The Friction Project

The Friction Project Plot Summary

Introduction

Friction in organizations can either impede or enhance performance, depending on how it is managed. When implemented thoughtfully, friction creates necessary safeguards, fosters deliberate decision-making, and builds commitment among team members. However, many organizations today suffer from the wrong kind of friction - bureaucratic processes that waste time, confuse stakeholders, and ultimately damage morale and effectiveness. The key distinction lies in understanding when to make things easier and when to make them harder. Too often, leaders focus solely on removing obstacles without considering which barriers serve valuable purposes. Through detailed case studies ranging from healthcare institutions to technology companies, we see how friction problems manifest as oblivious leadership, addition sickness, broken connections, confusing jargon, and unsustainable speed. Each of these challenges requires specific solutions that balance efficiency with humanity, allowing organizations to create systems where the right things are easy and the wrong things are appropriately difficult.

Chapter 1: Understanding Friction: When Hard Should Be Easy and Easy Should Be Hard

Friction in organizations is a complex phenomenon that can either fuel or frustrate progress. Contrary to popular belief, the goal isn't to eliminate all friction but rather to strategically manage it. Friction emerges in everyday organizational life through convoluted approval processes, unnecessary meetings, redundant documentation, and cumbersome technologies that slow people down when speed is essential. This misplaced friction wastes enormous resources. Studies show professionals spend up to 28% of their time dealing with emails, while many organizations devote hundreds of thousands of hours annually to preparing for recurring meetings that yield minimal value. At healthcare organizations like Hawaii Pacific Health, clinicians found themselves documenting trivial details in electronic records—such as diaper changes for infants—requiring multiple mouse clicks and wasting precious time that could be spent on patient care. However, the opposite problem can be equally damaging. When organizations make the wrong things too easy, they often create systems vulnerable to errors, ethical lapses, and poor decision-making. Consider the case of Zenefits, a once-promising startup that prioritized speed above all else with their motto "Ready. Fire. Aim." Their frenzied expansion led to cutting corners, including a browser extension that allowed sales representatives to bypass required licensing procedures. This reckless approach eventually triggered regulatory investigations, customer defections, and a massive devaluation of the company. The distinction between good and bad friction becomes clear when examining successful organizations. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos distinguishes between "one-way door" decisions (irreversible choices that warrant careful consideration) and "two-way door" decisions (reversible choices where speed is beneficial). Similarly, creative organizations like Pixar recognize that iteration, debate, and even struggle are essential parts of the creative process—attempting to streamline this work would damage quality rather than enhance it. Organizations therefore need both "grease people" who remove unnecessary obstacles and "gunk people" who thoughtfully build constructive safeguards. The challenge lies in knowing which is appropriate when, and in building systems that deploy friction strategically rather than haphazardly. When organizations succeed at this balance, they create environments that are both more efficient and more humane.

Chapter 2: Trustees of Time: How Leaders Create Respectful Organizational Systems

Effective leaders recognize that they serve as trustees of their organization's most precious resource—time. This mindset drives them to scrutinize and protect how people spend their hours, ensuring that unnecessary burdens don't consume energy that could be directed toward meaningful work. Being a trustee means constantly asking whether processes, meetings, and technologies respect people's time or wastefully squander it. Time trusteeship begins with awareness of one's "cone of friction"—the zone of potential impact where leaders can influence what becomes easier or harder for others. When Winston Churchill sent his famous "Brevity" memo in 1940, he used his position as prime minister to press government officials to write shorter reports with clearer language. Similarly, in 2013, Dropbox executives observed their employees drowning in meetings and declared "Armeetingeddon," removing all standing meetings from calendars and making it impossible to add new ones for two weeks. These interventions reflect leaders' recognition that their decisions about organizational systems profoundly affect everyone's daily experience. Successful trustees also recognize that their work resembles "mowing the lawn"—it requires constant maintenance rather than one-time solutions. At Dropbox, the benefits of Armeetingeddon began fading within months as meeting creep returned. This pattern teaches us that friction fixing isn't about heroic interventions but rather ongoing vigilance and adjustment. The most effective leaders build this awareness into organizational routines, creating regular "friction audits" to identify and address emerging problems before they become entrenched. Perhaps most importantly, trustees differentiate between symptoms and systems. While helping individuals navigate broken processes provides immediate relief, truly effective leaders focus on redesigning the underlying systems. Dr. Melinda Ashton demonstrated this at Hawaii Pacific Health by launching the "Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff" program, which invited healthcare workers to nominate anything in electronic records that was "poorly designed, unnecessary, or just plain stupid." The initiative identified 188 subtraction targets and implemented 87 improvements, saving thousands of nurse hours monthly through simple changes like reducing required clicks for routine documentation. Trustees also understand when friction serves valuable purposes. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts deliberately added friction to opioid prescribing processes—requiring physicians to document alternatives considered and justify prescriptions—which reduced unnecessary prescriptions by 15% and prevented millions of potentially dangerous doses from being dispensed. This illustrates how thoughtfully designed friction can protect people from harm while advancing organizational goals.

Chapter 3: Diagnosing Friction Problems: Tools for Identifying What Needs Fixing

Effective friction diagnosis requires a comprehensive toolkit for understanding when processes should be streamlined and when they should remain deliberately challenging. This diagnostic process begins with eight key questions: Is it the right thing to do? Do people have sufficient skill and will? Is failure cheap and reversible? Is delay dangerous? Are people already overloaded? Does it require coordination? Will reducing friction for some increase it for others? And finally, are the benefits of struggle worthwhile given the costs? These questions help distinguish between destructive and constructive friction. For instance, when Lt. Col. David Shoemaker at the Department of Defense prevented Theranos from installing unproven blood-testing devices on military helicopters despite pressure from four-star General James Mattis, he applied constructive friction to prevent potentially disastrous consequences. Similarly, when emergency department physicians at "General Hospital" were required to justify ultrasound orders by speaking with radiologists, ultrasound use dropped from 19.1% to 8% for abdominal pain patients compared to when those same physicians worked at "Flagship Hospital" where ordering tests required just a few clicks. This "process friction" saved patients time, reduced costs by $200,000, and had no negative health impacts. Once organizations identify friction problems, they need methodical approaches to document and prioritize them. "Good riddance reviews" or "sludge audits" help quantify the burden imposed by current processes. At Asana, employees rated over 1,100 standing meetings, identifying more than 50% as low-value and over 150 as simultaneously requiring great effort while delivering minimal returns. Such assessments provide clear targets for intervention and build organizational momentum for change. Journey mapping offers another powerful diagnostic tool, particularly for understanding customer or client experiences. When Stanford students mapped the process families navigated to obtain services for disabled children from a California social service agency, they identified numerous bottlenecks and communication failures that created excessive waiting times, confusion, and frustration. These maps visualized how seemingly minor friction points combined into overwhelming experiences that left families feeling "frustrated," "invisible," and "helpless." For individual diagnostic purposes, leaders can practice "friction forensics" by immersing themselves in frontline experiences. Dan Cockerell, who rose from parking attendant to vice president at Disney's Magic Kingdom, regularly worked "cross-utilization" shifts in frontline roles throughout his career. During two weeks working alongside housekeepers at Disney's All-Star Resort, he discovered workflow differences between high and low performers, noting that the best housekeepers created systematic rotation schedules for deep-cleaning different room elements. This insight, gained through direct experience rather than reports or meetings, led to productivity improvements across all housekeeping teams. Effective diagnosis also requires distinguishing between symptoms and root causes. When friction appears in one area, it often indicates deeper structural problems elsewhere in the organization. By systematically tracking these patterns, leaders can identify and address the underlying issues rather than merely treating visible manifestations.

Chapter 4: The Five Friction Traps: Common Organizational Dysfunctions

Organizations repeatedly fall into five distinct friction traps that damage performance and undermine morale. The first trap, "Oblivious Leaders," emerges when power and privilege blind executives to the burdens they impose on others. This blindness manifested at General Motors, where executives received new company cars every six months at minimal cost and with free gas—sparing them from experiencing the frustrating dealership interactions their customers endured. Similarly, executives who receive VIP treatment from service providers lose touch with the ordeals facing regular customers, creating a dangerous feedback loop of ignorance. The second trap, "Addition Sickness," reflects the human tendency to solve problems by adding rather than subtracting complexity. Research from the University of Virginia shows that even when removing elements is clearly superior, people default to addition—participants continued adding LEGO bricks to structures even when charged money for each additional piece. Organizations amplify this bias by rewarding people who create new initiatives, policies, and requirements while rarely celebrating those who eliminate unnecessary complexity. The resulting administrative bloat explains why many universities have doubled their administrator-to-faculty ratios over recent decades. "Broken Connections," the third trap, emerges when organizational structures impede necessary coordination. Melissa Valentine's study of a cancer treatment center revealed how patients endured a "cancer tax"—the burden of coordinating their own care across disconnected specialists—because no one in the organization felt responsible for this crucial integration work. Patients reported managing appointments with fifty or more healthcare professionals with little support, creating significant stress during an already difficult time. This trap reflects what researchers call "coordination neglect," where leaders focus on optimizing individual components while ignoring how they fit together. The fourth trap, "Jargon Monoxide," encompasses the confusing, empty, and impenetrable language that hampers understanding and action. This trap takes four forms: convoluted crap (needlessly complex language), meaningless bullshit (empty buzzwords), in-group lingo (specialized terms that exclude outsiders), and jargon mishmash (terms with inconsistent meanings). While technical terminology can enhance communication among specialists, excessive jargon often creates barriers that prevent effective coordination and decision-making. Finally, "Fast and Frenzied" captures the damage done when organizations prize speed above all else. Studies show that rushing increases unethical behavior—organizations whose mission statements emphasize urgency over thoughtfulness have four times more discrimination violations. This excessive speed builds technical and organizational debt that eventually slows progress. At Uber, early growth came from hundreds of autonomous teams racing forward independently, but this created mounting coordination problems that eventually threatened the company's viability, requiring years of remediation work by subsequent leadership. Each trap creates distinct patterns of dysfunction, but they frequently appear together and reinforce one another. For instance, oblivious leaders often drive addition sickness, which then worsens broken connections. Understanding these traps provides a framework for diagnosing specific friction problems and developing targeted interventions.

Chapter 5: Implementing Change: Strategies for Better Systems and Practices

Successful friction projects require practical strategies that balance rapid relief with sustainable transformation. Implementation begins with categorizing possible interventions using the Help Pyramid—a framework that organizes friction-fixing approaches from least to most systemic impact. At the foundation, reframing helps people cope emotionally with unavoidable frustrations. Navigation strategies guide people through complex systems without changing them. Shielding protects people from unnecessary interruptions and obstacles. Higher-impact approaches include neighborhood design, which improves localized processes, and system design, which transforms entire organizational frameworks. Effective implementation often starts with subtraction rather than addition. Rebecca Hinds at Asana demonstrated this with "Meeting Doomsday," removing all standing meetings with five or fewer people from calendars for forty-eight hours. This pause allowed participants to evaluate which meetings truly added value before selectively restoring them. The expanded "Meeting Reset" program helped sixty employees save an average of five hours monthly, with the greatest impact coming from outright cancellations (37%) and the remainder from shortening meetings, scheduling them less frequently, and replacing verbal updates with written communication. For deeper systemic change, leaders employ various subtraction tools. Simple rules provide clear guidance, such as applying "the rule of halves" to imagine eliminating 50% of standing obligations and making remaining ones 50% shorter. Subtraction specialists become organizational champions for simplification, as exemplified by Hootsuite's "czar of bad systems" who tracked and resolved problematic processes. Purges enable dramatic interventions, as when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and eliminated every product the company sold, replacing them with just four new models that restored focus and profitability. To address broken connections, friction fixers focus on integration mechanisms. The Cancer Center created a centralized CarePoint program to coordinate patient care across specialists. Organizations also improve handoffs between roles and departments by developing standardized protocols, like the I-PASS method (Illness severity, Patient summary, Action list, Situational awareness, Synthesis by receiver) that reduced preventable medical errors by 30% when implemented by pediatric residents. These structured approaches ensure critical information transfers effectively between people and teams. Jargon monoxide requires linguistic interventions. Effective leaders replace convoluted crap with concrete language, substitute meaningless bullshit with specific guidance, translate in-group lingo for outsiders, and clarify jargon mishmash by establishing consistent definitions. When medical specialists at a New Zealand hospital provided patients with plain-language translations of technical terms (replacing "peripheral edema" with "ankle swelling"), 78% of patients preferred these clearer communications and 69% reported improved relationships with their physicians. Finally, addressing fast and frenzied cultures involves intentional friction application. Leaders can implement mandatory pauses before important decisions, schedule regular "team relaunches" to reassess priorities and methods, and establish rhythmic cadences that alternate between intense work and recovery periods. When Noam Bardin at Waze faced declining user retention, he paused all hiring and feature development for six weeks while employees investigated underlying problems. This strategic deceleration enabled subsequent acceleration as the company improved its product and eventually sold to Google for $1 billion. These implementation strategies provide friction fixers with a versatile toolkit for addressing varied organizational challenges, from quick local improvements to fundamental system redesigns.

Chapter 6: Leading Friction Projects: Applying Techniques in Your Organization

Leading effective friction projects requires mastering five leadership principles that successful friction fixers consistently demonstrate. First, they focus on the journey rather than the destination, recognizing that friction fixing resembles mowing the lawn—a never-ending process requiring constant vigilance rather than one-time solutions. Sheri Singer, a veteran Hollywood producer who has created more than forty films on tight schedules, explains that her friction-fixing approach developed through accumulated learning about anticipating and preventing common production delays. Research confirms this mindset's effectiveness: executives who described completed training programs as "journeys" rather than "destinations" were significantly more likely to implement what they learned six months later. Second, friction leaders link small details to larger outcomes. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he obsessed over minute aspects of the customer experience at Apple Stores, including eliminating traditional cash registers in favor of mobile payment devices carried by employees. This attention to seemingly minor friction points resulted in a revolutionary retail experience that became a key competitive advantage. Similarly, at Disney theme parks, attention to queue design transformed waiting from pure frustration into part of the entertainment experience. Third, successful leaders place "grease people" and "gunk people" in the right roles. Grease people thrive on removing obstacles, bending rules, and accelerating processes. They excel in innovation, customer service, and crisis response roles where flexibility matters more than consistency. Gunk people, conversely, excel at creating and enforcing necessary safeguards, making them valuable in safety-critical operations, compliance functions, and quality assurance. The most effective organizations need both types but must position them where their natural tendencies align with job requirements. Fourth, friction fixers master the art of friction shifting—knowing when to accelerate and when to apply brakes. Paul Anderson demonstrated this when he took over struggling mining giant BHP in 1998. Rather than immediately launching change initiatives as expected, he shocked everyone by declaring, "We're not going to do anything today." Instead, he spent months interviewing key personnel and understanding the company's problems before implementing targeted reforms that ultimately delivered record profits. This capacity to shift between deliberate assessment and decisive action defines effective friction leadership. Finally, the most successful friction projects harness shared emotions including civility, caring, and even love. Research by Sigal Barsade on cultures of "companionate love" found that workplaces characterized by affection, compassion, and tenderness had higher employee satisfaction, stronger teamwork, lower burnout, and superior customer outcomes. Todd Park, who co-founded healthcare company Devoted Health after leading the rescue of the troubled HealthCare.gov website, explicitly builds his organization's service model around love, instructing employees to "work like crazy to care for everyone like we would for our own mom." Implementing these principles requires accepting that organizational life will always contain some friction. As one partner in a major law firm noted after returning from what he thought would be a less frustrating competitor, he had simply joined "the grass is browner club." The wisest leaders expect messiness, work to improve what they can, and develop resilience for navigating unavoidable challenges. Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI, prepares her teams by having them anticipate potential problems before launches, starting with small-scale implementations before expanding, and assigning specific team members to address inevitable issues while others focus on continuing development.

Summary

Friction emerges as a fundamental force shaping organizational life—either enhancing or undermining performance depending on how it's managed. The critical insight is that the goal isn't removing all friction, but rather distributing it strategically: making the right things easier and the wrong things harder. This perspective transforms leadership from generic efficiency-seeking into nuanced friction management, where leaders become trustees of organizational systems and people's time. The journey toward better organizations requires embracing three core principles: serving as trustees who value others' time, taking accountability for friction fixing rather than treating it as someone else's problem, and recognizing that organizational design represents the highest form of friction management. When leaders apply these principles through specific practices—conducting friction audits, deploying subtraction tools, improving connections, clarifying communication, and strategically applying constructive friction—they create workplaces that simultaneously enhance efficiency and humanity. The most profound success comes when friction fixing becomes embedded in organizational culture, with everyone feeling responsible for continually improving how work gets done rather than accepting unnecessary burdens as inevitable.

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Robert I. Sutton

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