#240: The Friction Project

Dear friends

If my current client conversations are anything to go by, you’re probably drowning in meetings and processes, bouncing from one thing to the next, feeling overwhelmed and powerless – two deadly drivers of burnout – to change it.

Today’s letter draws on Stanford University’s Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao’s The Friction Project to give you corporate cholesterol-crushing possibilities.

Please share it with your friction-frustrated colleagues. We can accelerate our effectiveness by developing a common understanding of our challenges and a shared language for exploring solutions. This could be your start to a happier work life. They can subscribe here.

/strategy
Nearly sixty years ago, Peter Drucker observed, “The fewer people, the smaller, the less activity inside, the more nearly perfect is the organization in terms of its only reason for existence: the service to the environment.”

As organisations grow, they become more complex. The ‘inside’ demands more and more time, stealing time from the ‘outside’.

In 1944, the CIA released The Simple Sabotage Field Manual. It gave the European resistance subtle mechanisms to weaken Nazi occupiers. It included gems like:

• “Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.’ Never permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
• When possible, refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration.’ Attempt to make the committee as large as possible.

• To lower morale and, with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.
• Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, paychecks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do”

Are you starting to feel uncomfortable? Wondering whether the CIA has taken control of your business? Bureaucratic demands can undeniably sabotage your happiness and effectiveness.  

The Friction Project is packed with cringe-worthy, but sadly familiar, expressions of similar corporate inefficiency, “In 2015, when Hootsuite’s director of technology, Noel Pullen, tried to send a customer a $15 company T-shirt, so many approvals were required that Noel calculated it cost $200 to send the single shirt. Noel hounded people in finance and marketing to scrap this ordeal and trust employees to send T-shirts.”

I am sure you have at least one parallel in your business. If you’re honest, you can think of three.

Sutton and Rao’s work overflows with inspiring examples of proactive problem-solvers simplifying their business lives. They suggest seven methods to find subtraction targets (stuff that’s clogging up the system, slowing it down). Here are my five favourites:

1. “Identify stupid stuff. Lisa Bodell, CEO of FutureThink, asks, ‘If you could kill all the rules that frustrate you or slow down your efficiency, what would they be?’ A similar spirit propelled the Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff effort at Hawaii Pacific Health. Dr. Melinda Ashton asked healthcare workers to nominate anything in the electronic patient records system that ‘was poorly designed, unnecessary, or just plain stupid’ – which generated 188 subtraction targets.’”
2. “Figure out the value and cost of your meetings. In their Meeting Reset, sixty Asana employees rated each of their standing meetings. They identified more than five hundred meetings that were of low value”. (More on this next week).
3. “Catalog sources of email overload. The average employee spends 28 percent of their time dealing with emails. Is this true at your company (or is it worse)? Review the number, length, recipients, and timing of the emails that people send and receive. What can you subtract? Perhaps an email policy like that used at the consulting firm Vynamic will help. They call it zzzMail, as in catching some z’s: ‘team members are to refrain from sending emails to other team members between 10pm and 6am Monday through Friday, all day Saturday and Sunday, and all Vynamic holidays. In urgent matters, a call or text is preferred over email.’”
4. “Build a journey map. Diagram the stages that customers or clients travel through as they try to get information, obtain services, or buy products from an organization—and how they, and employees, feel along the way.”  
5. “Try a perfectionism audit. In The Systems Bible, John Gall proposed the Perfectionist’s Paradox: in complex systems, ‘striving for perfection is a serious imperfection.’ Pressures for perfection cause needless effort and delay, interfere with learning from imperfect prototypes, and provoke despair. Many things that are worth doing—or are required by others—aren’t worth doing well. Or, as Gall preaches, ought to be done poorly. In that spirit, ask people to identify tasks where the standards are too narrow or too high, or that are enforced with too much zeal.”

(If you’re in a friction-busting mood, you’ll also enjoy Bin It, Time and Cash, and How To Be Effective).

//self
This week, I popped into our local bookstore, mostly on a whim, an analogue equivalent of my scouring websites for classic watches I’ll never buy, the classic Porsche I can’t afford, and the commercial building waiting to be conjured into an architectural wonder that I never seem to find.

Ma Boyong’s The City of Silence in last week’s letter was front of mind, so I asked the assistants if they read sci-fi. For a moment I expected a kiss, I’d asked the right question. As the books piled up, time travellers, misplaced magicians, erratic robots, I realised my question was not specific enough, so I modified, “Sci-fi driven by socio-political commentary”. The tower-building stopped. The young curly-haired man turned to me, soft brown eyes suddenly contemplative behind his glasses, “For that you need female authors. They’re the only ones who understand what is going on”.

I left with R.F. Kuang’s Babel, Sierra Greer’s Annie Bot and Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice.

Leckie is a record breaker. Published in 2013, Ancillary Justice was her debut novel and is the only novel to ever win the Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards.  

She first laid out her sketch of what would become Ancillary Justice in 2002. It lay dormant for a few years, until she returned to it, writing for six years before it was finally picked up by a publisher in 2012. She was 47.

Leckie reminds us that success has no age limit, and it never comes overnight. Behind every broken record are years of unseen, uncelebrated effort.

///soul
In 2019, her novel The Raven Tower was longlisted for the Hugo Award. Remarkably, she withdrew it from consideration. Why? She felt there were many wonderful books, ones that she loved, some that were debuts, many more than there were places on the shortlist and, by then, she’d won multiple awards. Her withdrawal gave others a better chance.

It is a beautiful thing to be aware of one’s privilege and take action, no matter how small, to extend it to others.

All the best

Karl

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