385. Defeating Workplace Friction w/ Huggy Rao

Welcome to episode 385 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Dr. Huggy Rao, Co author of the Friction Project. Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more Brain friend. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I'm joined by Dr. Huggy Rao. Huggy is a Fellow of the center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science, a Fellow of the Sociological Research association, and also a Fellow of the Academy of Management. His teaching specialties include leading organizational change, building customer focused cultures, and organizational design. He teaches courses on those topics to MBA and executive audiences. He has consulted with and conducted executive workshops for organizations such as Aon Corporation, British Petroleum, General Electric, Hearst Corporation, IBM, MassMutual, James Hardy Company, Safarth Shaw. Additionally, he also worked with non nonprofit organizations such as the American Cancer Society and governmental organizations such as the FBI and CIA. His research has been published in the Administrative Science Quarterly, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal. He wrote the book Market Rebels How Activists make or Break Radical Innovation and co authored Scaling Up Excellence which was a Wall Street Journal best seller and was included in the Best Business Books to read in 2014 by the Financial Times Inc. Magazine, Amazon, Forbes, Washington Post and the Library Journal. He co authored that book with Robert Sutton and it's the same with his newest book that they co wrote together.

The Friction Project, which we're going to.

Be discussing on today's episode. Really quickly, before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the.

Show notes for everything including my top.

Recommended past episodes and books like the.

Friction Project and more.

It's all within the app you're listening to and atthe brainy business.com 385 now let's jump right in. Dr. Huggy Rao, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.

Thank you Melina. Delight to be here.

Yes, I am so excited to have you. As we talked about a little bit in the pre chat, there's so many past guests that are referenced in the book and I love your work and we talk about friction and sludge around here all the time. So really excited about the book and to talk with you for everyone who doesn't yet know you. Can you share a little bit about yourself, your background, the work that you do?

Sure. I'm a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. My job as a professor is super simple. It's to multiply curiosity with generosity. I love doing research, I love teaching, and I'm very thankful for the life I've had and I have as of to this day. So that's the briefest introduction I could offer. I should also point out that the book that Bob and I wrote called the Friction Project, it lists us as the co authors, but of course there was an entire village who helped us.

Absolutely love what you said about multiplying curiosity through generosity. So as I said to you briefly when we were getting started here, so I end every episode of the Brainy Business podcast with be thoughtful. That's my signature line as well. A little nod to behavioral economics there in the. And every year I really focus on the concept of reciprocity. And like you said, with generosity, you know, everything's a long game. We give first and know that things will come back positively somewhere along the way. Can you share a little bit more about what you, what you mean by, you know, getting more curiosity because of increased generosity? Like, how does that work? How have you seen that?

Great question, Melina. This actually really reminds me, it takes me back really to the origins of our book, the Friction Project. And so if I may, Bob and I wrote a book called Scaling Up Excellence. This was about how do you make a company bigger and better. I teach a course called Startup to Scale up here at gsb. And when Bob and I wrote the book, we quickly realized that the top and senior echelons of the enterprise, they were really very drawn to the material and the evidence based techniques and so forth in the book. But as we went to middle and lower levels of management in a company, what we quickly discerned was and encountered was a lament. They said we like the message, but the lament is it's really hard to do anything. And let me give our listeners two bookends of response. In one of the executive education classes at Stanford, I asked an executive, hey, where do you work? And the guy looks at me and with a glint in his eye he says, I work in a frustration factory. Professor. I was floored. I'm thinking to myself, how does this guy summon the will to go to work and come back? I mean, it's just amazing. And then there's a young woman, you know, and who said this with it quiver in her voice and a tear in her eye. I can never forget her. She said, I go home exhausted after doing a lot of inconsequential work. And when I go home, she said, all I've got left are scraps of myself from me and my family. That was a punch to our solar plexuses. We just thought, man, this is wrong. And thus began our adventure into friction. And what we discovered was friction, of course, as it is in physics, is about obstacles. And we went in focusing on obstacles that enrage, infuriate, and simply overwhelm people. Given the time poverty that I just mentioned earlier, people just don't have enough time in the day. But the other thing we encountered was obstacles also had another role to play. It wasn't that they all needed to be eliminated, but they also need to be instituted. And why was that? To actually slow down decision making, make sure people considered a wider range of alternatives. So that was kind of where we came with this idea of saying, hey, if you take away obstacles that infuriate, which we labeled as bad friction, and put in obstacles that educate, which we describe as good friction, that's really the job of the leader. And in a sense, obstacles or friction in organizations is kind of like bacteria in our gut. You got bad bacteria, you got good bacteria, bad cholesterol, good cholesterol. Very similarly, you have bad obstacles and good obstacles. So hopefully we remove the bad obstacles so that the right things become easier to do, and we put in good obstacles so that the wrong things become kind of harder to do. And that was where we approached it. But our big kind of aha for us was to discover that it's not just time poverty that's the problem. Time poverty in organizations collides with a bias that is only being recognize now, and that is the addition bias. We have all kinds of biases, but a long term kind of human propensity is to add. And, you know, you could write evolutionary stories about how hoarding was productive and all kinds of things, but we constantly add when you have little time, and on top of that you add things. The net result is the collapse of willpower. You cannot self regulate yourself. And therein lies the depth of curiosity and generosity. Now, are you even curious? Do you ask questions and you kind of say, I don't have the time for that or generosity requires effort. Helping others requires effort. Are you ready for that? Can't deal with that today. And if you're ungenerous, you're also likely to ask fewer questions because you really don't care. About people. And so the lack of curiosity and the lack of generosity, they reinforce each other. I mean, you know, here's like a super simple experiment that was done at the Yale Divinity School. And you may recall that, you know, people go to divinity school to join the clergy to become pastors. They want to help people. So. And of course, they teach you the parable of the Good Samaritan. And in this experiment, they taught people about the parable of the Good Samaritan. But then what they did was they randomly assigned people into two conditions. One set of people had very little time to rehearse a speech on the parable of the Good Samaritan and go to an adjacent building after walking through a path. The others had much more time. Unbeknownst to the participants, the experimenters recruited confederates who lay on the path to this new venue where they had to give the speech. And these were people moaning and saying, I'm in pain and I'm oozing blood and I'm thirsty and this and that and the other. And what they found, unsurprisingly, was the people in the low time condition. They had like, I don't know, five or 10 minutes, if I recall, to prepare the speech and walk over to the building. A large preparation, ponderant fraction of them. They just walked by all these people asking for help to go to the building to give a speech on the parable of the Good Samaritan. I mean, can you imagine anything more absurd than that? I mean, that's the problem with the death. They're not even the least curious about what is happening to these people. Not even asking a question. Zilch. You just go, and I got to give a speech and that's it. And that's all I'm going to do. And you forget the whole point of the parable. And that is the sort of challenge that we feel kind of exists in organizations. And I think great leaders, I think, understand this, which is why we think of them as trustees of other people's ties. That's what they think. They prefer not to waste the time of anybody because it's precious. It scares.

Yeah, I love that. Thank you so much for sharing. And it really, that study is. Is one I haven't thought about in a while. And I'm glad that you brought it up for people, especially those who hadn't heard it yet. It is surprising, and yet I think we can all relate to those, you know.

Exactly, exactly.

So as we think about that, though, being able to reduce a lot of the friction around Is something that is a great place, I think for a lot of people to start when it comes to friction. And with that, one of the questions I get all the time and what I see a lot is people are only looking for the big rocks, right? Like if we can't make the biggest of all changes, there's this huge friction problem. And until we solve that, it's not worth any of these other little things. And I talk a lot about the single clicks, the little stuff that adds up. And you had a great example in the book from reducing a single click from a hospital. Can you share about that?

Absolutely. This was actually a wonderful initiative launched by Melinda Ashton, who's a physician in Hawaii. She was profoundly dissatisfied with the electronic patient record system being of course a great friction fixer. She quickly launched a campaign called Get Rid of stupid Stuff. What a lovely, lovely framing in the title. A 10 year old kid can understand this and that's why it's scaled. So they got 187 subtraction targets. Now you and I know that just because somebody nominates a subtraction target doesn't mean you eliminate it. You actually look at what the spillovers are because somebody's bad friction, maybe somebody else's good friction or can be. So you sort of need to be mindful of these things. And one of the ideas she out of the 187 or something like that, they implemented 80 plus and one of them was this click idea. They found that if they reduce one mouse click per nurse, you know, during the rounds, they have like four hospitals and lots of patients. They calculated just eliminating that one click would save them 1700 hours. Just think about that.

Right, right. Yeah. And it was 1700 hours per month across the four hospitals from. And when you're doing those diaper changes, which is relevant, I have a two year old, so. So you know, you think about. But and I think it was just because I was making notes on it, I think it saved 24 seconds per nurse per time to reduce that which may feel like it's just a few seconds, it's not worth it. But when you look at it in the grand scale, for those who have large companies like that, that one thing has such a positive impact and if you can find bunch of little things, you can start to then look for bigger things. You get some momentum going, right?

Completely. You know, the most important thing is the, you know, this idea of mowing, you know, get rid of stupid stuff. These are all ways of what we refer to in the book as mowing. The law. And the problem is mowing the lawn in a company is an orphan. Problem doesn't belong to anybody. Everybody is interested in adding things. And you have a tragedy of the commons. Nobody mows the lawn, nobody worries about it. So what's the consequence? The lawn is overrun with weeds and everybody's trying to plant a sapling. Like, what do you think is the probability of a sapling surviving with so many weeds? The weeds would out compete the plants, the saplings. And that's the big challenge. We actually even wrote a wonderful case study in a regulated industry, pharmaceuticals, about AstraZeneca, where a group of people saved the company 2 million hours. And it seems to me that that is kind of what we need to do. Save. Why did they save 2 million hours? They measured it in hours saved, not dollars saved. Why was that? They wanted to give the gift of time back to employees. When you give them 2 million hours, they can actually do what? They can serve 4 million more patients and run 400 more early phase trials. Now, if you didn't do that and all that you expected them to do was to serve 4 million more customers and run 400 early phase trials, you can imagine what that added cognitive burden would do. So I think we need to periodically, we need to mow the lawn with the frequency that we mow our regular lawns. And the beauty of it is you can actually introduce good friction to prevent bad friction. Hey, you want to add something, subtract something, or for every one thing you add, subtract three things. I mean, these are simple rules that you can actually institute. And what you're doing is you're putting a constraint on this tendency to add all of the time. The other day I was chatting with the customer service representative and I said, hi, young lady, how many screens do you have open on the computer? I asked her and she giggled and says, 20. I'm thinking, my God, 20 screens is like a lot of screens. And I said, how many apps do you have open? She said, 15 apps. Now, I don't know about you, Melina. When you look at a 13 inch laptop with 20 screens and 15 laps, what I see is clutter.

Yes, definitely a lot of extra clutter. Too much of it.

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah. Well, I would love to talk about adding some friction because like you've said, I think people just focus. It's like with habits, right? We say we only think about them come resolution time and the bad ones we want to get rid of. But they really do a lot of work for us. I talk about the good friction I've, I've taken to the term of thoughtful sludge is what we call it around here. So what are some examples? Where is there value in good friction?

Great point, great question. We really ought to think about adding obstacles to slow down decisions and to foster deliberation when we are making kind of like costly to reverse decisions, one way door decisions like acquiring a company, recruiting a C suite, executive reorganizing the company or what have you investing in new products or diversification. The second thing is you really ought to think of adding friction when constructive friction or good friction when we're doing creative work. Because speed can be the enemy of creativity very, very easily, as we all know. The third thing is when work is complex and the fourth is when it's very easy to do the wrong thing. So let me give you like a bunch of ideas, examples of each of these for our listeners. We refer to these as friction forensics. So take for example when you're making a costly to reverse decision, Andreas and Horowitz, the venture capital company here in the Bay Area, they look at thousands of pitches and probably invest in 15, 20 companies a year. They have a five person investment committee and they have an interesting norm. And the norm is if all five people agree that a pitch idea is great, they'll never invest in it. And their reasoning is, hey, five people agreed you guys didn't do enough due diligence. Or if the idea is so great somebody else has already done it and we don't know about it or is doing it and we don't know about it. And their thing is any pitch, venture capital, any entrepreneurial pitch is likely to be disruptive and by definition controversial. And so it ought to be reflected in the voting pattern which is why the investment votes 4 to 1 or 3 to 2. So this is kind of an example, if you will, of making a difficult to reverse decision because once you invest in a startup, I mean you can't like you can't and it's hard to kind of unwind as you can imagine. So that's like one example. Now when you think of like creative work, it's really interesting how much of the research on creativity, Milena, points to the importance of constraint. You know, our listeners may be fascinated by this study that shows that people in dark rooms are actually more creative than people in brightly lit rooms. So I mean, as an example, you put people in an imaginary prison cell, they're way more creative when they're in an open office or whatever. So these are all examples of putting constraints into the creative process. I'm actually reminded of a funny interview that HBR had with Seinfeld and they asked Seinfeld to describe the whole comedy process. And after Seinfeld described it, the HBR interviewer said, maybe you should get McKinsey to help you make this more efficient. And Seinfeld of course, says, who is McKinsey? And you know, the HBR author tells them who McKinsey is. And Seinfeld says, are they funny? And he says, no, they're not funny. And at that point, Seinfeld says something very profound. I thought he said, you know, the right way to do comedy is the hard way, not the easy. Now complex tasks, you know, like a surgical procedure. I mean, you know, when you think of it, or, you know, a journey into the unknown or what have you, those are all places too where you can actually add friction. I mean, one of the things you ought to do is before you pull the trigger on acquiring a company and post merger integration, you really need to add a lot of friction. Otherwise the psychological momentum is to finish the deal because everybody's praising you as a genius and then they want to collect fees from you and so on and so forth and preventing the wrong things. I was once working with a bank and this bank had increased the quota. You had to sell some eight products or whatever it is to the customer. So when they asked me, what do you think about it? And they said, you know, I said, you want to be careful about this. And I said, one way to kind of find out what can go wrong is let's actually go to the lowest performing branch and ask people if this target is feasible. Much to our surprise, they all said the target was entirely feasible. And I was like, how can you sell eight things to a customer? And one of the guys looks at me and says, professor, you don't need eight signatures to sell eight things. One signature is enough. I said, that's great, but who will you sell this? And he looks at me, smiles, and says, we'll sell it to people over 65 who are not particularly well informed. Can you imagine what's going to happen in that bank if people actually sell it to people over 65, saddle them with products that they don't need, and immediately the idea was to put in friction. You're dealing with a 65 plus customer. You got to get approval from the boss before you sell anything to that person. Hopefully these are all examples of where we can add friction in ways large and small. Healthcare is another great area and you Very rightly have been pointing out how seemingly small interventions, I prefer not to call them nudges because nudges seem to be kind of beneath the consciousness of people. It's not like they're beneath the consciousness of individual. They're kind of aware of them. But what they may not be aware of is the cumulative consequence of like everything that's done. And a great example was in the state of Massachusetts, physicians were over prescribing opioids. And your Blue Cross, well, you can't encroach on their autonomy. But Blue Cross came up with a simple idea. They told the physicians they covered, you're welcome to prescribe opioids, but when you do, you need to write a one page memo that on average took 10 minutes to complete. Adding the 10 minute toll gate lowered, according to this particular report, lowered opioid prescriptions by 20 million. In the state of messages, I mean, simple ideas like that.

Yeah, well, and I know you have another example. That was actually what I was thinking you were going to be talking about because it maybe came up a little bit later in the book, but you were talking about the, for the CT scans, I think on the abdomen and you know, similar, you had to go meet with someone and all this. That. Yeah. Reduces the likelihood someone's going to do that. You know, I talk about this, my background is in marketing originally, you know, and ran a marketing department. And people ask marketing department for everything all the time and it feels like it's super easy to get just a, just a quick flyer. Right. We just need a simple ad and it should take you 10 seconds to do it. Right. That's, that's how these things work. And it's amazing when you would then respond with, oh great, here's the proposal document that you need to fill out. And once you have this thing completed, it'll go into our evaluation and we can set it up for you. And yeah, you'd be surprised. You wouldn't. But many people might by how few requests. Actually someone cares. If they don't care enough to fill out the document, then they don't need the thing.

Right, exactly right. You know, exactly right. Exactly right. But these are all examples of very constructive friction. But you know, the bad friction can be astonishing. In the book and I'm sure you're very familiar with this given your careful read of the book, Melina. We talk about the state of Michigan. You know, some of our students, they've set up a firm to help govern governments, deal with this problem of bad friction. Civila and you know, they were asked by the welfare department in the state of Michigan to take a look at the welfare process. The ordeal for a welfare applicant in the state of Michigan is astonishing. 42 pages of a questionnaire, thousand questions. And the question that threw me for a loop is, please name the day on which your child was conceived. I'm like thinking, first of all, how many people would know that? How is this relevant to the decision you are planning to make? I just had no idea. It's just.

Right.

Just crazy.

Yeah. And I think, you know, it's like probably nine months before said baby arrived. And I put their date of birth in here, so there's a simple calculation, like, why do we need this extra question? So like you're saying, I, I. There are so many wonderful examples in the book for everyone as they can be going through and seeing. And you talk about. I really like the example from the dmv and I think that was something like you said, where Bob had gone to do something with a car. And we all think of the DMV as the place where, you know, you're gonna invest your whole life getting something done. There's a surprisingly much better example. Can you share about that?

Which one did you have in mind?

Oh, the one with the dmv. With the car and how.

Yeah, so, you know, you know, so when you think of the dmv, I mean, have you ever heard of anybody introducing themselves to you, Melina, and saying, hi, I'm so. And so I work for the dmv. I mean, nobody would say they work for the dmv. And that's the problem. You, you know, customers and the public, we kind of stigmatize the DMV because we think of it as a cesspool of inefficiency. What's striking in the California DMV is that a new leader, you know, in a sense was trying to really shake up an ossified bureaucracy and refound it and like, look at the ideas behind the dmv. How simple they were, but how profound. So when my wonderful co author and friend and comrade, Bob Sutton, when he goes to the DMV because he needed to do something for his mother's estate or whatever, he was standing in line, resigned to the fact that this was a day long India, he was surprised to find there's a person who kind of walks around with a little, you know, clipboard and, you know, he asks people, what are you here for? And, and he's like a trail guide. And he says, oh, you need to Go to that window, this window, and he'll go to people and say, what are you here for? And they say, we're here for a passport. And they say, hey, we don't do passports. You got to go to the Secretary of State, it's a federal thing and so on. So the trail guide is a great example of simplifying and reducing bad friction for customers. Now the other thing that the DMV has done, which is very smart, is why do we need to get people to come to the DMV office? Why don't we go closer to that? So today in the Bay Area you can actually do a lot of DMV transactions. If you go to the local Safeway, they have kiosks that are self operated. You can renew registration, get replacement stickers and do all of these things. And they take a couple of minutes. Very convenient, astonishingly convenient. And so what they're doing, and we're actually trying to write a case study on them by the way, so you know, it's all about reducing the friction for customers, in this case the bad friction that angers them, that kind of alienates them. And as you can see, people aren't particularly helpful to each other when waiting in the DMV line. You see everybody else as an encroacher and you get the idea. While we're on the subject, Melina, I wanted to draw your attention to how AI can actually help us deal with the problem of bad friction too. So I'm trying to write a case study about a networking company. And when a company has an extensive networking operation, you have like a billion plus log files. Now, can any human being comb through them first? It's like mind numbingly monotonous. So what are they doing? Using large language models to comb through the log files, identify things. And so they're kind of making sure that network engineers don't actually do this mind numbing work. It's actually taken away from them. And I was asking the head of the unit, I said, I know it improves network reliability, certainly what you're doing. How does it help the network engineers? And he looks at me, smiles at and says, professor Rao, our network engineers can sleep better. We've reduced their sleep debt. No longer do they need to be working at 1 o' clock or 2 o' clock and 3 o' clock until networks down.

Yeah, it's great to think about those ripples. And like you said, when you look at that generosity and how you're going to be helping people, it just really does come full circle. Of them being able to then give back to more and the like gift of some time and people know you care about them, then they want to give more on the work that they are now freed up to be able to do.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Melina. In fact, when you give people a gift, the a meta analysis of all the gift giving studies suggest that if I gave you a gift worth a dollar, chances are you'd reciprocate anywhere with a gift ranging from three to seven. So you can look at this uptick of generosity that each act of gift giving gives.

Yeah, wonderful. Well, in the toward the end of the book, you know, you have examples of some of the problems where we see different areas of friction, you know, showing up and different tactics that you want to be looking at. And I know there's the people with too much power. We talk about the curse of knowledge. There's a lot of interesting stuff in there. We. One that I really want to talk about and make sure we get to that I hope is something that you don't necessarily talk about a ton, but I absolutely loved it is about jargon, because, oh my goodness, jargon is such a problem. And I talk about reframing jargon all the time. And I love the example. And I won't steal the wonderful name that you have. I will let you reveal it. That came from, you know, students. But so good. Yeah.

Thank you so very much. Yes. The chapter or the phenomenon or the ramp to bad friction that we outline, we call it jargon monoxide. And just like carbon monoxide kills people, sadly, jargon monoxide kills curiosity. It kills generosity because it creates an impenetrable. And that's the real sort of problem jargon of any kind. You know, maybe one ought to give our viewers a super straightforward example. You know, imagine telling your employees, we strive for superior customer service. Is that really accessible? Does that actually lift the soul? Does that actually. Does it make clear to the person, hey, that's what I need to do now compare superior customer service with telling your employees, hey, our purpose is to put a smile on the customer's face. I can visualize it. I can do time travel. And the actions I can take to do that become clearer to me. And therefore I can be much more autonomous. And that's why we actually talk about simplifying things, making things super, super clear. Sometimes you need words, at other times you need pictures. And if it's okay with you, I'm going to share one lovely story which is not in the book. Oh, yes. So I teach in Our Stanford executive program. This is for people who become CEOs and, you know, I teach a five day course on scaling and so on. So, you know, some years ago, one of the participants was a rear admiral from the Swedish Navy. He was going to be the CEO of a submarine company called Koken in Sweden, which was part of a large business group. And this submarine company was in the red for about 15 years or something like that. And this guy was going to be appointed as the new sea. And so he asked me, he said, we chatted as to what he should do. And he's a clever guy, came up with a bunch of great ideas. Let me fast forward. So the group CEO asked our rear admiral, where would you like to be introduced as the new CEO of Kokum? corporate headquarters in Stockholm or the submarine plant near Karlskron, which is near Maln in Sweden? He said, the submarine yard. So duly there in the submarine yard and there's a podium, group chairman, outgoing CEO, who's a big EBITDA fan, finance and all that. And a new chair for our rear admiral. And that chair was unoccupied. And by then, of course, the workers were whispering amongst themselves and saying, looks like the new guy has already fled. He's not even showing up for his own kind of inauguration. And then the group chairman finally introduces him, and the workers are kind of astonished that he was sitting amidst them with a hard hat and he stood up and they all looked at him in surprise and at each other in surprise, because no CEO had ever done that before, sat with them like that. Now look at what he did. Just by that gesture alone, he was saying, I'm one of you. And by doing that, they opened their ears to his message. Everybody thinks of persuasion, aiming the message, but nobody thinks of persuasion, as Bob Cialdini would say, opening your ears. So he got them to open the ears. And I asked him, what did you do? And he laughed at me. And he said, professor, I just had one slide. I said, were these your new goals for the company? He said, no. Was this your new vision for the company he's in now? He said, I just put one slide. And that slide contained a picture of a submarine and a young Swedish naval captain leaning against the conning tower. So he puts this slide up. And he asked the workers, any of you recognize the submarine? They say, yeah, of course. We made that 15 years ago. It was a phenomenon. On and on they went. He nodded and he said, any of you know who this naval captain is? He said, no clue who this Bloke is. And he says, that was me 15 years ago when I was a captain in the Swedish navy. I commanded the sub you made. I was proud of it. I knew my men were safe and we could undertake any mission that was actually given to us. And then Melina, he looks at all these workers in the submarine yard and says, can you help me build a boat like that again? And sits down. What do you think was the effect on the submarine workers?

Just. Yeah, amazing.

Yeah, Isn't that amazing? He'd ask them for help instead of going there and saying, you piece of loss making bs and you know, whatever, whatever, whatever. He just took them from a zone of resignation to a zone of pride in a matter of two minutes. So was there any jargon here?

No.

And this is the problem with companies. The jargon companies use foster cynicism even when they try to simplify. As you know, Melina, the larger the enterprise, the greater the probability. A transformation initiative in large companies, companies is named after a sleek feline animal. You can't do anything. And you say, we got a Project Leopard. And people are thinking like, what are you talking about? Project Panther, you know, Project Tiger. And the best of all, slow moving, lethargic companies says, we got this project called Project Gazelle. And you know, people double up with laughter. You see the absurdity of that. So, you know, you need to be mindful of both sides.

Oh, yes.

No, that's funny.

Yeah.

And I think people just don't even the things like where that, you know, striving for superior customer service. Right, exactly. Everyone says that. I feel like it's such a common thing and like I said, taking. And the problem with something like that is people think that everyone is thinking about it in the same way and that it means the same thing to everyone. It's like trust. Right? And so I talk about trust in, in my book, what your employees need and can't tell you and how, like, if I think of trust, if we look at it in a, you know, taking it to fabric, right? Where you would say, trust is like a wetsuit. I can get in the water, I'm going to be safe, I'm protected. Trust is like fleece, I'm comfort. Right. Trust is like lace, because you can, you know, it's. If one thing pulls, the whole thing's going to come apart. Trust is like mesh because you can see through it. But if I'm talking mesh to wetsuit people, it doesn't mean anything, right? And something like superior customer service.

Superior to what?

Like to Who? Based on what? Whose standard? And if no one's asking the question, then what are we even doing? Which is the whole point completely.

I think you've really highlighted it. If I can be mischievous for a moment, Melina, the one thing that actually makes sure everybody is on the same page to the extent possible, ironically, is profanity. I wrote a case study about a company called Atlassian. And as you know, salespeople can cross sell to customers. And when you're selling a lot of products to customers, in order to collect your incentive, you can sell things to the customer that the customer may not need because you need to collect your incentive. And when I asked Scott, one of the CO CEOs, how do you deal with this? He says, well, you know, we have one very important value which we kind of make sure everybody understands. I said, what's the value? And he was in class and he said, well, we're Australian and so it entails a profanity. I said, I'm all ears. And he said, what we tell all of our employees is don't f the customer. Of course he used the full word. And when I told him, I said, why do you need to use such dirty language in your company? And he said something that really made me chuckle. He said, professor, it means the same thing in Sydney, San Francisco, Shanghai. I mean, like nobody is confused when you tell people, don't f the customer. But if you tell people, please be customer centric, you need 25 slides and you've lost them after slide two. You get the idea.

Yeah. Oh, such a great point. I love that. And yeah, super, super great. And as we know, there are so many amazing examples throughout the book. And what I really love about this book is a lot of people talk about friction or sludge. And like I said, we've had it on the show.

So great.

And you have some frameworks, some questions to ask. There's the help pyramid and the different levels of things. It really just takes this to a level of applicability that I think will be really helpful for people to be able to really go do something with what's there.

You know, I'm so glad you mentioned that. The first thing we wanted to do was by offering Rich, you know, we wanted to make sure the examples bring alive the lived experience of people encountering friction. Otherwise, you know, it just becomes kind of alien and kind of out there. And you're absolutely right. We wanted to help people and you know, the way we sort of think about the help, also the health pyramid that you allude to is you got to kind of engage in like as a friction fixer. Sometimes you have to play therapist. At other times you have to redesign the organization. And because we emphasize the design of an organization, we also make sure or try to ensure that we don't psychologize the consequences of friction because it's easy to do that, right? Oh my God, your mental health is bad. You know, you need to meditate more. Tradition bias, you need to do this more. You get the idea. And we can assume the problem is actually with the individual when it's the organization generating all of it. So what is it we can do? And so the help pyramid that you allude to, so you can actually start by simply reframing things or playing trail guide like they had at the dmv. Or you can shield people from friction. That's another thing that you can do as the leader of a team, a department, a division or even a company. And then you do neighborhood design and then you do organizational design. But often it's how you frame things that matter. So take me. I have this challenge. I have very smart students taking my MBA classes at Stanford. If I give them a 25 page case study and ask them to do like an optimization problem, they kind of groan and say, do we really need to do this? Why do I need to jump through these hoops when I know all of this just for you to give me a grade? So what do I do? We need exams. But as good friction, it's not working. You got to think of another way. So what have I been doing now for the past 15, 20 years? Every year my final exam is I get an alum of the course to come in and say, talk about your three biggest challenges. So they come and talk about their three biggest challenges as they're scaling the firm. And I tell the students, your job is to help this person. 200 words for the first challenge, 300 for the next, 600 for the third. That's it. You write any more than that, we won't read it. Help the person. It's incredible. They spend the entire weekend. The problem is real. It's an alum of the gsb. Somebody they want to be, somebody they want to aspire. And it's wonderful. And I don't need to do much. I just get out of the way.

I love that.

Such a great example and showing the value of brevity and well edited text which I know you have a story in a book where that wasn't necessarily always the case with some stuff at Stanford and we've seen it. The long winded email that is a book for no good reason, right?

Oh, my God. You know, my colleague, I was stunned. You know, we opened the book, as you know, with this invitation from our vice provost to help us with the new school of sustainability. 1250 plus email, 70 to 100 word attachment and then a request to donate two Saturday. Bob is such a wonderful writer and a compulsive editor. It was unbelievable. In four minutes he was able to shorten it to one third the length. You know, and I'm like, Bob, why are you? But, you know, he can't resist the. He was outraged, as was I.

Well, I think he and I would be kindred spirits as well. I'm definitely good at doing some editing. I really like, can shrink things down sometimes. But anyway, well, I could keep talking to you for a very long time. And in respect for your time and for our listeners, we'll go ahead and we'll cut it here. And I want to say, Huggy, thank you so, so much for joining me on the show. For everyone who wants to learn more, to get in contact, maybe someone that has a great case study idea for you or something, you know, what is their best path to connecting and learning more.

Wonderful. Thank you so very much. Melina. What I'd request readers to do, of course, is, you know, go to the website called huggyrao.com or bobsutton.net shoot us a question because we want to learn from you. And our book, of course, is the Friction Project, How Smart Leaders make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder. And it's available on Amazon and a bunch of online book selling sites. So read it, enjoy it, and most of all, make sure you're being more choiceful that you think about how to be a friction fixer yourself. That is really our plea because what would make both Bob and I very happy is it would be wonderful if we make the world of work less of a grind.

Definitely. Well, we will of course have links for all that in the show notes, including for everyone to get their copies of the Friction Project and maybe, you know, five or 10 to share with their teams and everything so they can be reducing friction, finding that one little thing they'll do right away to make the world a little bit less of a grind. So thank you again, Huggy. It was such a delight to chat with you today.

Thank you so very much.

Thank you again to Dr. Huggy Rao for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing? In today's conversation for me, I love talking and thinking about friction, and I really love how Huggy has brought it back to generosity and curiosity. Two of my favorite things. While it might seem strange on the surface when you think about it, this makes so much sense. Taking the time to be curious about a user, whether they're internal members of your team or potential customers, is an act of generosity. By not being selfish and only thinking about yourself or looking from your own perspective when you ask questions with that person in mind, like do we really need to ask this question now or ever? Or is this just unnecessary friction? Or can we ask this later? Or how could we make this easier on the user? Are all looking for ways to be generous to someone else and we know that generosity and reciprocity leads to people wanting to give back, which can often result in them doing the thing you want them to do in the first place.

First place, like fill out the form, buy your product, whatever, so it really comes full circle. I love that and all the ways.

That friction can both be removed or added to make us and our businesses stronger as we close out the show. Don't forget about those show notes, which include links to my top related past episodes and books like the Friction Project.

Ways to get in contact with Huggy, a timestamp summary of the episode and we're more it's all waiting for you.

In the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 385 and thank you again to Dr. Huggy Rao for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.