Friction elimination is both top-down and bottom-up. Hawaii Pacific Health’s Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff (GROSS) campaign was initiated by a chief medical officer but driven by doctors and nurses who flagged tasks that cut into their time with patients—like a mouse click that was sucking up 1,700 hours of nurses’ time every month. While senior executives may initiate systemic change, every member of an organization can contribute to friction fixing.
Overly complex lingo can be confusing. Take the management framework Holacracy, which is full of lines like: “A Role may link into another Circle if a Policy of that other Circle or any Super-Circle thereof invites it.” To avoid “the hazards of convoluted crap,” Sutton and Rao suggest speaking or writing in concrete terms, incorporating sensory metaphors, and using the present tense.
Slow down
Some friction is good. Sometimes, you must get your employees or colleagues to resist impulsive or instinctive moves. In particular, generating great ideas can’t be rushed. “To do creative work right, teams need to slow down, struggle, and develop a lot of bad ideas to find a rare good one,” Sutton and Rao write. After launching a new project, take a moment for some “imaginary time travel.” Generate “previctorems” in which your team sketches out the story of its future success, and “premortems” in which you speculate about massive failure.
Everyone can fix friction
In their new book, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder (St. Martin’s Press, 2024), Sutton (a professor of organizational behavior, by courtesy, at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and professor emeritus of management science and engineering at Stanford) and Rao (a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford GSB) offer a wealth of advice on identifying and removing troublesome friction—while implementing the helpful kind. Here are some tips for aspiring “friction fixers.”
Less is more
Published Feb. 1, 2024, on Stanford Graduate School of Business Insights.