The Friction Project
Since we wrote Scaling Up Excellence in 2014, Bob Sutton and I have been deluged with stories about how organizations stymie and exasperate their executives, front-line employees, customers, and so many others.
The beleaguered people who we teach, participate in our research, and reach out to us often provide disturbing details. They explain how getting smart and necessary things done where they work requires convoluted, unnecessary, time-consuming, and soul-crushing gyrations—which get worse as organizations grow, age, and become more complex. This burden distracts them from more crucial matters. It undermines their performance and creativity. And it frustrates, discourages, and exhausts them.
These unsettling lessons prompted us to launch The Friction Project—which will be our main focus for at least the next two years. We are on a messy multi-pronged mission to understand the causes and cures for destructive organizational friction–and when it is wise to make things harder to do. The Project is supported, in part, by the Designing Organizational Change initiative, which we lead at Stanford.
To learn about The Friction Project, check out the project philosophy, our articles and cases, the Friction podcast, and the research tracks we are using to generate evidence and as the project unfolds.
THE FRICTION PROJECT IS GUIDED BY TWO BELIEFS.
First, we believe that our insights about friction are most useful when we consider both rational and emotional elements. That is why our project tagline is “Building organizations that make the right things easy to do and don’t drive people crazy.” Or, as I describe our conversations with people who struggle to cope with and remove destructive friction (and inject constructive friction) “it is half organizational design and half therapy.”
Second, we believe that the best approach is NOT to hide in our ivory tower for a few years, develop a pristine academic theory, and unveil our findings, model, and advice at the end of the project. Friction embraces numerous wicked and messy problems. Sure, scholars offer useful insights. But so do people in the real world who grapple with such challenges every day.
As a result, The Friction Project is a journey where, along the way, we are talking with, teaching, studying, and trying to help people in all kinds of roles and organizations. We keep showing them our unfinished ideas about friction –our hunches, explanations, and solutions—to all kinds of smart people. That way, our perspective keeps evolving—and, we hope, getting better– in response to their suggestions, insights, and critiques.
Bob Sutton and I write articles and case studies (often with colleagues) to learn about friction, develop our point of view, and share our emerging ideas so that others can think about, use, and critique them.
‘I work in a frustration factory’: how to make workplaces run better
Financial Times
WHY BOSSES SHOULD TELL EMPLOYEES TO SLOW DOWN MORE OFTEN
The Wall Street Journal
Every company wants to do things as quickly as possible. But there are times when you ought to hit the brakes.
RID YOUR ORGANIZATION OF OBSTACLES THAT INFURIATE EVERYONE
Harvard Business Review
In this article [we] focus on addition sickness: the unnecessary rules, procedures, communications, tools, and roles that seem to inexorably grow, stifling productivity and creativity. They show why companies are prone to this affliction and describe how leaders can treat it.
RULE NAZIS AND OTHER PETTY TYRANTS: THE TOXIC BLEND OF INFLUENCE WITHOUT PRESTIGE
This Linkedin piece draws on ideas from the Friction Podcast and The Asshole Survival Guide about people in organizations who take sick satisfaction from wielding power or interpreting rules and policies in narrow ways that undermine progress and drive their colleagues and customers crazy.
BETTER SERVICE, FASTER: A DESIGN THINKING CASE STUDY
This Harvard Business Review piece that Bob Sutton wrote with David Hoyt describes an intervention that a pair of Stanford students in one of my classes made in a social service agency to serve clients in ways that were less frustrating, more dignified, and more efficient.
WHY YOUR JOB IS BECOMING IMPOSSIBLE TO DO: THE TRAGEDY OF WELL-INTENTIONED ORGANIZATIONAL OVERLOAD
This LinkedIn piece considers why, in many organizations, there are many intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for people to add organizational friction and few incentives for removing friction.
DROPBOX’S SECRET FOR SAVING TIME IN MEETINGS
This INC piece by Rebecca Hinds and me describes a radical strategy used by Dropbox to pressure employees to think about the meetings they call and attended, to schedule fewer meetings and shorter meetings, to have meetings with smaller group, and to walk out of meetings that aren’t a good use of their time.
TO SCALE UP FAST, SOMETIMES YOU’VE GOT TO SLOW DOWN: WAZE SHOWS THE WAY
This LinkedIn piece describes how Waze CEO Noam Bardin—despite pressures from investors to go in a hiring spree and to accelerate product development, instead instituted a hiring freeze and paused product development for six weeks so his people could figure out why most people who downloaded this navigation software soon stopped using it. This is an interesting example of using temporary and constructive friction that forces people to stop and think about what is going wrong and how they can fix it.
HOW DO YOU END A MEETING? NETFLIX’S HR REBEL ASKS TWO SIMPLE QUESTIONS
Bob Sutton's LinkedIn piece is based on an interview with Patty McCord, a key architect of the Netflix culture. McCord explains the two questions she asks at the end of every meeting to help spare people from unnecessary confusion and frustration.
We have completed and are working on case studies that provide insights into what friction looks like and feels like, when it is good and bad, and the mans that leaders and their teams use to remove and inject friction into organizations. Most of these cases are produced with support from skilled case writers at the Stanford Business School including at Julie Makinen, Davina Drabkin, and David Hoyt. Four cases are especially pertinent.
In 2010, Bob and I worked with Professor Charles O’Reilly and case writer David Hoyt on the case JetBlue Airways, A New Beginning, which describes how the fast-growing airline failed to develop adequate systems and practices for dealing with storms and other system disruptions. These technical, organizational, and cultural flaws ultimately led a fiasco on February 14th, 2007 at Kennedy Airport in New York where thousands of passengers were stranded on planes that were “glued” to the tarmac by the ice and to over 1000 flight cancelations. in a six -day period. The case describes how, after other efforts to repair the airline’s systems failed, executive and pilot Bonnie Simi led a change effort that recruited over 200 employees to identify and fix hundreds of flawed practices, communications problems, and bottlenecks.
In 2016, Bob, Professor Sarah Soule, and I worked with Davina Drabkin to write a case on the 100,000 Homes Campaign. A national effort between 2010 and 2014 that found homes for over 100,000 homeless Americans. This Linkedin article provides key lessons that we learned and a link to the complete case. For example, one friction-fighting move that campaign manager Becky Margiotta used was to avoid wasting time with communities where the leaders were “Hollow Eastern Bunnies.” These enthusiastic people loved having long conversations and coaching sessions with Margiotta’s team—but who never actually did anything to find homes for homeless people.
In 2017, Julie Makinen and I documented how AstraZeneca scaled simplification. This case traces how the small team that ran the Simplification Center of Excellence worked with scientists, manufacturing managers, and sales rep to reduce friction in the company.
Bob and I are currently working with Julie Makinen a case on the short-term advantages and long-term problems created by decentralization and silos in a fast-growing large technology company–and the solutions that executives and managers are using to reduce the friction, overload, frustration, and fatigue that emerged as the company became larger and more complex.
