And what leaders can do to fix it.
For the past several years, Robert Sutton, Ph.D., has fixated on friction. Not friction as it’s defined in your high school physics book, or the interpersonal strain that may exist between you and your mother-in-law — but rather its corporate meaning, which he defines in his new book as the “forces that make it harder, slower, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done in organizations.”
You’ve almost certainly encountered friction in your job. Maybe it’s that meeting that could have been an email, or the hours you’ve wasted filling out expense reports. Friction has probably made your 9-to-5 more stressful and it’s probably weighing your company down, too, Dr. Sutton, an organizational psychologist and Stanford professor tells us.
In The Friction Project, he and co-author Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao explore the biases that create more friction within even top-tier corporations, how that friction’s slowly grinding down workers, and what can be done to eliminate it.
Katie Couric Media: Why did you and your co-author decide to focus on friction?
Dr. Sutton: There’s two reasons. The more rational one is that for about the last 15 years, Huggy and I have been studying growth in Silicon Valley. But a funny thing happened along the way. We noticed that as all these organizations grew — and we’re talking Google, Facebook, Salesforce, the Silicon Valley giants — and became more complex, things became harder and harder to get done.
The other reason we pursued this is more personal: We saw the same things happening at Stanford, our employer. As it became larger and more complex, it became harder to get things done there, too, and some of that drove us absolutely crazy. I’ll give you an example: I chaired a committee to get a professor promoted to tenure. I had to get 27 letters of recommendation for her, we prepared a 113-page document and edited it over and over again. It was a year of work, and afterward one of my colleagues came up to me and said it was one of the easiest tenure cases they’d ever seen.
What are some of the most common forms of friction that appear in organizations?
There’s good friction and there’s bad friction. Let’s start with the bad and look at something like expense reports. It should be simple to get your expenses reimbursed. There needs to be some friction or people would expense everything, but that process should be a lot more simple than it is. Ultimately, it should be easy to make a decision where there’s little consequence.
Now let’s look at good friction. One famous case where there wasn’t near enough good friction is Google Glass. This product was a cool idea — a pair of glasses that allowed users to see the internet in the corner of the lens. The problem was that Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, became so excited about it that he released it before it was ready to go out into the world. And it turned out to be an absolutely terrible product. To me, that’s a case where there needed to be more friction, and they needed more patience. It’s kind of like the gas and brakes: You have to know when to hit the brakes and slow down and maybe even stop, and when to put the pedal to the metal.
What are some of the most common mistakes you see leaders make when it comes to applying too much or too little friction?
When you become a leader, there’s often the problem that you become oblivious to what’s around you. It kind of comes with the position. In the book, we talk about how CEOs often have this privilege of an absence of inconvenience, which their customers and employees don’t have. If you look at General Motors, for example, a senior executive there will get a new car every six months. But they don’t negotiate the price, they don’t have to trade it in, they don’t even need to take care of the maintenance. So they become blind to all the little annoyances that the average customer has to deal with, which allows these issues to persist.
Another thing we see are executives who fall in love with every initiative that’s put in front of them. So they’ll keep adding things and won’t realize how long it really takes and the toll it has on their workers. I remember I was doing a talk on scaling at an insurance company in Wisconsin and I talked to this poor middle manager, who was just drowning trying to stay on top of all the training they had to do for all of these different initiatives. They had so much to juggle, they couldn’t actually focus on doing their job. So this idea of friction blindness, of not being aware of what you’re doing to folks, is a big problem.
With all this friction, do you think employees’ to-do lists are becoming unmanageable?
Yes, in many cases, they’re becoming unmanageable. One of the issues simply goes back to how we’re wired. There’s a series of studies by Gabrielle Adams at the University of Virginia that show that when we’re faced with a problem, our natural way of approaching it is to add stuff — to think of new programs or build new products to tackle it. We don’t naturally think of solving something by subtraction.
The other issue is that organizations tend to reward people who add stuff: the people who start initiatives, who buy more software. This creates a system where people are getting more and more work heaped on them.
Do you think there’s more friction baked into companies now than there used to be?
I think it’s getting worse in some ways. If you look back at the last five years, there’s been so much upheaval with the pandemic and remote work and with social-justice movements that companies have been forced to make lots of adjustments, and that’s come with friction. The other thing is that people are being asked to learn lots of new technologies, so their tech stacks are becoming longer and longer. So yes, I think that in terms of pure burn and cognitive load, it’s worse.
Do you have any tips for corporate leaders to become “friction fixers”?
It starts with this attitude that a big part of the job is about understanding, What do I make hard and what do I make easy? And it’s important to think of yourself as a trustee of other people’s time.
One of the heroes of the book is Dr. Melinda Ashton, who was the chief quality officer at Hawaii’s largest hospital chain. She was on a mission to simplify their medical records system, which was very burdensome. So her team started something called GROSS, “Get Rid Of Stupid Stuff,” and they asked people to come up with suggestions to cut stuff out of the records system. They were able to really pare down this bloated program and get everyone involved in this subtraction movement, and it ended up saving people a ton of time.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
