Friction 101: How to make the right things easier and wrong things harder (w/ Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao) (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Anne Morriss:
Frances, how are you?

[00:00:03] Frances Frei:
Oh, I'm doing well today, baby.

[00:00:05] Anne Morriss:
On a scale of one to 10, what is the level of friction you're experiencing in your life today?

[00:00:11] Frances Frei:
Well, may I be annoying?

[00:00:14] Anne Morriss:
A-always. You don't need my consent.

[00:00:17] Frances Frei:
If you say on a scale of zero to 10, I know which one is higher, so…

[00:00:21] Anne Morriss:
This is, this is my least favorite form of, of friction. The 0 to 10 scale friction. Why don't you explain what you mean, honey? For all our eager listeners out there.

[00:00:35] Frances Frei:
So loads of customer research was done, and they would always give a scale of 1 to 10 for how satisfied you were. And what they found out is that some people interpreted 10 at the top of the scale, and some people interpreted 1 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 10, we know which is the best and which is the worst.

[00:00:56] Anne Morriss:
Do we really want the people who are confused in the dataset? It seems obvious that 10 is best.

[00:01:04] Frances Frei:
Um, except for at the Harvard Business School, we give grades of a one, two, and three, which is best.

[00:01:11] Anne Morriss:
It's, no, you're, uh, unpersuaded.

[00:01:13] Frances Frei:
I didn't hear the answer.

[00:01:14] Anne Morriss:
In fact we never, we never have to have this conversation again.

[00:01:17] Frances Frei:
Thank you. Thank you.

[00:01:19] Anne Morriss:
Uh, so why don't we call this getting on the same page friction.

[00:01:21] Frances Frei:
I love it. Or maybe speaking the same language friction.

[00:01:25] Anne Morriss:
Or maybe letting your wife win this one friction.

[00:01:27] Frances Frei:
Oh. You know what? That would've been a good note to have gotten earlier on. Huh.

[00:01:30] Anne Morriss:
You know, it's, uh, 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. And 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.

[00:01:51] Frances Frei:
That is an absolutely true statement, and just the smallest amount of friction can just veer me off course for days, for days.

[00:01:59] Anne Morriss:
So, uh, you and I are obsessed with this question of how to set people up for success, and I love identifying friction as this very material variable in our ability to do what we came to do at work.

[00:02:14] Frances Frei:
Yeah, I often refer to pebbles and boulders, and the way that it, I often encounter it is that people feel like they have a, 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.

[00:02:38] Anne Morriss:
Well, 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 Rao. Both are fantastic Stanford professors, and they are co-authors of a new book called The Friction Project.

[00:02:57] Frances Frei:
I love that our listeners are gonna get to meet Bob and Huggy. A, 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.

[00:03:17] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. I'm really excited to dig in here. I think this topic is under-examined as an important issue in the workplace.

[00:03:27] Frances Frei:
I'm so excited. Let's dive in.

[00:03:29] Anne Morriss:
I'm Anne Morris. I'm a company builder and leadership coach.

[00:03:32] Frances Frei:
And I'm Frances Frei. I'm a professor at the Harvard Business School and I'm Anne's wife.

[00:03:37] Anne Morriss:
And this is Fixable from the TED Audio Collective. On this show, we believe that meaningful change happens fast, anything is fixable, and good solutions are often just a single brave conversation away.

Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao, welcome to Fixable.

[00:04:05] Bob Sutton:
Anne, it's great to see you and Frances. I'm so excited.

[00:04:09] Huggy Rao:
It's a delight to be here to, this afternoon.

[00:04:12] Anne Morriss:
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.

[00:04:29] Frances Frei:
Loved.

[00:04:30] Anne Morriss:
It’s true, truly fantastic, and really one of the pleasures of the past year has been getting to know your work better. So, um, thank you, uh, for, for that gift as well.

[00:04:40] Bob Sutton:
I’ve loved getting to know, um, your work better and the two of you just crack me up, so I’m… it’s just fun to talk to you.

[00:04:48] Anne Morriss:
Well, that, that is really the bar that we're shooting for, uh, and the metric we care most about. So, um, that's a great start for us. Um, we wanna 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.

[00:05:11] Huggy Rao:
That's a wonderful summary.

[00:05:12] Bob Sutton:
I think that's a classic, really difficult challenge that every leader struggles with every day.

[00:05:18] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. Well that's why we're excited for this conversation. So in your work, how do you define friction? What is it?

[00:05:25] Bob Sutton:
Um, when I think of friction, I think of when an employee or a team is trying to do something, and it's hard, it, it feels harder than they want. That, 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?

[00:05:45] Huggy Rao:
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?

[00:06:00] Frances Frei:
Oh, look at you.

[00:06:01] Anne Morriss:
Mm. Oh, now, that’s, that's lovely. Well, let's go to some examples. So where am I most likely to see it in the workplace?

[00:06:09] Huggy Rao:
So after Bob and I wrote, uh, this lovely book called Scaling Up Excellence, what people would kind of respond with was feelings of 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.” And I'm thinking to 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.” 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.

[00:07:17] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.

[00:07:17] Huggy Rao:
Obstacles that, uh, anger, infuriate and fundamentally exhaust people, if you will, you just give up.

[00:07:25] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. So, Bob, what's the most damaging type of friction?

[00:07:29] Bob Sutton:
The most damaging kind is, is the kind that, uh, kills people's will.

[00:07:34] Anne Morriss:
The woman who comes home and, uh, with scraps of herself that Huggy was describing. Yeah.

[00:07:38] Bob Sutton:
Another great line from, from another executive we talked to was, uh, “I feel like I'm swimming in a sea of shit and, um, why do they expect me to show any initiative?” So, that’s the bad friction. And, and you know, if you sort of go down the, the standard list, it's emails.

[00:07:57] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.

[00:07:58] Bob Sutton:
It’s, uh, meetings, it's routines and procedures that make things difficult.

[00:08:04] Anne Morriss:
So, 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?

[00:08:09] Bob Sutton:
One is that, uh, for people in leadership positions, and in fact almost anyone, your job is to be a trustee of others' time. And then, uh, stealing a line from an HBS grad, um, named Michael Dearing, now a venture capitalist. He had this argument that the best leaders see themselves as editors in chief.

[00:08:30] Anne Morriss:
I love that metaphor.

[00:08:31] Huggy Rao:
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 wanna piss it away. And how many leaders do that effortlessly?

[00:08:45] Bob Sutton:
So I really like where Huggy’s going with this because it, 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 was just about two months ago. I've got 400 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 on too many trivial things too often.

[00:09:10] Anne Morriss:
A universal complaint that we hear. Yeah.

[00:09:12] Bob Sutton:
And then I say to them, you are the 400 vice presidents in this 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?

[00:09:25] Anne Morriss:
I, I love that. And it's a great example of this 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.

[00:09:40] Huggy Rao:
One minor thing, um, 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 work.

[00:10:06] Anne Morriss:
Mm.

[00:10:07] Huggy Rao:
So, for Bob and I, the outcome of subtraction may certainly be a more efficient organization, but what's most important is that we give employees the gift of time. They're starved for time. And we have a case study that both of us wrote together about AstraZeneca, where a team of people, they actually launched a social movement of sorts, if you will, to save 2 million hours. So you could serve 4 million more customers, run 400 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 time.

[00:10:55] Anne Morriss:
I, I love that. You, you tell a story in the book that, that has really stuck with me about an executive named Scott.

[00:11:04] Bob Sutton:
Ah!

[00:11:05] Anne Morriss:
Uh, so Scott is working 16 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. So are these the kind of results you're willing to commit to for our listeners?

[00:11:27] Bob Sutton:
Well, so you gotta be careful with people like us who do management cases 'cause we tend to make excessive claims. But the principle that, that we talk about, suppose we applied the rule of halves.

[00:11:40] Anne Morriss:
So Bob, so for the non-academics, uh, among us out here, so the rule of halves is you're just, you're cutting a work burden by 50%. So the number of standing meetings, the number, the length—

[00:11:52] Bob Sutton:
That’s a goal.

[00:11:53] Anne Morriss:
—of your emails. Is that the idea?

[00:11:55] Bob Sutton:
That, that’s a goal . But, but, but to be more realistic, uh, there's a woman named Rebecca Hinds. So we worked with Rebecca on this thing called a “meeting reset” with 60 Asana employees. Rebecca did most of the work to be clear, and, and what she had, um, 60 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, 30 of them removed all standing meetings from their calendar for 48 hours and put them back in. And on average, the average person saved about four hours a month by eliminating meetings, by making 'em shorter, less often, smaller, things like that. And that to us, that's an example. Uh, you know, it, it—

[00:12:40] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.

[00:12:42] Bob Sutton:
It’s not 50%, but it's four hours a month, which ain't nothing.

[00:12:46] Anne Morriss:
Mm.

[00:12:46] Huggy Rao:
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? Uh, 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? You know? 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? Trying to create jobs so that people don't have scraps of themselves to go back home.

[00:13:49] Anne Morriss:
Mm-hm. I love focusing on the metric of how employees feel, not only when they're working, but, but at the end of the day. So say I'm listening and you have my attention, where do I even begin, uh, to solve this problem. Where's the starting place for people who are convinced?

[00:14:06] Huggy Rao:
The simplest place is to get people to think of how do we get rid of stupid stuff.

[00:14:14] Bob Sutton:
Exactly.

[00:14:15] Huggy Rao:
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, whatever initiative you want to come up with. A 10-year-old should be able to understand immediately.

[00:14:40] Anne Morriss:
Mm.

[00:14:41] Huggy Rao:
Otherwise it's never gonna scale. The second thing is you are 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, I, you know, both Bob and I have seen it's just not a failure of implementation. It's also a failure of imagination.

[00:15:04] Frances Frei:
Yeah, it’s beautiful.

[00:15:04] Anne Morriss:
I love elevating that question to a mission critical question and not just a backroom whisper conversation, which is where it often happens. Bob, what would you add? Where, what would you, uh, where would you advise people to start?

[00:15:18] Bob Sutton:
Well, first of all, I, and, and, and we heard this, you know, 'cause we teach executives and, and they're pretty smart, usually. I remember this woman saying, um, that, that “My job is part therapy and part organizational design.” Organizational design's extremely important. But part of your job as a leader is, is to be aware that there are gonna be systems and situations that can't be fixed, at least for now. And your job is to keep people sort of moving forward in the mess and, and in some ways, you know, to be more, uh—

[00:15:53] Anne Morriss:
Agree. Totally. Yeah.

[00:15:54] Bob Sutton:
A little bit more precise. There's the, the, there's a woman, her name is, uh, Clara Shih. So she's now CEO of AI at Salesforce. And she talked about when, uh, when she launches a big initiative, um, what she does is she tells people it's gonna be messy. You're gonna be upset. We're not gonna be able to fix things. She has two teams and she calls us, “Separation of concerns. ” One team is basically to do all the stuff that was, is going as it was supposed to go. And the other team are the people who deal with the mess, the unexpected stuff, basically. And I, I thought that was a pretty complete view of how you as a leader, uh, move people through friction. And, and that's why she's a CEO and I'm not. She’s really good.

[00:16:35] Frances Frei:
I am marveling at, at this delightful conversation. And Huggy, I love the, the way that you bring the heart and the head together with the language. It's just really beautiful. The—

[00:16:48] Huggy Rao:
Thank you.

[00:16:50] Frances Frei:
The, the recruit a more curious and generous version of ourselves. I, I think a lot, and we think a lot about creating the conditions to thrive, but you've added a, a, just a poetic nuance to that and a higher mission to it. So the first thing is, while it's a real, like you're talking about friction, which seems like an operational morsel. You're actually talking about moral. Um, so you've gone from morsels to morals in a really beautiful way.

[00:17:18] Huggy Rao:
Beautifully put. Beautifully put.

[00:17:20] Frances Frei:
Yeah.

[00:17:20] Huggy Rao:
You know, maybe this is the perfect stage, given what Frances just said, to talk about our discovery of how in this whole friction project, love has to meet logistics.

[00:17:32] Bob Sutton:
Oh. Oh. So let's talk about love. So, the way this started, so we get introduced to a guy who's gonna be a guest in Huggy’s class in a few weeks. His, his name is Todd Park. He, he, he was the CTO in the Obama administration. He actually led the effort to fix the Obamacare website. And he’s a, built a software company. He's a, he's a fixer.

Okay. So he and his brother Ed started a company called Devoted Health, which, uh, what they do is they, uh, they make healthcare more accessible and clear for people over 65, and we all know how hard it is to navigate the healthcare system. It's like, I, it's unbelievable.

[00:18:05] Frances Frei:
Yes.

[00:18:05] Bob Sutton:
So we're interviewing him and he starts talking about love. I go, “Huh? You're like a…” And he said, “So yes.” He said, “If you start with the notion that the person we're helping is like your mother or your father and you love them and 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.”

[00:18:32] Anne Morriss:
Uh, we've used that word in our work. And we use it to define setting high standards and revealing deep devotion simultaneously.

[00:18:41] Frances Frei:
So that this is called Devoted Health is amazing to us because our, our definition of love is the simultaneity of high standards and deep devotion.

[00:18:48] Anne Morriss:
It, it, it’s super provocative to use the word love in corporate settings, and we've really enjoyed playing with that tension because it, it really brings the conversation to a different place.

[00:19:02] Bob Sutton:
Yes.

[00:19:02] Anne Morriss:
Are there other subtraction tools? Give us one more thing to walk away from this conversation. That I can, that I can do tomorrow.

[00:19:07] Frances Frei:
There’s some monoxide somewhere.

[00:19:08] Bob Sutton:
Oh, let’s talk about jargon monoxide 'cause that's just fun.

[00:19:11] Anne Morriss and Frances Frei:
Yeah. Yeah.

[00:19:11] Bob Sutton:
So essentially it's language that, uh, that, that, 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 Kahneman's definition of noise, which is a random scatter of ideas.

My favorite example, which is in the book is, uh, there was a, a, a, a Agile consultant in Australia who can, um, describe 40 different kinds of agile in 40 minutes. If something means 40 different things to 40 different people, it means nothing. So that would be an example of, uh, of, uh, friction inducing jargon monoxide.

[00:19:54] Anne Morriss:
And super actionable to just let's, let's say what we mean.

[00:19:58] Bob Sutton:
Yeah.

[00:19:58] Anne Morriss:
In a way that we can hear it. Yeah.

[00:19:59] Huggy Rao:
And maybe this is a bridge to our conversation on good friction. You know, a new case is underway about a company called Mind 24/7. They are transforming, I would say, mental health care. You know, a startup by a 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 me. They're building physical structures that are open 24/7.

[00:20:31] Anne Morriss:
Yeah, mental health, you can't really schedule. Yeah.

[00:20:34] Huggy Rao:
Yeah. And 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 gonna be crowded with, uh, mental health patients they don't know quite what to do with. And I said, “Who referenced the patients to you?” And he said, “You know, the best referral sources are cops.” I said, “Cops?”

[00:20:59] Frances Frei:
Yeah.

[00:21:00] Huggy Rao:
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 Frances, will you take my patient?” No. “Hey Anne, will you take my…” You know? And so we just compress all of that, and to give you a sense of love meeting logistics, in their mental health clinics. You can actually get to see, um, a psychiatrist in 22 minutes.

[00:21:30] Frances Frei:
Oh my gosh.

[00:21:30] Anne Morriss:
Wow.

[00:21:31] Huggy Rao:
22 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 said, is that of a car wash. You know, you, you got like bronze and silver and platinum and like whatever, but you gotta have the front end and the experience suffused with love.

[00:21:56] Anne Morriss:
Oh, that’s such, that's so powerful.

[00:21:58] Frances Frei:
I love it. I love it.

[00:21:59] Anne Morriss:
Well, B-Bob, tell us about good friction. Tell us why we want it and what it is.

[00:22:03] Bob Sutton:
We're pretty obsessed with, with good friction. In, 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 our book that compares, uh, problem solving in, in 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, is that higher IQ people, uh, solve easy problems faster, more difficult problems slower but better. And to me that's a reasonable metaphor. And then, and then I think we should talk about creativity. Uh, so your colleague, Theresa Amabile, spent her whole life—

[00:22:45] Frances Frei:
Teresa Amabile. Yeah.

[00:22:46] Bob Sutton:
Uh, studying creativity since she was a Stanford PhD student and now she's Emeritus. And, uh, 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, and, and then I can tell you a tale of two Stanford, uh, startups.

One that, uh, probably you've all heard of, Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes. Is she in jail yet? I'm not sure. But she cheated and lied because she had a hurry too much.

[00:23:12] Anne Morriss:
Yeah, she was in a hurry.

[00:23:13] Bob Sutton:
I would compare her to Greta Meyer and Amanda Calabrese. They started a company called Sequel, they’re einventing the Modern Tampon. They just got FDA approval. They've got $5 million in venture capital. They took every hard startup class at Stanford. They did everything the tough way. They formed a relationship through hell, and they both finished their degrees. They didn't drop out.

[00:23:38] Anne Morriss:
You, you could argue that FDA approver itself is a, is a example of good friction.

[00:23:42] Bob Sutton:
Yes!

[00:23:42] Huggy Rao:
Yeah. And the obstacle can, can take various, uh, forms. Our wonderful colleague, Jennifer Eberhardt, and she worked with the Oakland Police Department, and I believe, I think it was 2018, uh, they had like 31,000 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, uh, which was when you stop a vehicle, there's like a three 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, otherwise let it go. Just adding that question lowered the number of stops by 31%.

[00:24:35] Anne Morriss:
Mm. and presumably crime did not increase.

[00:24:38] Huggy Rao:
That’s right, Anne. Uh, ironically, even though there were fewer traffic stops, people felt safer.

[00:24:44] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure it reminds me of the research around dating apps where if you make, making it easy to, so easy to swipe left or right actually leads to worse outcomes.

[00:24:54] Bob Sutton:
Oh really? Oh that’s wonderful.

[00:24:55] Anne Morriss:
In terms of people building relationships. Yeah. But then creating these high, higher friction, even if they're more awkward moments where strangers come together, actually created a context where people made stronger connections.

[00:25:05] Bob Sutton:
Yeah that… that’s one of the most important line lines in our book, which is from The Supremes, which is, “You can’t hurry love.”

[00:25:11] Anne Morriss:
Yes. Well, now we have the data. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:25:14] Bob Sutton:
So…

[00:25:14] Huggy Rao:
This dating study is a fascinating study. Uh, this is not a published paper, it's still in process, but, uh, you know, uh, our graduate student, we said, “Hey. Why don't you use large language models? Take a look at all the Bay Area startups and look at their mission ,vision statements, and whatever public documents, and 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 number?” And 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 $1 billion valuation.” Predictably, the more you emphasize speed, the faster you become a unicorn.

So the graduate student, well, found this is really cool. And we said, “Wait a minute. Do another study. Show us what's the relationship between the time taken to get to 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 lawsuit.

[00:26:22] Anne Morriss:
Mm. Well, France, I'm wanna, I'm wondering where your head went.

[00:26:25] Frances Frei:
Yeah.

[00:26:25] Anne Morriss:
But I'm also, uh, wanna make the link between this conversation and a book we published titled Move Fast and Fix Things.

[00:26:34] Frances Frei:
It’s exactly where I’m going. It's exactly where I'm going. So, listen, your book came out after ours, but should we just tear it up? Because here—

[00:26:40] Anne Morriss:
That's the question.

[00:26:44] Frances Frei:
Because here, so I, I wanna just put it out here. It… You can move fast and break things. All four of us are in agreement that that's bad.

[00:26:50] Bob Sutton:
Right.

[00:26:51] Frances Frei:
But there are two antidotes to this. You can either slow down, which is what you are arguing for, or you can put in some good friction.

[00:27:04] Bob Sutton:
Yeah.

[00:27:04] Frances Frei:
But I just, I wanna make sure, um, is our book obsolete?

[00:27:05] Bob Sutton:
I, I don't think that we, we disagree. Um, a good analogy is, uh, who wins the most races in like Formula One or Nascar? It's the people who know when to hit the gas and know when to 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, and so to me that is sort of the, the analogy that, that I, I like to use, is it’s the gas and the brakes. So, so it's your overall speed is what matters, right?

[00:27:41] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. No, I love that. I was gearing up and putting on the gloves and getting ready for the, the showdown in this conversation, but then as I, I went deeper into the book, I realized that, well, one way to think about what the, the theory we just launched into the world is that Monday through Thursday is about creating good friction, and then on Friday you earn the right to eliminate all the bad friction.

[00:28:04] Bob Sutton:
Right, right, right.

[00:28:04] Anne Morriss:
We're just saying sequence it.

[00:28:06] Huggy Rao:
Yeah. You know, it's, it's, as I was reading your book, which I enjoyed, uh, the phrase that rang through my mind was a phrase that apparently Augustus Caesar used to use when he sent his generals to battle. And he would always tell them, apparently, “Make haste slowly.” And I, I sort of see that as like the connection.

[00:28:28] Anne Morriss:
Yes, that's it, Huggy. We’re one of the two women obsessed with ancient Rome, in addition with all the men.

[00:28:33] Bob Sutton:
So I want, I wanna add one more thing. There's a really cool academic literature on savoring. So you're talking about coping, it's like bad stuff. Gotta cope with it.

[00:28:42] Anne Morriss:
Mm. That’s a good word.

[00:28:42] Bob Sutton:
I’m in a hurry. Uh, you know, I got an upset. But savoring is when good things happen. When you're having a lovely meal, you're having a lovely conversation. Literature shows that, that it's good for your mental health to slow down and, and enjoy things. And so the example that that we use in the book, the largest supermarket chain in, uh, the Netherlands is called Jumbo.

And they experiment with the slow lane. And this is where for people to slow down and have a chitchat with the, the clerk, and they've scaled it out to 125 different grocery stores in Holland.

[00:29:18] Anne Morriss:
Oh, I, wow.

[00:29:18] Frances Frei:
It warms my heart.
[00:29:21] Huggy Rao:
You know, this is for the elderly customers.

[00:29:22] Bob Sutton:
So, so that's savoring some things. You know, they ought to be slower,

[00:29:27] Anne Morriss:
So, what’s the biggest thing that you hope listeners take away from this conversation? Huggy, why don't we start with you?

[00:29:33] Huggy Rao:
I've come to slowly realize that the 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. Uh, that's what real power is.

[00:29:46] Anne Morriss:
The modern definition of power.

[00:29:48] Huggy Rao:
Yeah. You have no recourse whatsoever. But the other thing that I walk away with is it's really kind of made me realize how to put good friction in my life and how to take bad friction outta my life. So I asked myself, do I really need to be in this meeting that's gonna 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.

[00:30:36] Anne Morriss:
Mm. Um, Bob, what about you? What, what do you want people take away from this?

[00:30:38] Bob Sutton:
My, mine’s a little bit more, I guess, narrow, but this general notion, which I, all of us know, life would be better for all of us if, 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. I, there was 60 people in line in front of me. It was 7:30 in the morning, and I, and my mother had passed away and I had to like do this title stuff, and I figured I was gonna be there all day.

And this wonderful DMV employee at like 7:40 starts walking down the line and asking each person while they were there. He did triage and, uh, he gave me my form to fill out. And I thought I was gonna be there all morning. I was out by 8:15 and they opened at eight.

[00:31:25] Frances Frei:
Wow.

[00:31:25] Bob Sutton:
And, and we're, we had a, a zoom with the, the senior executives who run the California DMV, and they are doing all the stuff with technology, with culture, with old fashioned process sort of design. Uh, to, to improve the quality. And, and, and in one transaction, which is called Getting Real ID, they've cut it from an average of 28 minutes to 8 minutes for people who visit the DMV.

[00:31:48] Frances Frei:
How.

[00:31:49] Bob Sutton:
And, and so, so, so to me is if this guy at the Department of Motor Vehicles can be a trustee of other people's time, then almost anybody else can.

[00:31:59] Anne Morriss:
Wow, well, what a powerful example. Um, alright, well you, you both are extraordinary and we're so grateful that you joined us for this conversation.

[00:32:08] Huggy Rao:
You made it so much easier for us. Thank you both.

[00:32:11] Bob Sutton:
Thank you.

[00:32:25] Anne Morriss:
Frances, what did you learn from Bob and Huggy?

[00:32:29] Frances Frei:
Oh, so much, so much about bad friction and good friction. You know, I'm predisposed to get rid of the bad. Uh, to savor the good, um, that, that is new, and I find that each of us can be the person in the DMV right, like, like do what we can from our position as Bob said.

[00:32:49] Anne Morriss:
Yeah, mm-hm, I love the DMV example because that's not a person who has, you know, extraordinary power in this system, but had a huge impact on the experience, the people in that line. I also really loved this idea of designing jobs that solve for curiosity and generosity. Uh, and right now in many organizations, we're doing the opposite.

You know, we're creating jobs where I can't show up generously, and I can't show up with curiosity because there's all of these other, you know, miserable tasks that I have—

[00:33:22] Frances Frei:
Preexisting conditions.

[00:33:22] Anne Morriss:
That I have to do. And what if we took real responsibility for that as leaders and as organizations?

[00:33:31] Frances Frei:
I'm so inspired.

[00:33:32] Anne Morriss:
The other thing I loved is picturing, uh, Huggy deciding whether or not to attend a meeting. I mean, we do live at the tyranny of other people's relationship with our time at kind of a high level, but at a micro level—

[00:33:47] Frances Frei:
We get to decide.

[00:33:47] Anne Morriss:
We probably can make some more decisions about whether this meeting is worth my time, this phone call is worth my time, and it's sobering for me because I don't always solve for my own generosity and curiosity, you know? Um.

[00:34:01] Frances Frei:
No, you're, you're very dutiful.

[00:34:03] Anne Morriss:
Uh, yeah. You know, I, I, I will do things out of obligation.

[00:34:06] Frances Frei:
Yeah. Yeah.

[00:34:06] Anne Morriss:
Or, or feeling a sense of responsibility for people. But I don't do the full calculus. What am I giving up when I have that kind of a relationship with my time? A nd the idea that I have some more control over this than I'm asserting is exciting.

[00:34:23] Frances Frei:
Exciting. Yeah.

[00:34:23] Anne Morriss:
It’s exciting. Our challenge to listeners is to take that rule of halves into your lives and see if there's a, a work burden that you can reduce by 50%. Number of meetings, how long the email is, you and I will join in the challenge, what can we reduce by 50%?

[00:34:45] Frances Frei:
I, I love it and I can't wait to re-listen to this. I think I will listen to it again and again and learn more and more, and I, and I hope everyone that's listening, uh, gets that as well.

[00:34:54] Anne Morriss:
Fortunately, with the technology of podcasting—

[00:34:57] Frances Frei:
We can savor it!

[00:34:57] Anne Morriss:
We can savor it.

[00:35:01] Frances Frei:
Thanks for listening, everyone, we wanna hear from you. If you wanna figure out a workplace problem together, send us a message at fixable@ted.com or call us at 234-FIXABLE. That’s 234-349-2253.

[00:35:19] Anne Morriss:
Fixable is brought to you by the TED Audio Collective. It's hosted by me, Anne Morriss.

[00:35:24] Frances Frei:
And me, Frances Frei.

[00:35:25] Anne Morriss:
Our team includes Isabel Carter, Constanza Gallardo, Lidia Jean Kott, Grace Rubenstein, Sara Nics, Michelle Quint, Corey Hajim, Alejandra Salazar, Banban Cheng, and Roxanne Hai Lash. This episode was mixed by Louis at Story Yard.

[00:35:42] Frances Frei:
If you’re enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share this episode with a friend or a boss who's looking for ways to reduce friction in their organization.

[00:35:53] Anne Morriss:
And one more thing, if you can please take a second to leave us a review. It really helps us make a great show.

[00:36:01] Frances Frei:
And it totally helps the search algorithm.