Friction: Friend or Foe?

It depends. A couple of articles have prompted me to explore the concept of Friction Fixing in organisations and the nature of friction as bad and good depending on what you are trying to achieve. If I want to slow people down, make them think and perhaps prevent certain actions, friction is good. If I want to proceed at pace, act and remove obstacles, friction is bad. This Fast Company article sums it up well, so I thought I would share and reflect.

So many coaching conversations involve a discussion about pace - how fast to go and how hard to push, getting this right is a challenge many leaders face. When Robert Sutton (Organisational Psychologist and Stanford University professor emeritus of management science and engineering) worked on a book with Huggy Rao called The Friction Project: 'How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder'. 

I like the fact they take this from a perspective of enabling people to do the right thing more easily but then also slowing people down, or placing enough friction in place, to stop them doing the wrong thing. They also focus on times when friction is good and inevitable, during innovation for example. This is when leaders need to resist the urge to speed things up or wrap it all up neatly. It reminds me of when a wonderful academic (Dr Elizabeth Garnsey) reminded all of us first year PhD students that the journey of PhD research was like a topographical map - with bogs, swamps and forests in which thinking can get messy but with persistence and quality thinking, you could get through to the clearer open ground and your final destination. In that sense - the friction drove harder and deeper thinking, a good thing when you are trying to break new ground. 

Of particular interest are the thoughts they have shared in this article about the need for a subtraction mindset. I have often seen people grapple with the adaptation of a current process or system when the approach that would be best suited is a blank sheet of paper and an open mind unencumbered by the constraints of the status quo. Sometimes the most elegant solution is to subtract and simplify. I am going to deep dive into the book itself for further insights - watch this space for updates.