Numerous witty sayings about organisational behaviour have been left by management consultant—and widely referred to as the father of management—Peter Drucker. My personal favourite is, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
Fake work is an easy trap to slip into; it’s well-meaning work that uses up time, effort, and other resources and doesn’t improve performance indicators.
Professors Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao of Stanford University examine this phenomenon with clarity in their book The Friction Project: How Wise Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder.
Expert friction fixers, according to the authors, behave and think like stewards of other people’s time, freeing them up to concentrate on more important things.
What distinguishes good organisational friction from harmful organisational friction?
According to Sutton, “Organisational barriers that make the right things too difficult, too frustrating, or downright impossible to do” are what create bad friction. Like the drawn-out and confusing phone tree, I had to deal with to get my internet provider to fix a mistake before they put me on a 45-minute hold to speak with a live being who then inadvertently hung up on me, forcing me to repeat the entire operation over”.
He goes on to say that, “good friction” is present when there are barriers that make tasks more difficult, slow you down, or completely prevent you from doing them.
What kinds of damaging conflict does he frequently observe in organisations?
It depends on the industry, according to Sutton. “In the healthcare industry, electronic health records are a major burden for nurses and doctors, causing them to spend more time staring at screens and entering data than actually examining and interacting with patients.”
According to a 2019 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, physicians spent 43% of their time updating patients’ electronic data and only 13% treating patients.
Emails, meetings, bureaucracy—such as pointless laws and regulations—and “workplace vigilantes,” who take it upon themselves to obstruct workflow, are among the top offenders for those in administrative roles, such as executives and managers. Research from Katy DeCelles at the Rotman Business School supports this theory.
Vigilantes, according to Sutton, are “people who mistrust their colleagues and—even though they lack authority—appoint themselves as ‘judge, jury, and deliverer of justice.'” According to DeCelles and Aquino, 42% of workers had gone on “some kind of strange power trip” or “on patrol for anyone who didn’t abide 100% by any rules or regulations” with coworkers.
According to Sutton, vigilantes alert coworkers to minor infractions like arriving late by two minutes or having an untidy desk. He continues to say that they make life miserable for coworkers and customers by upholding every regulation to the letter and, occasionally, creating and imposing barriers that they think are appropriate, even though they are superfluous or even downright oppressive.
Embracing friction: The essential ingredient for optimal performance
According to Sutton and Rao, achieving a frictionless organisation is not the aim, and excellent friction—which is sometimes disregarded—is a crucial component of effective performance.
Sutton goes on to say that not everything in life should be quick, simple, or even achievable. It ought to be impossible to commit immoral or unlawful acts. For example, “It gives me comfort to know that Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO of Theranos, was prevented from installing her company’s inefficient blood testing device in the U.S. Army helicopters because the FDA had not given it the green light”, he asserts.
The finest leaders force their team members to slow down and give their work serious thought so that it is done correctly, especially when they are perplexed, facing a challenging task, or creating something novel and unique.
The power of pausing and fixing for organisational success
Sutton and Rao stated in their previous book “Scaling Up Excellence” that businesses with failing products or services would be better off “slowing down and fixing things” as opposed to “keep rushing ahead and selling something crummy and that drives away customers.”
Noam Bardin, the original CEO of the navigation service Waze, is one example they give. According to Sutton, there was a period in Bardin’s company’s history when the majority of people who downloaded and used the app just once or twice would never use it again. Thus, he put an end to all product development and instituted a hiring freeze. He gave the order for everyone in the organisation to investigate the app’s issue.
They created a prioritised list of the issues that needed to be fixed during the six-week break, at which point they got to work on the product. A few months later, they began employing new personnel. Once they downloaded the program, most users continued to use it because of its significant improvements. After WAZE grew popular, Bardin sold the business to Google for around a billion dollars a few years later.
When negative conflict is discovered, leaders take action rather than merely whining
To develop a meeting reset tool, Rebecca Hinds, the director of Asana’s Work Innovation Lab, collaborated with 60 of her coworkers to evaluate the importance and effort involved in each standing meeting that was scheduled. Workers found hundreds of low-value meetings, and with Rebecca’s help, they altered some to be shorter, less frequent, or involving fewer people and eliminated others. Participating in this “meeting reset,” the typical employee saved roughly four per month.
How do the most effective leaders decide how much work to cut?
Sutton states, “They perform what we refer to as good riddance audits.” They calculate the amount of time lost on meetings, emails, Slack chats, pointless training, overuse of apps, and similar activities. After that, they take action.
Once more, for all these advancements to occur, leaders must regard themselves as stewards of the time of others.
Effective leaders are acutely aware of how their actions within the group, their rules and norms, and the organisational structures they design facilitate the correct behaviours and impede the bad ones. They concentrate on how they may continue to improve things for those in their “cone of friction”—that is, those who are affected by their choices and deeds—such as their coworkers and clients.
“That mindset was demonstrated by the CEO we met who worked to write emails that were 50% shorter because it would save his thousands of employees so much time,” Sutton says. “It was demonstrated by the security guard at a large pharmaceutical company who figured out how to remove the gate in the parking lot and develop a more efficient security system for ensuring that all visitors were authorised. This eliminated the morning traffic jam at the entrance to the company parking lot.”
In conclusion, the anecdotes shared by Sutton and Rao underscore the pivotal role of embracing constructive friction and pausing for reflection in organisational dynamics. By addressing shortcomings head-on, companies can pivot from failure to success, fostering resilience and growth while retaining valuable talent.
Embracing the power of slowing down and fixing not only improves products and services but also nurtures a culture of innovation and dedication among employees, ultimately propelling organisations towards sustainable excellence.
(Tashia Bernardus)