Fixing Bad Friction, Finding Good Friction

Full Transcript

Note: This transcript was generated by an automated system and has been lightly edited for clarity. It may contain errors or omissions.

Kevin Cool: You hurry off the plane, down the jetway through the airport, and onto baggage claim, where you watch an empty conveyor belt spin until your suitcase trundles down and back into your hands.

Kristin Allen: Waiting for your bag is never fun. We all know that.

Kevin Cool: That’s Kristin Allen, one of the project managers for the new Terminal 1 at San Francisco International Airport. When they were designing the new terminal, the planners wanted to minimize the frustration many passengers feel when they’re waiting for their bags.

Kristin Allen: Knowing that it only takes between two and five minutes for the bags to get here really makes sense based on the walking distances. So, as you’ll see here, you’ll see the claim start to move when the first bag is ready to arrive.

And if we look at this claim that just started up, and that announcement just happened, bags are already coming out, and people are trickling in right now to get their bags.

Kevin Cool: You might assume the priority is to get passengers to baggage claim as quickly as possible, but that’s not necessarily true. In Houston, for example, airport executives were surprised when passengers complained about wait times, despite having located baggage claim close to the arrival gates. Then somebody had an unorthodox idea: place gates further away from baggage claim, which meant passengers had a longer walk, but less time standing around the carousel.

The new plan worked. The complaints all but disappeared. Adding distance wouldn’t normally be seen as something to improve an experience, but if the alternative is waiting in one spot, it could be a welcome change. In San Francisco, the new terminal seems to have found the sweet spot.

Kristin Allen: So, you sort of get the trickle-in effect, and that flight that arrived, that claim is already cleared out and everyone’s gone, and within minutes.

Passenger: Like, I just walked up and boom, came out. After a long flight, it’s the best, you know?

Passenger: I probably would, would rather walk around in the time that I’d spend waiting, ‘cause, I mean, otherwise I’m just standing here.

Passenger: I like walking, getting where we’re going to go, and have my stuff ready to go when I get there. So, when we got here, our bags were ready.

Passenger: I’d prefer to end my walk as the bags were coming out, and here’s my bag. Bye.

Kevin Cool: Extending the walk from gate to claim is an unusual example of friction. And when introducing friction improves an experience, you can call it ‘good friction’ according to Huggy Rao, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He’s also the co-author, along with Bob Sutton, of The Friction Project.

Huggy Rao: Friction for us has to do with obstacles. Obstacles can disable you. Obstacles can enable you.

Kevin Cool: Today, we’re talking with Huggy about how to create good friction, eliminate bad friction, and how both contribute to scaling effectively. This is If/Then from Stanford GSB, where we sit down with faculty and explore how their research deepens our understanding of business and leadership. I’m your host, Kevin Cool.

Why don’t you just give us a sort of, uh, back of the envelope description of what you mean by friction in this context? What are we talking about?

Huggy Rao: So, examples of obstacles enabling you are when you skate, friction makes us go around. When you ski, there’s friction. Without it, it would be way dangerous, as you can imagine. But there’s also friction that overwhelms you, exhausts you, confuses you.

So, when we think of friction, we like to use the analogy of cholesterol. All of us have bad cholesterol, we’ve got good cholesterol, LDL and HDL. It’s the same thing with friction. You got bad friction, anything that confuses, overwhelms, exhausts. And good friction, that actually slows you down, gets you to pause, most of all, gets you to reflect.

Kevin Cool: You’ve described it as making good things easier and bad things harder.

Huggy Rao: What should any leader make easy? We suggest it’s curiosity and generosity. And how do you make them easy? By removing obstacles that confuse, overwhelm, and distract people. What should you make harder to do in any organization? We suggest the two culprits are overconfidence and myopia.

Kevin Cool: Overconfidence and myopia.

Huggy Rao: Yeah. Easy to be overconfident, easy to be myopic, have tunnel vision, and both go hand in hand. And there, what we suggest is you put in good friction to actually slow down people, get them to think a little bit, get them to reflect, or don’t do things mindlessly.

Kevin Cool: So, Let’s talk a little bit about where friction comes from, and I do want to get into some more examples that you have in your book. But what’s the origin of friction? Does it just come from good intentions gone bad, or what happens?

Huggy Rao: I think, uh, it’s a great question. I would say if you take bad friction, often it’s the tragedy of good intentions. It sounds great, and then you tell people you have to do A, B, and C, and whatever you think is important or necessary, they perceive to be obstacles.

Another source of friction is, if you will, blindness. And what I mean by that is the higher up you are in an organization, you have privilege. And what privilege does is it shields you from inconvenience. So, you have no idea, … of what the life of people, you know, in the ranks is. So, as a result, what you do is you constantly are adding things.

What does all of this addition do? We often psychologize these things. We say, “Oh my God, there’s stress and there’s burnout.” And these are consequences for the individual, no doubt, but the consequences for the organization are the loss of initiative, the loss of curiosity, and the loss of generosity. And the reason is you don’t have any willpower.

Kevin Cool: Yeah.

Huggy Rao: If I ask you to do 10 things,

Kevin Cool: Right

Huggy Rao: … how can you have any willpower? How can you have bandwidth?

Kevin Cool: Is there a sense in which in some organizations people are incentivized, but, you know, if you think about brainstorming activities, for example, well, what’s going to happen from that?

There’s going to be ideas to do new things or maybe different things, but new things. So, there are some built-in incentives, aren’t there?

Huggy Rao: Completely. All of these are sources of addition bias. The problem is organizations don’t realize that scaling means not just getting bigger. Scaling is about getting better. It’s about scaling excellence. You can get big, but that doesn’t mean you’re getting better.

Kevin Cool: Right.

Huggy Rao: And the key to scaling is smart subtraction.

Kevin Cool: So, let’s talk about meetings for a moment, because I think on the list of things that might be considered bad friction are meetings. And of course, lots of people complain about meetings, and you use an example about Dropbox in your book, about how they banned organization-wide meetings.

And I’m curious to know, first of all, how that worked out for them, and also how would someone who’s leading an organization think about the role that meetings play in getting in the way, being an obstacle, or finding the right size to make it productive but not an obstacle?

Huggy Rao: Right. Um, both great questions. Meetings consume us, as you know. In Dropbox, since you raised that question, uh, the CEO is, of course, the CTO and the others, they’re brilliant, uh, executives. And this was after Dropbox had an IPO. Both Bob and I had a chance to meet the CEO.

Kevin Cool: And Bob is Bob Sutton, Bob is your, your co-author.

Huggy Rao: Yes. My wonderful co-author, conspirator, um, comrade, wine drinker, … teacher. He’s taught me a lot of things as well, for which I’m eternally grateful. We asked him, we said, “Hey, Dropbox has had a great IPO. What’s your biggest challenge?” And he fingered meetings as the big challenge. He called it OurMeetinggeddon.

Kevin Cool: OurMeetinggeddon.

Huggy Rao: Like a play on Armageddon.

Kevin Cool: Sure.

Huggy Rao: And then, of course, he’s the CEO, and so he issued an edict. And the edict was like a set of guidelines saying, “Don’t have meetings without a clear owner, clear purpose,” and so on, so on and so forth. Couple of weeks later, we met him and said, “Hey, how is this edict working?” and he sort of smiled at us and said, “The problem is worse than ever.” We said, “Why? You’re the CEO.”

And he said something very wise. He said, “Subtraction isn’t one and done. It’s like mowing the lawn. You gotta do it like pretty regularly. If you don’t mow the lawn, the weeds are gonna overrun the place.”

Now, the problem with meetings is, we have to consider the incentives of people who organize them and the incentives of people who attend them. The big thing is FOMO, fear of missing out.

Kevin Cool: Yeah.

Huggy Rao: I want the boss to see me, particularly in this era of remote and hybrid work.

Kevin Cool: Right.

Huggy Rao: I need to be noticed.

Kevin Cool: Being present matters. Yeah.

Huggy Rao: Completely. On the other hand, from the organizer’s viewpoint, having a meeting that a lot of people attend is a signal of status. Because look at how many people whose time I can waste. And they can’t do anything. It’s like this-

Kevin Cool: It’s a captive audience sort of.

Huggy Rao: Completely. Trapped is the way I would describe it ‘cause that’s how they feel. That’s how I feel when I attend meetings. So how do you solve problems? We have one of our PhD students now who’s actually doing very interesting work on meetings, Rebecca Hinds, and she’s written a book on meetings. And one of the things she found was the place to begin is attack recurring meetings that are scheduled by default. You don’t need to have recurring meetings all the time.

Kevin Cool: The ones that are scheduled on your calendar for literally a year.

Huggy Rao: Right. Right? Those you need to take aim at. The other is don’t have back-to-back meetings because when you go from one meeting to another, you’re exhausted. Create time. Create space.

For me, I wish organizations were more mischievous. So, on the incentives to attend, I would actually give a gold medal to the person who attends the most meetings in any company. Would you like to get a gold medal like that, Kevin? People kind of say, “Man, I don’t want to be tagged like that.”

Kevin Cool: Yeah, yeah.

Huggy Rao: You know? Yeah. So, you can actually do that. See, the real hallmark of bosses for Bob and I is that great leaders are people who think of themselves as trustees of other people’s time.

Kevin Cool: Trustees of other people’s time.

Huggy Rao: Yeah.

Kevin Cool: Okay.

Huggy Rao: They don’t want to piss the time of other people away.

Kevin Cool: Yeah. Are there ways for someone to know that they are wasting people’s time? Is that a sort of built-in organizational guardrail of some kind? Is that just a cultural situation?

Huggy Rao: I think the telltale signs are people inspect their cell phones. People are looking at their tablets. What does that tell you?

Kevin Cool: Yeah, yeah.

Huggy Rao: You know, nobody’s paying any attention. The other thing I recommend is if you really want a meeting to be productive, get a customer inside the meeting. They’re going to say, “Jesus, this is what you’re doing? That’s why you’re charging us this high price?”

Kevin Cool: When we’re back, we’ll hear about good friction and how to create it.

Now, you made an allusion a moment ago to good friction, so let’s pivot and talk about good friction and why that’s important as well. So, what, first of all, what do you mean by good friction, and how might that be expressed?

Huggy Rao: So good friction can take many forms, but most of all, any method of slowing down people, getting them to reflect. Whenever I think of good friction, I go back often, Kevin, to the Roman Empire. So, one of the descendants of Julius Caesar, I believe it was Augustus Caesar, he expanded the Roman Empire, and he had fascinatingly a one-line instruction to his generals before they went into battle. And he would tell them, “Make haste slowly.”

Kevin Cool: Make haste slowly.

Huggy Rao: And the reason is, if you make haste without slowing down, your formations can, can get disorganized. Your ability to observe the enemy may be compromised, and so on. So that’s why make haste slowly. Don’t pre-commit and get yourself into trouble.

Kevin Cool: That reminds me of something similar the great basketball coach John Wooden used to say, “Go fast, but don’t be in a hurry.” right?

Huggy Rao: There, well, you know, there you go. Yeah,

Kevin Cool: yeah.

Huggy Rao: That’s a brilliant line. And John Wooden, to me, is one of my great philosophers.

Kevin Cool: Absolutely. Wonderful teacher, for sure. This is going to be a strange example of good friction, but it just popped into my head. You know, if you think of a household as an organization-

Huggy Rao: Indeed

Kevin Cool: Um, I’ve had elderly relatives in recent years who made decisions about where they were going to live on whether or not there were stairs, but it’s the opposite of what you might assume. They wanted stairs for two reasons. One, it was exercise for them. It required them to, you know, if they wanted something, they had to get some exercise to get it.

But also, it made them think more about how many trips they were going to need to make up there.

Huggy Rao: Completely.

Kevin Cool: So, in a, in a strange way, they were producing good friction by choosing to live in a place that had a stairwell. So, yeah.

Huggy Rao: That’s right. You know, I think I love that example because what are they doing? They’re not using words like the ones I’m using. They’re actually doing a mental simulation. And one of the things they’re also saying is, “Hey,” maybe they didn’t say it to you in this language, Kevin. Most of us, what’s our problem? Weak will.

Kevin Cool: Weak will, yes.

Huggy Rao: Yeah, we’re not resolute choosers.

Kevin Cool: Yeah.

Huggy Rao: You know, we’re not people who are going to say, “I’m going to exercise every day.” Sounds great, but those are hard to implement.

Kevin Cool: Yeah, yeah.

Huggy Rao: So, what we need is we need affordances. We need assists. Stairs, in your lovely example, are an assist.

Kevin Cool: Right, right. So, let’s scope out just a little bit and think about friction sort of at the societal level because you make the point that if we get this wrong, it actually can affect our trust in institutions, for example. Talk a little bit about that.

Huggy Rao: I think, uh, the harder you make something, and one of the examples we give is in the state of Michigan, where for welfare applicants, I think the form they had to complete had, I think, uh, several thousand words, maybe more than 18 or 20,000 words. And one of the questions was, “Please tell us the date on which your child was conceived.”

Now, exactly how is that an input into making a decision on whether to grant welfare payments to an applicant? When you have so many obstacles, what do people do? They generate conspiracy theory. They say, “Oh my God, there’s a cabal out there. And you know what? They have sinister motives. They’re out to screw us.”

Kevin Cool: Is authority itself in jeopardy as a result of all of this?

Huggy Rao: I would say we are living in an era where there is distrust of authority. Uh, Gallup surveys of millennials and Gen Z and on and on, they show declining trust in leaders and institutions. And some of it actually has to do with the fact that people don’t perceive the system to be fair.

Kevin Cool: Right.

Huggy Rao: You know, for me, it’s very difficult to explain to anybody why there is a huge pay differential between a low-level employee and the CEO of a publicly listed company. If you’re a founder, you created your company, of course. It’s the company you’ve built, and you can pay for it yourself and whatever. But on the other hand, you’re a hired gun in a publicly listed company, and your pay is like two, 300 times the pay of the rank and file or more, possibly. You kind of say like, “Why?”

Kevin Cool: Yeah. Yeah.

Huggy Rao: And how come you get bonuses, but you don’t get punished when there’s poor performance?

Kevin Cool: So, Huggy, your research interests are quite broad. So how did you land on friction as an area of focus?

Huggy Rao: Great question. For me, the whole thing is anything I can’t understand is worth studying. It’s not like I have a 10-year plan. I wish I did. Some people do, but like I don’t, I don’t like to do the same thing over and over, kind of gets boring for me, I like a little bit of variety. And the reason we wrote The Friction Project was, when we were sharing, Bob and I were sharing ideas from Scaling Up Excellence, the top echelons loved our message. But as we went lower down, the lament we heard was, “It’s very hard to get anything done in this company.”

We had one participant tell us, we asked him, “Where do you work?” And the guy says, “I work in a frustration factory.”

Kevin Cool: Oh, my goodness.

Huggy Rao: What does that tell you?

Kevin Cool: Yeah, that’s quite an indictment.

Huggy Rao: And another young woman told us something that brought tears to my eyes. She said, “Professor, at the end of the day, when I go home, I only have the scraps of myself for my family.” It’s tragic, Kevin.

Kevin Cool: Oh, oh. Yes.

Huggy Rao: And what is even more tragic is the tendency of companies in the United States to psychologize the problem. If you had made that observation, Kevin, what would the average American company say? “Oh my God, Kevin has a work-life balance issue.” “Let’s give him a meditation app.”

I mean is that an answer to this? The answer is poor design, the lousy way in which we design companies. So that’s how we got into The Friction Project.

Kevin Cool: Oh.

Huggy Rao: But what The Friction Project does is it really gladdens our heart, when I say Bob and I again, when people say, “You know, this book gives me a vocabulary to describe my pain. This book gives me suggestions to address something that causes anger, disillusionment, disenchantment.” And we treasure that. Because after all, what is the mission, of course, of the Stanford Business School? It’s to change lives, change organizations. Changing society, it’s, like, pretty difficult, for me at least. But we have a reasonable shot at changing some lives, changing some organizations, and that’s what gladdens me about The Friction Project.

Kevin Cool: Well, Huggy, thank you. This has been delightful. Thank you so much-

Huggy Rao: My pleasure

Kevin Cool: … for being a guest on our show.

Huggy Rao: My pleasure.

Kevin Cool: If/Then is a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business. I’m your host, Kevin Cool. Our show is written and produced by Making Room and the content and design team at the GSB. Our managing producers are Michael McDowell and Elizabeth Wyleczuk Stern Executive producers are Sorrel Husbands Denholtz and Jim Colgan.

Sound design and additional production support by Mumble Media and Aech Ashe. And a special thanks to Kristin Allen, Ryan Louis, and Doug Yackel at San Francisco International Airport.

For more on our faculty and their research, find Stanford GSB online at gsb.stanford.edu or on social media @stanfordGSB. Thanks for listening. We’ll be back with another episode soon.

Passenger: Logan’s the worst there is.

Producer: Why? What’s, why is that?

Passenger: ‘Cause you’d be waiting for about 45 minutes for any bag. Another problem that we have at our, at Logan, and I don’t know if it’s other places, is it tells you, you go sometimes to two or three different carousels till you get the right carousel.

Producer: And what was that like here?

Passenger: We didn’t even look. They told us on the plane three, and that was the number we were at.