things that also got us frustrated. Perhaps the most interesting example of customers, it's really residents, is that in the state of Michigan there's a benefits form that two and a half million Michiganders complete every year. And originally it was a thousand questions long. One of the questions was, when was your child conceived? Would be an example. And there was this guy, we actually met him at Stanford. He took my class, he's like, he was head of the United Way of Southeastern Michigan. And the first time I meet this guy, Michael Brennan, he gets on his hands and knees and rolls out this 42 page form and says this drives me crazy, I'm going to fix it. And he started a nonprofit called Sevilla. And to sort of fast forward, he worked with government officials, did a bunch of prototyping, got support, and now there's a new form in the state of Michigan that's filled out again by 2.5 million people a year who want things like health insurance and food and stuff like that. And it's 80% shorter. And to me that's an example. I wish that many for profit organizations would learn from civila. And also we're on the verge of starting a case study, I believe with the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which is doing a fabulous job of reducing friction for the largest state in the United States and for the Sanford D. School or design school, that's what a part of our religion. What is your experience like through the systems and how can we fix the handoffs and sources of confusion?

There is this feeling that oh, of course the public sector is going to be slow and full of bureaucracy, but businesses, the private sector, they're going to do it well. But your research has shown that is definitely not the case. I think you're beginning to get at this, but I'm interested to know. A lot of us might accept friction as just a part of what the corporate world is. But what are some of the sort of real world consequences or costs of this inefficiency for businesses?

So the first thing to keep in mind is, as you rightly implied in your question, employees accept a threshold level of friction. Things are going to be hard in a big company, I expect that. But once you go beyond the threshold, that is when people begin to get angry, people begin to get infuriated. One real world consequence of this is because of friction, you actually forget about the customer. A classic example was Office Depot. Imagine you're the CEO of Office Depot. You get two reports. One report is from your mystery shoppers who go to these stores incognito and they tell you your stores are great, they're brightly lit, people wear uniforms, etc. Etc. You get another report and you say, hey, our sales are going down month to month in the stores. So the CEO of Office Depot says, I better go find out. So he drives over, parks his car before an Office Depot, sees customers go in at 9 in the morning and he's happy. Ah, there's inbound traffic. But he's shocked when they come out five minutes later with no shopping bags. They didn't buy anything. He says, how's that possible? He goes inside and he sees the problem. Right at the time the customers come in. What are the employees doing? They're stacking product on the shelves so they don't have their face to the customer. How long is a customer going to wait? A couple of minutes. Why were they doing it in the first place? Because the warehousing people thought, hey, we can actually ship at 7:30 in the morning, you offload at 9. But nobody ever thought of organizing all of this from the customer's point of view.

Hmm.

One of the things that we suggest is that people in organizations do essentially what we call a good riddance review. Cass Sunstein calls this a sludge audit. Basically a bunch of ways to figure out the burdens people face. One of the places to start we're all familiar with is email. There's great data from Adobe actually that the average American spends about five hours a day on email. So calculating email burdens, one thing, another one, and one of my favorite, favorite example is by one of your frequent authors, Rob Cross, who's famous for setting collaboration overload. And Rob does social network analysis. And he describes, he worked with this one guy, a senior executive who had 5,000 people reporting to him. He had, I think, 19 direct reports. And of course, this guy was just overloaded and working like crazy. Many subordinates indicated that getting a meeting with Scott or getting Scott's permission was one of the primary logjams or obstacles to them accomplishing their work. Yeah, and there's lots of other ways in which bureaucratic frustrations when things are hard to do in an organization that's clearly linked to disengagement.

Yeah.

And burnout too.

Yeah. So there are. Those are a lot of, you know, great points for how a leader might start to recognize friction points that are maybe in their blind spots. If you're an average worker and you see this going on but your managers aren't recognizing it, how do you point out bad friction in a way that will make those higher ups listen?

It depends how much psychological safety and job security you have.

No, absolutely, Bob. If you're an average Joe, the simplest way in which you can get bosses to pay attention to bad friction is bring the customer in. And once you showcase customer consequences, people immediately pay attention. But what leaders can do, leaders need to really see themselves as trustees of other people's talent. One other way that companies can do this, Alison, is to reimagine onboarding. In many ways, what companies do is they view it as an indoctrination exercise to get people to conform to the prevalent culture. But you can actually get your new recruits and say, go throughout the organization and tell us wherever you find stupid stuff. And you can quickly get a whole inventory of things that you can actually address. Because they can't think of a reason as to why a procedure ought to exist or why it exists. That's actually a bunch of nice subtraction targets for you.

Yeah.

So you're giving them permission to suggest targets. I would say that identifying pain points is easier than actually fixing those pain points. So how do you move from seeing the problem to solving it?

Yes, getting rid of friction. Bad friction we're talking about is harder than just complaining about it. From our perspective, it actually entails sort of slowing down in thinking. And we describe it as that. This is straight out of the Danny Kahneman the Nobel Prize winners playbook. When you're in a cognitive minefield, sometimes the best thing is just stand there and figure out what's going on to fix things. And there's some really cool research related to this that came out. It's been done in Germany. It's been done with these brain scan things, frmi. And essentially what they found was that people who have higher IQs, tend to solve simple problems more quickly, but they also tend to solve more complex problems more slowly because they slow down to actually figure out how all the pieces fit together. Another example of this, which we learned in the Harvard Business Review. The editor of the Harvard Business Review interviewed Jerry Seinfeld.

It was actually my colleague Dan McGinn.

Oh, oh, it's so beautiful. And it sort of starts out, and I'm paraphrasing, and Dan says, so you and Larry David had this really complicated, friction filled, burdensome process in the writer's room. Could you have gotten McKinsey to make the process more efficient? And Jerry seinfeld says, who's McKinsey? Which is actually quite beautiful. And then he asks, and after learning, he says, are they funny? Dan said, no. And then sort of the punchline was, the hard way is the right way. There's no way to make comedy efficient and really great work. And when Jerry does a comedy show, develops a comedy show, for every hundred jokes he tries, he keeps two or three. Just the process of creativity and innovation. You've got to sort of slow down and do the prototyping and be patient and fix things.

So let's shift to good friction. In what situations in business, in workplaces, do you really want to see it?

So we, in our book, we have a section called Friction Forensics. And there we give like a list of criteria, if you will. The first thing is, what kind of decision are you making? Is it a one way door decision or a two way door decision? In other words, what's the cost of reversing the decision? Is it very high or is it very low? If the cost of reversing a decision is very high, for example, an acquisition or hiring a C suite executive, you really need a lot of good friction in the process. If the cost of reversing a decision or the cost of mistake is pretty low, focus on getting rid of bad friction. Similarly, are you doing creative work or are you doing routine work? Creative work. You need to inject friction. Routine work, take out bad friction. The third thing is, is the work complex? If it's really complex, slow down, put good friction in. Maybe I should give you one quick example of how simple good friction can be.

Sure.

The Oakland police department in 2018 or 19, Bob, I think, was they were stopping 31,000 people. Most of them, tragically, were African Americans and Latinos who were stopped for no reason other than essentially a stereotype the cops might have had. So the question was, how do we kind of prevent these stops? Now you can think of anti bias training. It has an effect, but it really doesn't last for a very long time. Our wonderful colleague Jennifer Eberhard came out with a simple but powerful idea, which was to add friction to the cop's job. It turns out in the Oakland Police Department, when you stop a vehicle, you gotta fill a form with three yes, no questions. She added a fourth one. Do you have prior intelligence connecting the vehicle to a prior crime? If yes, stop the vehicle. If no, let it go. Adding that question alone led to a 31% drop in the number of traffic stops. Fewer African Americans and Latinos were stopped. The traffic stops, the more secure people felt too.

And probably our favorite example is Laszlo Bak, who was head of people operations, head of HR for years. So he did something when he first got to Google as basically head of hr, head of people operations. There was an old tradition that went back to the early days with Larry and Sergey where they would do many, many rounds of interviews. 5, 10, 15. Laszlo reports as many as 25 rounds of interviews before making a hiring decision. And this might have made sense when they were hiring the first 200 people in the company they were going to build them with, but it was causing all sorts of problem because think of all the time it wasted for candidates for HR schedulers, for the employees who did the interviews. What would happen was very often in those days, Facebook was the darling. The best engineers would just give up and go to Facebook. So Laszlo put in a simple rule that if you as an employee are going to do more than four selection interviews, you have to get written permission from me, an executive vice president. And Laszlo reports that the speed bump, this injection of good friction, led to a dramatic drop in excessive interviews before a decision was made. And that's one of the things that we like to think about, friction is where can you put in good friction to stop bad friction?

And, you know, so those solutions, sort of adding one question, limiting it to four interviews, but still having four, not one, seem like they're finding this perfect balance of just enough friction, right? You know, you're not adding too much so that it becomes bad. It's good enough that you get better solutions and decisions, you know, but how do you navigate that tension? I think of a couple other examples that you shared. You know, one was sort of a pre meeting before a project where you're outlining roles and behaviors and norms. And I sort of read it and thought, ugh. It's like those meetings where you talk about doing the work before you do the work. And then I also think about all these companies now that sort of intensely document all of their processes, which I understand, like that's for the good of the organization, institutional knowledge, but it also feels like really slowing down progress. So how do you navigate that?

This is the whole line of work that huggies in that I'm in that you're in the kind of ideas that we come up with. You can't just take them out of the package and apply them to your job. For the most part, what the best leaders do, they understand the work in the organization they lead so that they know what to make hard and what to make easy. We can provide hints, we can provide some tools, but we can't say if you do this, you're going to make things better. There's sort of like no one size fits all out of the box solutions. But there are ways that you can think about problems to make things better.

One other thing, Alison, implicitly behind your question, when you, you were saying, oh my God, you gotta have a pre meeting before a meeting. And that's like burdensome. And you know, all of that is very valid. I think what that kind of gets us to think about is how can you design lightweight interventions, not heavyweight interventions. The larger the organization, the more complex it is, the more lightweight you need the intervention to be. A simple example was a study that we did with 82 new venture teams. We randomly assigned these four person startup teams into control and treatment condition. All 82 teams were told you had to build a product which would be evaluated by external judges. But we went to the 41 teams in the treatment condition and we said, hey, take a couple of minutes, team members. Think of a job title that showcases your best skill. And once you've thought about the job title, share it with your team members. And the titles people chose were Guru of cybersecurity, defender of the source code, Queen bee of customer service, on and on. It took them a couple of minutes to think of the title, couple of minutes to share the title. But what was amazing was teams where people chose these titles and where people actually shared the titles. It was the easiest way to activate felt accountability. Chose your title, you felt you owned it. And the moment you chose your title, you also felt you had to live up to it. And everybody knew who was good at what. Yeah, we think of leaders who are friction fixers. They need to think of themselves as having a help pyramid to think about.

You know, one executive, one CEO, she said to us, my job is part therapy and part organizational design. And I like that because if you think about what a leader's job is, there are certain things in life, burdens, hassles, maybe a demanding customer you can't get rid of or the company will go out of business, who's driving you crazy? And in that case, as a leader, your job is to just help people get through it. And then there's the longer term sort of design principles too, of changing the organization, redesigning jobs, changing incentive systems. And to us there's sort of a duality of friction fixers work.

Yeah.

And in our remaining time, I wanted to talk about the different roles that people at different levels can play in fixing friction. So it seems like you're saying the most senior leaders sort of need to think at a very high level about the hierarchy and job roles and organizational design processes and systems, but they also need to think about sort of just helping people on an individual level to grease the wheels, as it were. What about the role of the middle manager? You know, do you see adding and subtracting friction as a big part of that job?

In the cultures that we work with that are good at friction fixing, I would actually, to name some companies, I think that Amazon and Walmart are pretty good examples of this. People are aware of their cone of friction. They're aware of how their behavior makes things harder or easier. Something that happened to me happened at the California Department of Motor Vehicles. I got in line at 7:30 in the morning to do a kind of complicated transaction. There were 60 people in front of me. I assumed I would be there all day or at least half the day. And at 7:40 a very nice gentleman walked down the line, talked to each one of us. If we needed a form, he gave us a form. If somebody was trying to do something like get a passport, which you can't do at the DMV, he said, sorry, you can't do that here. At 8 o' clock exactly I was in there and I was out of there by 8:15. And I was just sort of amazed because it's probably like a frontline manager that's a frontline supervisor doing things within his cone of friction to make things easier on customers. And also by having us fill out the forms and stuff while we were in line, it reduced the burden on the people in the windows too. And we all know in our organizations we call them grease people and gunk people. There are people who, if we go to them, the answer is going to be no or they're going to make us suffer. Then there's some People who think that their job is to help us navigate through this system. And my advice is for most people, try to be a grease person rather than a gunk person.

Find the shortcuts too right if there's a way around those prints. Impressive, yes.

Without cheating though. Yeah, we don't want you to cheat.

The minor but key wrinkle I'd like to touch on briefly, Alison, is if you're a middle manager, if you're the average Joe, even the top manager, it's easy to kind of think of the task as where do I take bad friction out? Instead, what we find is it's much better to focus on what the consequences and the consequences. Giving employees the gift of time, that is the scarcest thing in companies. People just don't have time. And so if you give people the gift of time, the consequences can be extraordinary. Bob and I wrote a case study about AstraZeneca and it's a lovely example of how they launched a movement within the company to save the company 2 million hours. Now, 2 million hours is equivalent to 1148 FTEs or full time employees. But they weren't concerned about savings. They were thinking about giving the gift of time 2 million hours back to the company so you can serve 4 million customers, run 400 early trials and so on. Bob and I interviewed this amazing woman, Pushkala Subramanyam, who led the initiative. And by the way, after she finished the job, she resisted every effort to make this a special department. And in our podcast we were asking her, how low did this initiative of giving the gift of time reach? And she said, let me give you an example. Organizations today have a composite workforce. Full time workers, gig workers, subcontractors, we all know this. And she was saying when they were doing this exercise at AstraZeneca, one of the things everybody at the Astra HQ has to do is work starts at 8, so you go in at 7:45, you got to swipe your ID card, the gate goes up and you go in. And there was invariably a traffic jack. Most people showed up at 7:50, you had to wait. And by the time you got to your office, it might have been 8:20 or whatever. And they had launched a world Simplification day at Astra. And she said after launching it, the next day she goes to work, there's no traffic jam. She asks the security guard, who's a contractual employee, hey, what happened to the traffic jam and all that? And the guy looks at her and says, madam, you had the world simplification day where you want to give the gift of time to people. As a security guard, I thought I could give everybody half an hour every day. So you don't need to swipe your card, you don't need the gate. We figured out another way to check you in, so you've saved half an hour. Think of that.

So he just figured out a different way to do it.

Exactly.

Yeah.

That's beautiful.

Yeah. And I guess if you're saving all of that time by eliminating bad friction, you have more room for good friction, which is what we're after, right?

Yep.

Well, thank you both. Bob Huggy, it's been a pleasure talking to you about this.

Oh, that's really fun. Thanks so much, Alice. Great fun.

Thank you so much, Alison.

That's Stanford's Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao, authors of the book the Friction Project, as well as the HBR article Rid you'd Organization of obstacles that infuriate everyone. And we have more episodes and more podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at each bridge or search HBR in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Thanks to our team, Senior producer Mary Dew, Associate producer Hannah Bates, audio Product manager Ian Fox, and senior production specialist Rob Eckhart. And thanks for listening to the HBR Ideacast. We'll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I'm Alison Bernard.

Sam.