Sunday Pick: Friction 101: How to make the right things easier and wrong things harder | Fixable

0:06Hey, TED Talks Daily listeners, I'm Elise Hu. Today, we have a special treat, an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, handpicked for you by us. Whatever you're dealing with at work, a bully, a bad boss, burnout, Fixable is there to help. Each week, business leaders Anne Morris and Frances Fry share real fixes to some of the most common workplace problems. And if you're listening and have your own workplace issue, you can send in your questions by emailing fixable at ted.com. Find Fixable wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com.

0:42Now on to the episode.

0:47Frances, how are you? Oh, I'm doing well today, baby. On a scale of one to 10, what is the level of friction you're experiencing in your life today? Well, may I be annoying? Always. You don't need my consent. If you say on a scale of zero to 10, I know which one is higher. So this is my least favorite form of friction, the zero to 10 scale friction. Why don't you explain what you mean, honey, for all our eager listeners out there? So loads of customer research was done, and they would always give a scale of one to 10 for how satisfied you were. And what they found out is that some people interpreted 10 at the top of the scale, and some people interpreted one at the top of the scale, and it's not self-evident.

1:34And then there was the genius observation. If we give a scale of zero to 10, we know which is the best and which is the worst. Do we really want the people who are confused in the data set? It seems obvious that 10 is best. Except for at the Harvard Business School, we give grades of a one, two, and three. Which is best? No, you're unpersuaded. I didn't hear the answer. We never have to have this conversation again. Thank you. Thank you. So why don't we call this getting on the same page friction? I love it. Maybe speaking the same language friction. Or maybe letting your wife win this one. Oh, you know what?

2:13That would have been a good note to have gotten earlier on. You know, despite my resistance, it's actually a good example of what we're talking about when we talk about friction, which is things getting in the way of progress. And I don't think it's an overstatement to say that this is one of the great sources of frustration in your life in particular. That is an absolutely true statement. And just the smallest amount of friction can just veer me off course for days, for days. So you and I are obsessed with this question of how to set people up for success. And I love identifying friction as this very material variable in our ability to do what we came to do at work.

3:00Yeah, I often refer to pebbles and boulders. And the way that I often encounter it is that people feel like they have a big problem in their way, boulder. And what I try to do is with the right frame and the right insight is right size that down to a pebble and then help equip them to sweep it away. Well, sweeping things away is our topic for today. We are having another master fixer on the show, actually two of them, Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao. Both are fantastic Stanford professors and they are co-authors of a new book called The Friction Project. I love that our listeners are going to get to meet Bob and Huggy, a beautiful, beautiful collaborative partnership.

3:49They're brilliant individually and together they have so much insight. They take their topics seriously, but they don't take themselves seriously and they spark joy. Yeah, I'm really excited to dig in here. I think this topic is under examined as an important issue in the workplace. I'm so excited. Let's dive in. I'm Anne Morris. I'm a company builder and leadership coach. And I'm Frances Fry. I'm a professor at the Harvard Business School, and I'm Anne's wife. And this is Fixable from the TED Audio Collective. On this show, we believe that meaningful change happens fast, anything is fixable, and good solutions are often just a single brave conversation away.

4:47Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao, welcome to Fixable. Anne, it's great to see you and Francis. I'm so excited. It's a delight to be here this afternoon. You both have been helping organizations become better, more effective, and more humane places for decades. And so it really is our privilege to host you. We are particularly excited about your new book, which is The Friction Project, which we both loved. Loved. It's truly fantastic. And really one of the pleasures of the past year has been getting to know your work better. So thank you for that gift as well. I love getting to know your work better and the two of you just crack me up.

5:30So I'm just fine to talk to you. That is really the bar that we're shooting for. And the metric we care most about. So that's a great start for us. We want to start with the problem you're focused on now, which is we understand it in its simplest form is to reduce bad friction in organizations and increase good friction. That's a wonderful summary. I think that's a classic, really difficult challenge that every leader struggles with every day. Yeah, well, that's why we're excited for this conversation. So in your work, how do you define friction? What is it? When I think of friction, I think of when an employee or a team is trying to do something and it feels harder than they want.

6:20I guess that's where I would start. So I don't know whether a physicist would agree with that, but that's the kind of thing that got me going. Hagi, what would you add or argue with? The only small modification I'd make, Bob, is that for me, friction consists of obstacles. And the real question is, do obstacles infuriate or do obstacles help educate decision makers? Look at you. That's lovely. Well, let's go to some examples. So where am I most likely to see it in the workplace? So after Bob and I wrote this lovely book called Scaling Up Excellence, what people would kind of respond with was feelings of how hard it was to get anything done.

7:10I remember asking one person in an executive program, hey, where do you work? And the guy looks at me and says, I work in a frustration factory. And I'm thinking to myself and saying, oh my God, how can you even summon the will to go there every day? Another person spoke with an extraordinarily moving quiver to her voice. And I said, how would you describe what you do? And she looked at me and said, I pour myself into work that's largely inconsequential. But then she said, when I go home, I just have scraps of myself for my family. And that kind of hit me in the gut, you know. And to us, they actually kind of evoke the world of bad friction, if you will.

8:02Obstacles that anger, infuriate, and fundamentally exhaust people, if you will. You just give up. Yeah. So, Bob, what's the most damaging type of friction? The most damaging kind is the kind that kills people's will. The woman who comes home with scraps of herself that Huggy was describing. Another great line from another executive we talked to was, I feel like I'm swimming in a sea of shit. And why do they expect me to show any initiative? So that's the bad friction. And, you know, if you sort of go down the standard list, it's emails, it's meetings, it's routines and procedures that make things difficult.

8:48So do you have a way of framing this challenge or describing it in a way that really allows people to put this at the front? One is that for people in leadership positions, in fact, almost anyone, your job is to be a trustee of others' time. and then stealing a line from an HBS grad named Michael Deering, now a venture capitalist. He had this argument that the best leaders see themselves as editors-in-chief. I love that metaphor. The only minor thing I'd like to add is what leaders need to do is they really need to understand how valuable the time of their employees is. So you don't want to piss it away.

9:28And how many leaders do that effortlessly? So I really like where Huggie is going with this because when it's dysfunctional, everybody points their fingers at everybody else and says it's everybody else's fault. And I'll give you a little example. This was just about two months ago. I've got 400 executives. They're all vice presidents. This is like some kind of huge company. And they're all complaining there's too many Slack messages on too many trivial things too often. A universal complaint that we hear, yeah. And then I say to them, you are the 400 vice presidents in this huge company. Why don't you look in the mirror and look at the Slack messages you sent this morning and start working on it?

10:09I love that. And it's a great example of this subtraction mindset you advocate for in the book. Basically, instead of adding complexity or nuance or maybe in this case a Slack bot to solve a problem, just subtract. Send fewer Slack messages. One minor thing, even though Bob and I use the term subtraction as shorthand, most people think subtraction is about the elimination of activities or elimination of tasks. Of course, that's important. But for us, what's the most important thing to subtract are the negative feelings that are associated with being overwhelmed at work. So for Bob and I, the outcome of subtraction may certainly be a more efficient organization.

10:59But what's most important is that we give employees the gift of time. They're starved for time. And we have a case study that both of us wrote together about AstraZeneca, where a team of people, they actually launched a social movement of sorts, if you will. to save 2 million hours. So you could serve 4 million more customers, run 400 early phase trials, and so on. So I think it's kind of very important to connect from our point of view, subtraction to the idea of giving employees the gift of time. I love that. You tell a story in the book that has really stuck with me about an executive named Scott.

11:50So Scott is working 16 hours a day, seven days a week when we encounter him. He embraces this subtraction idea. The performance of his team improves. He works fewer hours. His health gets better, and he saves his troubled marriage. So are these the kind of results you're willing to commit to for our listeners? Well, so you got to be careful with people like us who do management cases because we tend to make excessive claims. But the principle that we talk about, suppose we applied the rule of halves. So, Bob, so for the non-academics among us out here, so the rule of halves is you're just – you're cutting a work burden by 50 percent.

12:34So the number of standing meetings, the number – the length of your emails. Is that the idea? That's a goal. But to be more realistic, there's a woman named Rebecca Hines. So we worked with Rebecca on this thing called a meeting reset with 60 Asana employees. Rebecca did most of the work, to be clear. And what she had 60 employees do is go through and rate every standing meeting on their calendar in terms of how important it was and how much work it was. And they found that a whole bunch of the meetings were valueless. And in fact, one thing, 30 of them removed all standing meetings from their calendar for 48 hours and put them back in.

13:14And on average, the average person saved about four hours a month by eliminating meetings, by making them shorter, less often smaller, things like that. And to us, that's an example. It's not 50%, but it's four hours a month, which ain't nothing. So how many executives think of how do I go about designing a good job? A good job that fosters initiative, that actually fosters generosity. Because in the end, that's really the purpose of job design, isn't it? The way I like to think of it is the real purpose of job design is not to get people to do a series of tasks only. You want to help them recruit a more curious and generous version of themselves.

14:05We have many versions of ourselves. What's the point of designing a job that's going to recruit an exhausted version of myself? And that's kind of the problem we feel in organizations, that leaders kind of have the ask muscle. I want you to do more using one rhetorical slogan or the other. But what about the help muscle, trying to create jobs so that people don't have scraps of themselves to go back home? I love focusing on the metric of how employees feel, not only when they're working, but at the end of the day. So say I'm listening and you have my attention. Where do I even begin to solve this problem?

14:48Where's a starting place for people who are convinced? The simplest place is to get people to think of how do we get rid of stupid stuff? There's a lot of stuff that everybody thinks is stupid. How do we do that there? Bob and I have tried this in class. And when I ask executives, hey, imagine you're going back to work. You have an initiative called get rid of stupid stuff. I'm going to impose two constraints on you. First, whatever initiative you want to come up with, a 10-year-old should be able to understand immediately. Otherwise, it's never going to scale. The second thing is you're only allowed one rule as a result, and the rule shouldn't contain more than four words.

15:38And when you put that constraint on people, you know, both Bob and I have seen it's just not a failure of implementation. It's also a failure of imagination. Yeah, it's beautiful. I love elevating that question to a mission-critical question and not just a backroom whisper conversation, which is where it often happens. Bob, what would you add? Where would you advise people to start? Well, first of all, and we heard this because we teach executives, and they're pretty smart usually. I remember this woman saying that my job is part therapy and part organizational design. Organizational design is extremely important, but part of your job as a leader is to be aware that there are going to be systems and situations that can't be fixed, at least for now.

16:30And your job is to keep people sort of moving forward in the mess. And in some ways, you know, to be more, a little bit more precise. There's a woman. Her name is Clara Shai. So she's now CEO of AI at Salesforce. And she talked about when she launches a big initiative, what she does is she tells people it's going to be messy. You're going to be upset. We're not going to be able to fix things. She has two teams. And she calls this separation of concerns. One team is basically to do all the stuff that is going as it was supposed to go. And the other team are the people who deal with the mess, the unexpected stuff.

17:08And I thought that was a pretty complete view of how you, as a leader, move people through friction. And that's why she's a CEO and I'm not. She's really good. I am marveling at this delightful conversation. And Huggy, I love the way that you bring the heart and the head together with the language. It's just really beautiful. Thank you. The recruit a more curious and generous version of ourselves. I think a lot and we think a lot about creating the conditions to thrive, but you've added a just a poetic nuance to that and a higher mission to it. So the first thing is, while it's a real like you're talking about friction, which seems like an operational morsel, you're actually talking about moral.

18:00So you've gone from morsels to morals in a really beautiful way. Beautifully put. Yeah. You know, maybe this is the perfect stage given what Francis just said to talk about our discovery of how in this whole friction project, love has to meet logistics. Oh, so let's talk about love. So the way this started, so we get introduced to a guy who's going to be a guest in Huggies class in a few weeks. His name is Todd Park. He was the CTO in the Obama administration. He actually led the effort to fix the Obamacare website. And he built a software company. He's a fixer. OK, so he and his brother Ed started a company called Devoted Health, which what they do is they make health care more accessible and clear for people over 65.

18:46And we all know how hard it is to navigate the health care system. It's like – it's unbelievable. So we're interviewing him and he starts talking about love. I go, huh? And he said, so yes, he said, if you start with the notion that the person we're helping is like your mother or your father and you love them and you want to have an experience that feels great for them and then you design the interaction, you design the software around them to support them. If you start with love, things are better from both an efficiency and mental health standpoint. We've used that word in our work, and we use it to define setting high standards and revealing deep devotion simultaneously.

19:25So that this is called devoted health is amazing to us because our definition of love is the simultaneity of high standards and deep devotion. It's super provocative to use the word love in corporate settings. And we've really enjoyed playing with that tension because it really brings the conversation to a different place. Yes. Are there other subtraction tools? Give us one more thing to walk away from this conversation. There's some monoxide somewhere that I can do tomorrow. Let's talk about jargon monoxide because that's just fun. So essentially it's language that bores, confuses, and overwhelms people.

20:04This is when a word, which used to mean something, means so many things to so many people that it qualifies for Daniel Kahneman's definition of noise, which is a random scatter of ideas. My favorite example, which is in the book, is there was an agile consultant in Australia who can describe 40 different kinds of agile in 40 minutes. If something means 40 different things to 40 different people, it means nothing. So that would be an example of friction-inducing jargon monoxide. And super actionable to just let's say what we mean in a way that the people can hear it. And maybe this is a bridge to our conversation on good friction.

20:49You know, a new case is underway about a company called Mind247. They are transforming, I would say, mental health care. You know, a startup by Stanford Alamo, amazing guy. I sort of asked him, I said, okay, tell me what is it you're doing in mental health? And he looks at me, they're building physical structures that are open 24-7. Yeah, mental health you can't really schedule. Yeah. Yeah. And it's really interesting. He gets paid by the local county because he's taking friction out for the ER rooms of local hospitals. Otherwise, they're going to be crowded with mental health patients they don't know quite what to do with.

21:35And I said, who refers the patients to you? And he said, you know, the best referral sources are cops. I said, cops? What do you do for them? He said the average cop in Tucson spends roughly one day a week driving around trying to find out, hey, Francis, will you take my patient? No. Hey, Anne, will you take my, you know. And so we just compress all of that. And to give you a sense of love meeting logistics, in their mental health clinics, you can actually get to see a psychiatrist in 22 minutes. Oh, my gosh. Wow. 22 minutes. And the way he described it from an operations point of view was, he said the real challenge in mental health is, he said, the logistical model, he said, is that of a car wash.

22:30You know, you got like bronze and silver and platinum and like whatever. But you got to have the front end and the experience suffused with love. Oh, that's so powerful. I love it. I love it. Well, Bob, tell us about good friction. Tell us why we want it and what it is. We're pretty obsessed with good friction. In fact, our argument is that many things in life should be slow because they're hard. And there's no other way to do it right. And so there's this really cool study, which came out actually after our book, that compares problem solving in increasingly difficult tasks among people who have higher and lower IQs.

23:09And then they do these brain scans, fMRIs and everything. And what they found is that higher IQ people solve easy problems faster, more difficult problems, slower but better. And to me, that's a reasonable metaphor. And then I think we should talk about creativity. So your colleague, Teresa Mobley, spent her whole life studying creativity since she was a Stanford PhD student and now she's emeritus. And one of the big lessons is when you try to hurry creativity too much, you screw it up, you cheat, you wear people out. And then I can tell you a tale of two Stanford startups. One that probably you've all heard of, Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes.

23:51Is she in jail yet? I'm not sure. But she cheated and lied because she had to hurry too much. Yeah, she was in a hurry. I would compare her to Greta Meyer and Amanda Calabrese. They started a company called Sequel. They're reinventing the modern tampon. They just got FDA approval. They've got$5 million in venture capital. They took every hard startup class at Stanford. They did everything the tough way. They formed a relationship through hell. And they both finished their degrees. They didn't drop out. You could argue that FDA approval itself is an example of good friction. Yes. Yeah, and the obstacle can take various forms.

24:34Our wonderful colleague, Jennifer Eberhardt, she worked with the Oakland Police Department. And I believe, I think it was 2018, they had like 31 ,000 plus traffic stops and tragically more African-Americans and Latinos were being stopped. And the operative question is, how do you reduce needless traffic stops? And she came up with a pretty simple idea, which was when you stop a vehicle, there's like a three-question yes-no checklist. They added one more question, and that question was, do you have prior intelligence connecting this vehicle to a prior crime? Yes, no. And if it's yes, stop the vehicle.

25:14Otherwise, let it go. Just adding that question lowered the number of stops by 31%. And presumably, crime did not increase. That's right, Anne. Ironically, even Even though there were fewer traffic stops, people felt safer. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure. It reminds me of the research around dating apps, where making it so easy to swipe left or right actually leads to worse outcomes in terms of people building relationships. Oh, really? Oh, that's wonderful. But then creating these higher friction, even if they're more awkward moments where strangers come together, actually created a context where people made stronger connections.

25:51One of the most important lines in our book, which is from The Supremes, which is, you Can't Hurry Love? Yes. Well, now we have the data. This dating study is a fascinating study. This is not a published paper. It's still in process. But, you know, our graduate student, we said, hey, why don't you use large language models, take a look at all the Bay Area startups and look at their mission, vision statements and whatever public documents and tell us what's the linguistic emphasis on speed. And so they came up with a number. So she said, what do I do with this number? And we said, well, you know, show us the relationship between the linguistic emphasis on speed and the time taken to become a unicorn and receive that$1 billion valuation.

26:43Predictably, the more you emphasize speed, the faster you become a unicorn. So the graduate student thought this is really cool. And we said, wait a minute, do another study, show us what's the relationship between the time taken to get to unicorn status and the probability of lawsuits two years down the line. So the faster you became a unicorn, the more likely you were to be slapped with lawsuit. Well, Frances, I'm wondering where your head went, but I also want to make the link between this conversation and a book we published titled Move Fast and Fix Things. It's exactly where I'm going. It's exactly where I'm going.

27:21So listen, your book came out after ours, but should we just tear it up? That's the question. Because here, so I want to just put it out here. You can move fast and break things. All four of us are in agreement that that's bad. Right. But there are two antidotes to this. You can either slow down, which is what you're arguing for, or you can put in some good friction. Yeah. But I just I want to make sure is our book obsolete? I don't think that we disagree. A good analogy is who wins the most races in like Formula One or NASCAR? It's the people who know when to hit the gas and know when to hit the brakes.

28:04And their overall speed is highest. But if you don't hit the brakes when you go into the corner or when you're about ready to smash into the car next to you, it's all over. And so to me, that is sort of the analogy that I like to use is it's the gas and the brakes. So it's your overall speed is what matters, right? Yeah. No, I love it. I was gearing up and putting on the gloves and getting ready for the showdown in this conversation. But then as I went deeper into the book, I realized that one way to think about the theory we just launched into the world is that Monday through Thursday is about creating good friction.

28:44And then on Friday, you earn the right to eliminate all the bad friction. We're just saying sequence it. Yeah. You know, it's as I was reading your book, which I enjoyed, the phrase that rang through my mind was a phrase that apparently Augustus Caesar used to use when he sent his generals to battle. and he would always tell them, apparently, make haste slowly. And I sort of see that as like the connection. Yes, that's it, Huggy. We're one of the two women obsessed with ancient Rome in addition with all the men. So I want to add one more thing. There's a really cool academic literature on savoring.

29:25So you're talking about coping. It's like bad stuff, got to cope with it. I'm in a hurry. But savoring is when good things happen, when you're having a lovely meal, you're having a lovely conversation. Literature shows that it's good for your mental health to slow down and enjoy things. And so the example that we use in the book, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands is called Jumbo. And they experiment with the slow lane. And this is where for people to slow down and have a chit chat with the clerk. And they've scaled it out to 125 different grocery stores in Holland. It warms my heart.

30:06Yeah, this is for the elderly customers. So that's savoring. Some things, you know, they ought to be slower. So what's the biggest thing that you hope listeners take away from this conversation? Huggy, why don't we start with you? I've come to slowly realize that the people with the most power in any organization are people who can waste your time and you can't do a darn thing about it. That's what real power is. The modern definition of power. Yeah, you have no recourse whatsoever. But the other thing that I walk away with is it's really kind of made me realize how to put good friction in my life and how to take bad friction out of my life.

30:52So I ask myself, do I really need to be in this meeting that's going to take like one and a half hours and not result in anything? No, thanks. I don't need to be there. So I'm going to be there wherever I feel the test for me is my curiosity and generosity are recruited. And so I think injecting curiosity and generosity into daily life, as important as doing it at work. Bob, what about you? What do you want people to take away from this? Mine's a little bit more, I guess, narrow. But this general notion, which all of us know, life would be better for all of us if we did what we could from where we are.

31:37My favorite example in the book is one of the best experiences I had was going to the Department of Motor Vehicles in California. There was 60 people in line in front of me. It was 7.30 in the morning and I and my mother had passed away and I had to like do this title stuff. And I figured I was going to be there all day. And this wonderful DMV employee at like 740 starts walking down the line and asking each person why they were there. He did triage. And he gave me my form to fill out. And I thought I was going to be there all morning. I was out by 815. And they opened at 8. And we had a Zoom with the senior executives who run the California DMV.

32:16And they are doing all the stuff with technology, with culture, with old-fashioned process sort of design. to improve the quality. And one transaction, which is called getting real ID, they've cut it from an average of 28 minutes to eight minutes for people who visit the DMV. And so to me, it is if this guy at the Department of Motor Vehicles can be a trustee of other people's time, then almost anybody else can. Wow, what a powerful example. All right, well, you both are extraordinary, and we're so grateful that you joined us for this conversation. You made it so much easier for us. Thank you both.

32:56Thank you.

33:09Frances, what did you learn from Bob and Huggy? So much. So much about bad friction and good friction. You know, I'm predisposed to get rid of the bad, to savor the good that is new. And I find that each of us can be the person in the DMV line, like do what we can from our position, as Bob said. I love the DMV example because that's not a person who has, you know, extraordinary power in this system, but had a huge impact on the experience of the people in that line. I also really loved this idea of designing jobs that solve for curiosity and generosity. And right now, in many organizations, we're doing the opposite.

33:57You know, we're creating jobs where I can't show up generously and I can't show up with curiosity because there's all of these other, you know, miserable tasks that I have to do. And what if we took real responsibility for that as leaders and as organizations? I'm so inspired. The other thing I loved is picturing Hagi deciding whether or not to attend a meeting. I mean, we do live at the tyranny of other people's relationship with our time at kind of a high level. But at a micro level, we probably can make some more decisions about whether this meeting is worth my time, this phone call is worth my time.

34:38And it's sobering for me because I don't always solve for my own generosity and curiosity. No, you're very dutiful. Yeah. I will do things out of obligation or feeling a sense of responsibility for people, but I don't do the full calculus. What am I giving up when I have that kind of a relationship with my time? The idea that I have some more control over this than I'm asserting is exciting. It's exciting. Our challenge to listeners is to take that rule of haves into your lives and see if there's a work burden that you can reduce by 50%. Number of meetings, how long the email is, you and I will join in the challenge.

35:25What can we reduce by 50 %? I love it. And I can't wait to re-listen to this. I think I will listen to it again and again and learn more and more. And I hope everyone that's listening gets that as well. Fortunately, with the technology of podcasting, we can savor it. We can savor it. Thanks for listening, everyone. We want to hear from you. If you want to figure out a workplace problem together, send us a message at fixable at ted.com or call us at 234-FIXABLE. That's 234-349-2253. Fixable is brought to you by the TED Audio Collective. It's hosted by me, Anne Morris. And me, Frances Fry. Our team includes Isabel Carter, Constanza Gallardo, Lydia Jean Cott, Grace Rubenstein, Sarah Nix, Michelle Quint, Corey Hajim, Alejandra Salazar, Ban Ban Chang, and Roxanne Hilash.

36:23This episode was mixed by Louis at Story Yard. If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share this episode with a friend or a boss who's looking for ways to reduce friction in their organization. And one more thing. If you can, please take a second to leave us a review. It really helps us make a great show. And it totally helps the search algorithm.

36:56Thank you.