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In a good way What's in your wallet Terms apply. see capital one d. com slash bank, Capital onene andA member FDIC Monday. com AI agents took over my work. and I absolutely love it. Chasing deadlines, writing status reports, updating stakeholders. Agents handle the daily grind now. I stay in the loop only when it matters. Create your own AI agent in minutes on Monday d. com Hey, fixable listeners This week, we're sharing one of our favorite episodes from our archives It's a fast moving conversation with Stanford professors and organizational psychologists, Bob Sutton and Huggy Raow In this episode, we talk about their terrific book The Fiction Project. Together, we get into what's behind the friction that makes work feel like such a slog Bob and Huggy share how we can get rid of obstacles that stand in the way of making progress But friction isn't all bad counterintuitively We learned that friction can be surprisingly useful in slowing you down when high stakes decisions have to be made right In this moment when our to do lists seem never ending and our calendars are filled with meetings, this discussion is as relevant as ever So thanks for joining us Now ono the show Francis, how are you? Oh, I'm doing well today, baby. On a scale of one to ten, 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 say on a scale of zero to ten, I know which one is higher This is This is my least favorite form of friction The zero to ten 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 ten for how satisfied you were. And what they found out is that some people interpreted ten at the top of the scale and some people interpreted one at the top of the scale. And it's not self evident and then There was the genius observation. If we give a scale of zero to ten 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 ten 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. We never have to have this conversation. 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? That would have been a good note to have gotten earlier on,u you know, it's 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 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 You and I are obsessed with this question of how to set people up for success. I love identifying friction as this very material variable in our ability to do what we came to do at work Yeah, 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 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 Row. 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 They'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 examamined 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 Franis Frye. I'm a professor at the Harvard Business School and I'm Anne's wife And this is fixable from the TEed Audio Collective. On this show, we believe that meaningful change happens fast anythingything is fixable goodood solutions are often just a single brave conversation away Rort for today's episode comes from Square Think about the last time a local business major day a little better Maybe it was a quick checkout, a friendly hello, or someone remembering exactly what you like. For me, it's that perfect cappuccino from Lac Comne. Even on a busy morning Square helps the people running these shops to keep things moving. So they can focus on creating moments that matter As a business, you can track sales, manage inventory and access reports in real time whether you're in the shop on the go or running things all on your own With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity And why wait Right now, you can get up to two hundred dollars off square hardware at square. com slash go, slash fixable SQu AR E. com slash geo slash fixable Run your business smarter with Square and get started today This episode is powered by AT and T Business. I was thinking recently about those early days of building something of your own It's not just the little things You're building the whole plane as you fly it. Think of those mornings, you might find yourself sitting in a crowded coffee shop or the back of a library punched over a laptop and just hoping the public Wi Fi would hold long enough to upload a pitch It's a stressful way to start a day and an even harder way to build a legacy. You're working from wherever you can piecing things together, hoping everything holds, and it's funny Connectivity is one of those things you don't really think about until it becomes a problem And when it does, it can throw everything off. The last thing you want is to be worrying about whether things are going to work. when you need them to That's why AT and T business is a great provider for small business owners. It's built to work so you can stay focused on what you're building, powered by AT and T business Built to work, get today at business. at. com Here's something we've all experienced and somehow still accept as normal. Sitting on hold, repeating yourself, explaining the same problem to the fifth person who picks up This episode is brought to you by Parloa, the AI platform built to make that a thing of the past Parloa's AI agents work twenty four seven across voice, chat and email in any language and with zero way time They remember every customer interaction, so no one ever has to start over The result Service that doesn't feel like a transaction, it feels like being known The world's biggest brands already trust Parloa to deliver customer experiences at enterprise scale, because when loyalty is on the line, good enough simply isn't. See Parloa's AI agents in action at Parloa. com That's PAR LO A. com I Sutton and Huggy Ral, welcome to Fixable And it's great to see you in 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. 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. so I just fun 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. Um, we want to start with the problem you're focused on now, which as 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? Is it When I think of friction, I think of When an employee or a team is trying to do something And it's hard it feels harder than they want I 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. Huggy, 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? Oh. 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 of Excellence. people would kind of respond with was Feelings how hard it was to get anything done I 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. I'm thking at 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 Hm 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. Obstacles 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 and with scraps of herself that Huggy was describing. Another great line from 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 initiatives? 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 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, and 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 Dearing, 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. And how many leaders do that effortlessly? So I really like where Huggy's going with this because when it When it's dysfunctional, everybody points their fingers to everybody else and says it's everybody else's fault And I'll give you a little example. This is just about two months ago. I've got four hundred 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 Too many trivial things too often. A universal complaint that we hear. yeah And then I say to them You are The four hundred vice presidents in these huge companies. Why don't you look in the mirror and look at the Slack messages you sent this morning and start working on it? I love that. And it's a great example of the 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 wor. So for Bob and I, the outcome of subtraction may certainly be a more efficient organization What's most important is that we give employees the gift of time They've starved for time. And we have a case study that both of us wrote together about Astra enecca. where' a team of people They actually launched a social movement of sorts, if you will to save two million hours So you could serve four million more customers, run four hundred 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 talk I love that. You tell a story in the book that has really stuck with me about an executive named Scott So Scott is working sixteen 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 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, suppppose 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 fifty percent. So the number of standing meetings, the number the lengths of your emails Is that the idea That's a but but to be more realistic There's a woman named Rebecca Heines. So we worked with Rebecca on this thing called a meeting reset with sixty Asana employees. Rebecca did most of the work, to be clear And what she had sixty 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 thirty of them removed all standing meetings from their calendar for four to eight hours and put them back in. And 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 that to us, that's an example. you know it's not fifty percent 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 We 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? tryrying to create jobs so that people don't have scraps of themselves to go back home I love focus 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. Where's the starting place for people who are convinced? The simplest place 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, What of an initiative you want to come up with? ten 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 And 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 Qion. and not just a backroom whisper conversation, which is where it often happens. Bob, what would you add? would you Where would you advise people to start? Well, first of all, we heard this you because we teach executives and they're pretty smart usually. And I remember this woman saying that my job is part therapy and part organizational design. Organizational design is extremely important partart of your job as a leader is to be aware that there are going to be systems and situations can't be fixed at least for now. and 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, herer name is Clara Sai. So she's now CEO of AI at Salesforce. and she talked about when 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 caused us 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 And I thought that was 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. 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 just a poetic nuance to that and a higher mission to it. So the first thing is, while it's a like you're talking about friction, which seems likeike an operational morsel actually talking about moral. So you've gone from morals to morals in a really beifully put. 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 Lumve has to meet logistics., so let's talk about loveve. So the way this started, so we get introduced to a guy who's going be guest in Huggy's 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 Obama Care website And he's build a software company. He's a fixer. Okaykay. so he and his brother Ed started a company called Devoted Health, which what they do is they they make healthcare more accessible and clear for people over sixty five. And we all know hard it is to navigate the health care system. It's like it's unbelievable. We're interviewing him and he starts talking about love. I go, huh, you're like And he said so yes, he said, if you start with the notion that the person we're helping It's like your mother or your father and you love them 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 were 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, so 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. Some monoxide, somes talk about jargon monoxide because that's just fun. So essentially it's language that bores, confuses and overwhelms people This is This is when some a word which used to mean something means so many things to so many people that it qualifies for Daniel Konnman'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 forty different kinds of agile in forty minutes If something means forty different things to forty different people, it means nothing. So that would be an example of friction inducing jargon monoxide And super actionable to just let's let's say what we mean in a way that other can hear it. Yeah. And maybe this is a bridge to our conversation on good friction You know, a new case is underway about a company called Mind twenty four seell They are transforming, I would say, mental health care. You know, a startup by Stanford alum. 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 mean, they're building physical structures that are open twenty four seven. Yeah, mental health, you can't really schedule. Yeah Yeah 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. And I said, Who refers the patients to you And he said, you know The best referal sources are cops. I said cops. Yeah. 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 and will you take my, you know? And so we just Compress all of that And to give you a sense of love mating logistics, In their mental health clinics, you can actually get to see a psychiatrist in twenty two minutes Oh my gosh. Wow. twenty two 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 send is that of a car wash. you 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 that's so p. 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 a book that compares problem solving and increasingly difficult tasks among people who have higher and lower IQs and then they do these brain scans, FMRIs and everything. And what they found is that higher IQ people Solve easy problems faster Dicult problems slower but better And to me, that's a reasonable metaphor. and then and then I think we should talk about creativity So your colleague Tsa Mab,ife 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 Therano, So Elizabeth Holes is she in jail yet. I'm not sure But she cheated in lied because she had a hurry too much. Yeah, she was in a hurry. I would compare her to Greta Meyer and Amanda Calibrez. They started a company called SQL They're reinventing the modern tampon They just got FDA approval. They've got five million dollars in venture capitals They took every hard startup class at Stanford. They did everything the tough way. They formed a relationship through hell And they both finish their degrees and didn't drop out You could argue that FDA approver itself is an example of good friction. Yes. Yeah. and the obstacle can take various forms. Our wonderful colleague, Jennifer Eberhart, she worked with the Oakland Police Department And I believe I think it was twenty eighteen. they had like thirty one thousand 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 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, othertherwise let it go. Just adding that question lowered the number of stops by thirty one percent. And presumably crime did not increase. That's right, Anne. Ironically, 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 if you making it easy so easy to swipe left or right actually leads to worse outcomes in terms of people building relationships.. But then creating these higher friction, even if they're more awkward moments where strangers come together, actually created a context where people may stronger 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 And you know, our graduate student, we said, hey, Why don't you use large language models? Take a look at all the Bara startups and look at the mission vision statements and whatever public documents. 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 now? 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 one billion dollar valuation predictably, the more you emphasize speed, the faster you become a unicorn. So the graduates room were this is really cool. And we said, Wait a minute. Do another study, showh us what's the relationship between the time taken to get a 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 laws M. Well, friend, someone, I'm wondering where your head went, but I also want to make the link between This conversation and a book we published titles exactly where I'm going. It exactly where I'm going. So listen Your book came out after ours, but should we just tear it up Be' a 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. R But there are two aneidotes 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 and like Formula one or NASCAR. It's the people who know when hit the gass and no when hit the brakes. And 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 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 launch into the world is that Monday through Thursday is about creating good friction. And then on Friday, you earn the right right to eliminate all the bad friction We're just saying sequence it. Yeah. you know, it it's as I was reading your book, which I enjoyed The phrase that rang through my mind It was a phrase that apparently Augustus Caesar used to use when he sent his generals to battle And he would always st them apparently Make haste slowly And I sort of see that as like the connection. Yes. That's it, Huggy Weerere 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 unsavoring So you're talking about coping. It's like bad stuff. got to cope with it. I'm in a hurry. you know, I got to up. But savoring is 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 one hundred and twenty five different grocery stores. in Hlland. It warms my heart Yeah this is for the elderly customers. So that's savoring. Some things, you know, they ought to be slower What's the biggest thing that you hope listeners take away from this conversation Helly, why don't we start with you come to slowly realize that 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 make me realize How to put good friction in my life and how to take bad friction out of my life some 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. My minds 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. My 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 sixty people in line in front of me. It was seven thirty in the morning and 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's like seven hundred forty starts walking down the line and asking each person why they were there, he did triage. and But He gave me my form to fill out and I thought I was going to be there on morning. I was out by eight fifteen And they opened today and we had a zoom with the senior executives who run the California DMV And they are doing all the stuff with technology, with culture old fashioned process sort of design to improve the quality and in one transaction, which is called getting real ID, they've cut it from an average of twenty eight minutes to eight minutes for people who visit the DMV