Why ‘friction thinkers’ see hidden opportunities first

When we face a problem, whether it's planning a trip, fixing a Lego model, or leading an organization

our natural tendency is to sort of race ahead. But some friction, well, that's actually a good thing

I think a good ogy here is the ogy of a race car

The teams that win, they don't go pedal to the metal the whole time

They brake when they go in the corners. They pull in for pit stops

and when the car is on fire, they pull over, stop and get out so they don't die

So a customer, an employee, a senior leader, when they want to do something

and they run into obstacles that make it slower, harder, more frustrating

we call this organizational friction. And a lot of times that's a bad thing, but sometimes that's a good thing

I'm Bob Sutton. I'm an organizational psychologist and best-selling author of eight books, including The Friction Project, How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

one thing that we emphasize in our research and in the book the friction project is is it the right

or wrong thing to do and it's ridiculously simple which is that if it's the right thing to do i don't

know paying a bill uh getting reimbursed for a travel expense then it's the right thing to do

it should be easy and it should happen fast and be frictionless. But if it's the wrong thing to do

I don't know, stealing money from your organization, breaking a law, well, those things, they should be

difficult or impossible to do So a good example of constructive friction is Elizabeth Holmes then CEO of Theranos She did some unlawful things trying to sell a blood testing device

that didn't work. And she started pressing military officials to put her blood testing

device on military helicopters. And in fact, she even had a four-star general press the sort of

lower level lieutenant colonel bureaucrats to put this on helicopters. And they refused

because it did not have FDA approval. And there's this rule that it had to have FDA approval

which, well, that's actually a good thing. And an interesting contrasting example to Elizabeth Holmes

is a company in San Francisco called Sequel, which has reinvented the modern tampon

They went through all the friction to develop the product over and over again

to get FDA approval, and now it's being manufactured and sold. And to me, that's a good example of constructive friction

They took the slow, hard road, and now they have a legitimate product that we know works

In the name of full disclosure, I just invested $25,000 in their company

I may or may not get it back, but I couldn't resist. Anyway. A friction fixer is someone who is obsessed and focused on making the right things easier

and the wrong things harder, and they see themselves as trustees of others' time

They're constantly aware of how the big and little decisions they make waste people's time

maybe are a good use of people's time. And a good example of this, I took a visit to the

Department of Motor Vehicles office So I get there at 7 in the morning there a long line there 60 people in front of me it like I know what I going to be doing all day but at 7 45 this wonderful gentleman walks out

asked each of us why we're there some people he sends away because you can't get a passport at

the California DMV others of us like me he gave a form to fill out told us what line to get in

and I expected I would spend three hours going through the process

I was out of the office at 8.20 in a state of shock

that a visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles was one of the lowest friction experiences I had

and it was in large part because of that gentleman who went down the line, showed respect for our time

and helped us navigate quickly through the process. And yes, just because you aren't at the top of the pecking order

doesn't excuse you from being a trustee of others' time. One of the things that we think that good friction fixers do

is they're skilled at diagnosing what ought to be hard and what ought to be easy

And there's two questions that great friction fixers ask. The first one, do I know what the heck I'm doing

In many situations, it's great to think fast and be on automatic pilot

But when we're in a cognitive mind field, when things are falling apart, maybe you should sort of stop yourself and just do nothing

A good example of this is Google Glass, which was a computer meets your eyeglasses

And Sergey Brin co saw the product fell in love with it and he kind of ripped it out of the hands of the team even though they were telling him it wasn ready for primetime manufactured thousands of them gave them to a bunch of famous people but it had battery life problems security problems It didn work People couldn

figure out how to operate it. And it was actually on the list of the worst products of all time

So sometimes, even if you're the boss, you need to slow down and think before you make a dumb

decision. So that's the first one. The second diagnostic question is whether or not the decision

is reversible. Firing the CEO, acquiring a company, selling your company, if you're going to make a

decision like that, you got to kind of slow down and not screw it up. But if you're doing something

that's reversible, then in that situation, you should sort of throw it out in the world and see

what happens. I'll tell you a little story. There's a famous firm called IDEO, and it used to be 50

people and it was great. They'd have everybody together. It would feel like a community

They grew to 150 people. There was confusion. They had a hard time staffing projects

And so the CEO and founder, David Kelly, called the whole company together. But right before this

meeting, he shaved off his Raucho Marx type mustache. And none of us had ever seen him without

his mustache, including his wife who screamed. And he looked at everybody in the room and he said

okay, we're going to do a reorganization. This change is just like my mustache. It's a reversible

prototype. We can change the structure just as I can re-row back my mustache. Now, if he cut off

his finger, that would not be a reversible prototype. So you've got to be careful that

some prototypes and some changes are one-way doors that there's no going back

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