The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

Organizational psychologist Sutton and Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Rao follow up their 2014 collaboration, Scaling Up Excellence, with an impassioned guide for reducing “friction,” which they define as “forces that make it harder, slower, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done in organizations.” Highlighting organizations that have successfully simplified their operations, the authors describe how the chief medical officer at Hawaii Pacific Health saved hundreds of nursing hours per month by making such minor tweaks as reducing the “required clicks for documenting a diaper change from three to one.” Sutton and Rao outline a five-level “help pyramid” suggesting how workers with different degrees of power might resolve “friction”; those with less institutional influence will have to settle for helping coworkers view obstacles as less daunting by joking about challenges, but senior executives can implement “systemic repairs.” (For example, higher-ups at pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca saved staffers “from thousands of unnecessary emails” by “adding steps before employees could ‘reply all’ to more than twenty-five” recipients). The guidance is solid and the case studies illustrate how even small changes can have large effects. Readers tired of sitting through unnecessary meetings will want to check this out. (Jan.)