1A Trustee of Others’ Time
In August 1940, as his country prepared for waves of attacks by German planes, Winston Churchill set out to address a different enemy. In his 234-word “Brevity” memo, he implored his colleagues to “see to it that their Reports are shorter.” The British prime minister urged them to write “short, crisp paragraphs,” to move complex arguments or statistics to appendices, and to stop using “officialese jargon” and “woolly phrases.” A few months later, Churchill asked bureaucrats to hear his “cry of pain” and remember that “the number and length of messages sent by a diplomat are no measure of his efficiency.”
More than seventy years later, we sat down with our teaching team to discuss how to run our “customer-focused innovation” class for sixty executives. As people weighed in with various ideas about the content, our colleague Jeremy Utley suddenly roared, “I hate wasting people’s time. Let’s make every minute good for them.”
During the friction project, we returned to Churchill’s memo and Jeremy’s words again and again because both illustrate a hallmark of skilled friction fixers: being a trustee of other people’s time. Trustees take pride in spotting and removing obstacles that squander people’s time and money, frustrate them, and leave them feeling helpless and exhausted. And they take pride in knowing when to slow down, struggle, or stop—in creating constructive friction.
The Cone of Friction
Trustees are leaders who focus on and fret over who is—and could be—influenced by their powers to make things easier or harder, and whom they might be unwittingly hobbling by their words, deeds, and designs. This zone of potential impact is your “cone of friction.” Churchill used his position as prime minister to press public servants in his cone to practice “short-windedness.” Jeremy pressed our team to eliminate needless boredom, frustration, and downtime for the sixty executives in our “cone.” Dr. Melinda Ashton and her team that launched the Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff program at Hawaii Pacific Health served as trustees of their nurses’, doctors’, and patients’ time.
In 2013, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and his top team used their powers over all employees of this file-sharing company to cancel hundreds of time-sucking meetings. Employees were wasting so much time in meetings that they kept missing crucial deadlines, especially shipping dates. Drew’s team decided to help Dropbox employees avoid heaping unnecessary meetings on themselves. Dropbox IT folks removed nearly all standing meetings from employees’ calendars and made it impossible for them to add new meetings to their calendars for two weeks. Employees were notified via an email titled “Armeetingeddon has landed.” After explaining why their calendars were “a bit light,” the email asked, “Ahhh, doesn’t it feel fantastic?” Dropbox also developed guidelines that included such directives as “schedule meetings if (and only if) other forms of communication won’t cut it” and “invite only key stakeholders, not spectators,” and if people realized a meeting was useless, or they were adding nothing, they were encouraged to leave early.
Trustees also scout for signs that it’s time to inject healthy friction, including when to hit the brakes and slow down or stop. That’s a lesson from research on “stealth CEO factories,” obscure companies that produce scores of successful CEOs for other companies. Consultants Elena Lytinkia Botelho and Sanja Kos found that one of the most productive of these factories is Rohm and Haas (a chemical manufacturer now part of Dow Chemical). Companies led by CEOs groomed at Rohm and Haas “performed 67 percent better than those companies did when other CEOs were in charge.”
Rohm and Haas teaches its leaders that when they face a decision with broad and enduring consequences, taking speedy, narrow, and impulsive action is a recipe for disaster. Instead, Rohm and Haas preaches the Five Voices method. Before making a big decision, leaders slow down, do careful research, and talk to people until they understand five key stakeholders: the customer, the employee, the owner, the community, and the process. Time at this leadership finishing school helped alum Pierre Brondeau as CEO of the FMC Corporation. The Five Voices taught him, “It’s not about pleasing your boss—it’s about doing the right thing by your stakeholders.”
Trustees also create red tape that makes the wrong things difficult or impossible to do. For example, the leaders of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (the state’s largest private insurer) decided to take action because deaths from opioids in the state increased 45 percent between 2012 and 2013, and the death rate in Massachusetts from opioids was two and a half times the national average.
Many of these deaths resulted from opioids prescribed to Blue Cross Blue Shield members. The company implemented policies to make it harder for physicians to prescribe opioids. Doctors were required to discuss treatment options other than opioids and to sign written agreements with patients about their treatment plans. Doctors also had to provide a written rationale for prescribing opioids, which was reviewed and approved (or rejected) by a clinician with expertise in opioid addiction. The company also implemented a ban on pharmacy mail orders for opioids.
By 2015, opioid prescriptions for Blue Cross Blue Shield members had dropped by 15 percent. That meant, as a team of researchers led by Dr. Macarena C. García reported, “twenty-one million fewer opioid doses were dispensed in the first three years after implementation.”
The Massachusetts program was led by top company executives including Dr. Bruce Nash, their chief physician executive. We’ve also been inspired by many trustees who have more modest influence and are closer to the bottom than to the top of the pecking order. All of us have the power to help people in our cone of friction, whether it is big or little.
That’s what happened when one of us, Bob Sutton, visited his local Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) office in Redwood City, California, to change the registration on his late mother’s Toyota Camry. He was dreading a long ordeal with grumpy civil servants. When Bob arrived at 7:30 A.M., a half hour before the branch opened, fifty people were already in line outside. At about 7:45, a friendly DMV employee set up a table near the entrance and began walking down the line asking everyone the purpose of his or her visit—something, we learned later, DMV employees did there every morning and was one of many systemic changes aimed at making California DMVs more effective and customer friendly. That employee told at least fifteen people they could complete a form instead of waiting in line—and even handed them the right form and a pen (!) so they could complete it on the spot. The employee sent the rest, including Bob, inside and told them which of the seven windows to wait at and provided forms and tips to get ready—so our transactions would be quicker for us and the clerk. Bob completed his rather complicated transaction by 8:15 A.M.
Yes, to our amazement, one of the best customer service experiences either of us had during our project was at the DMV! And it was largely due to that skilled (and warm) trustee of time who helped people negotiate the bureaucratic maze.
The Five Commitments
Mottos for Trustees
Five mottos emerged from our friction project that help trustees protect the time—and bolster the dignity, zest for life, and performance—of people in their cone of friction. These commitments guide how trustees practice their craft, teach it, and recruit others to join them. Friction fixing works best when people are encouraged, praised, and rewarded for banding together. The antics of lone heroes are rarely sufficient for averting and repairing such vexing and messy problems.
1. It’s like Mowing the Lawn
We love the dramatic flair and instant relief evident in Churchill’s “Brevity” memo and “Armeetingeddon” at Dropbox. The aftermath of both stories, however, reinforces a second, more somber, lesson: friction requires constant vigilance. When Winston Churchill returned for his second term as prime minister in 1951 (he was voted out in 1945), he re-sent his 1940 “Brevity” memo, because official papers were still “too long and diffuse.” Churchill also attached a memo from his foreign secretary urging diplomats (yet again) to send fewer telegrams and make them shorter.
Similarly, at Dropbox, in the months after Armeetingeddon, people scheduled fewer meetings, meetings were smaller, and people routinely declined invites. But they soon slipped back into their old ways. Drew Houston told us that by 2015 “things were worse than ever,” and added that the battle against too many big bad meetings was like mowing the lawn. Constant maintenance was required to stem the ugly and excessive growth.
This never-ending game of Whac-A-Mole entails injecting friction at the right times and places. Friction fixers think like the crew chiefs of NASCAR or Formula One racing teams, scheduling regular pit stops while searching for signs that it’s time for emergency repairs. We interviewed a vice president at a big software company who used this “pit stop” perspective to manage his dozen direct reports, who were spread across nine countries and six time zones—and, together, led four hundred engineers. The VP cut regular meetings with this team from once a week to once a month, replacing meetings with a rhythm where team members wrote a shared (and collectively edited) document with schedules, responsibilities, goals, red flags, and updates. It was due every Friday. Relying more on writing and less on talking improved communication and coordination and forced people to think more deeply about their work—the team functioned better than ever.
But, after using this system for a few months, the VP learned that some flare-ups and fiascoes couldn’t wait for the monthly meeting. Such as when a team member got in a nasty argument with a client and threatened to quit the company if the client wasn’t fired—the VP called an emergency meeting to work through the anger and figure out how to save the relationship with the client.
2. Organizations Are Malleable Prototypes
Rather than feeling powerless to tinker with or toss out prevailing rules, procedures, and structures, friction fixers treat such organizational features as temporary and changeable—as just the best they can do right now. That’s akin to how skilled designers treat the products and services they develop—as ever-changing and (they hope) ever-improving prototypes. Friction fixers live this mindset by asking such questions as: Do people know how to use the company? Is it simple? Complex? Is it obvious how it works? What is slow about it? Are there bugs? What can we fix quickly, and what’s going to take a long time?
We learned the power of treating organizations as prototypes some twenty years ago from David Kelley, when we did an eighteen-month ethnographic study of IDEO—a renowned innovation firm that David cofounded and was CEO of at the time. David realized that unhealthy friction was rising at IDEO because the system that had worked for staffing projects when the company had 50 designers didn’t work with 150. The committee that staffed projects was taking longer to make decisions and making mistakes because they didn’t know enough about the work, the clients, or how long each project would take. Tempers flared as designers battled over who ought to work on which projects.
David introduced a prototype in hopes of fixing this mess at an all-hands meeting that we attended. He began by acknowledging that IDEO’s structure was no longer working. Then he introduced three leaders, each charged with heading a new “studio.” Each made a pitch about “why you should join my studio.” Designers then selected which studio they wanted to join: each listed their first, second, and third choices (all got their first choice).
Before the pitches began, David reminded people that IDEO’s philosophy was “enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects.” The new studio model, he noted, was a changeable prototype, just like the products, services, and experiences they designed for clients. To reinforce this message—in a move that shocked all—David shaved off his trademark Groucho Marx–style mustache just before the meeting. He said, “The changes we are trying are just like shaving off my mustache; they are temporary and reversible experiments.”
David grew back that mustache a few months later, and IDEO has experimented with numerous other structures over the years. But David still reminds folks at IDEO and elsewhere to treat organizations as imperfect and unfinished prototypes.
When some policy or practice annoys or drives people crazy, friction fixers need the courage and sway to try something different. And if that doesn’t work, to change it, or toss it out, and try something else.
3. Celebrate and Reward Doers, Not Posers
We call Becky Margiotta a friction fixer. She uses more graphic language. From the time Becky was a young U.S. Army officer, then as leader of a campaign that found homes for one hundred thousand unhoused Americans, and now as head of the Billions Institute (which helps “leaders spread solutions to the world’s biggest problems”), she says, “I’ve spent the majority of my adult life unfucking things.”
Becky has cleaned up many messes by bolstering doers rather than posers. In the early days of the 100,000 Homes Campaign, Becky’s team realized that one reason they kept failing to meet interim goals was that dozens of posers were jabbering away at meetings and on calls, promising to do key work in their communities, and asking staffers for help. Yet the posers never followed through. They were adept at smart talk but allergic to grinding out the work to connect their words to action. Becky’s team nicknamed these glib pretenders “hollow Easter bunnies” because “it is just like Easter when you think you are going to get a really good chocolate Easter egg and it’s just a hollow Easter bunny. It’s nothing.” After wasting too much time on these hollow bunnies, Becky’s team became adept at serving as trustees of others’ time, and their own, by spotting such posers, ignoring them, and (gently) explaining to them they were hampering the campaign.
Becky’s team also cranked up rewards for doers. When Becky was in the U.S. Army, if soldiers were screwing around or messing up, she or a fellow officer asked, “Who is fucking this chicken?” In other words, who was in charge? When Becky told that story to her 100,000 Homes team, they knew it would inspire doers who propelled the campaign. Becky started giving “The Chicken F’er” talk to community groups that were working to house people. And her team created the “top secret” Rooster Award. Every month, they selected ten or fifteen people who were moving the campaign forward. Each chicken f’er received a little metal rooster to recognize the person’s accomplishments.
Trustees such as Becky and her team are vigilant about spotting and discouraging hollow moves that undermine rather than activate friction fixing. See our list of seven tricks that can make posers feel good about themselves and burnish their reputations but waste precious time and money when disconnected from action. Wise trustees keep an eye out for such moves and discourage others who try them.
Most of these tricks are versions of “the smart-talk trap,” which is what Bob Sutton and Stanford colleague Jeff Pfeffer call eloquent, interesting, and insincere words that serve as substitutes for action (rather than to guide and inspire action). Smart but empty talk happens because it is easier to say smart things than to do smart things. And because smooth talkers get immediate kudos while dogged doers must delay gratification.
Poser Tricks
Hollow Acts That Undermine Friction Fixing
Promises as substitutes for action. Offering to help fix friction troubles, then behaving—and perhaps believing—that no further effort is required.Holding and attending meetings to talk about friction fixing as substitutes for actually doing it.Eloquent but useless talk. Spewing out impressive ideas and compelling stories about friction—which are so vague, impractical, or convoluted that no subsequent action or learning results.Mission statements and lists of shared values as substitutes for friction fixing.Bad-mouthing as a substitute for action. Criticizing, complaining about, and blaming people, traditions, and rules that fuel friction problems—but doing nothing to help with or encourage repairs.Training as a symbolic rather substantive response to friction troubles.Outsourcing friction fixing efforts to consultants and other fellow posers—so they get the blame for inaction rather than the poser.Those hollow bunnies fooled Becky’s team, at least at first, with many of the tricks on our list. They made enthusiastic promises to help with the campaign. They planned and attended meetings with campaign staffers and community members. They spewed out impressive facts, figures, and jargon about unhoused people. They said they were working to house people in their communities, but didn’t follow up on their plans. In the end, their jargon was vague and impractical, and their grand promises went unkept. All they did was squander others’ time and energy.
Friction fixers need to be especially wary of smart critics. Experiments by psychologist Teresa Amabile on the “brilliant but cruel” effect found that people who write nasty book reviews are seen as more intelligent and expert than people who write positive reviews. As Amabile put it, “Only pessimism sounds profound. Optimism sounds superficial.” In the early days of our friction project, we focused on stories about the terrible ordeals that companies, universities, and governments imposed on people—and provided blistering critiques. Sure, there are lazy, incompetent, and cruel people—and broken systems—that deserve to be named and shamed. Yet, when we went behind the curtain to find the villains in these horror stories, we often found good people who were trying to make things better but faced onerous obstacles such as absurd rules and laws that they had to follow or be fired. Because they wrestled with the problems every day, they knew what was wrong and how to fix it.
But no one listened to them or gave them permission to change things. They didn’t deserve to be bad-mouthed.
That’s what Civilla cofounders Michael Brennan, Adam Selzer, and Lena Selzer found when they began working with the Michigan civil servants to redesign that convoluted forty-two-page benefits form. As Adam tells it, he had stereotyped these folks as uncaring and unimaginative. When Michael, Adam, and Lena met them, however, they found caring, conscientious, and courageous frontline employees who wrestled with and despised the terrible form, too, and senior officials who had been trying to fix it for years. Once those civil servants realized that Civilla was there to help and had the resources and patience to stick with the problem, they became imaginative, open-minded, and relentless partners throughout the redesign. As Civilla’s inspiring case study of Project Re:form put it, “Rather than approach conversations with blame or accusation, we’ve found that giving folks the benefit of the doubt and recognizing the complexity of their jobs to be a lot more helpful in sparking partnerships and opening the door for constructive discourse.”
Training is another kind of talk that substitutes for friction fixing. Organizations use it to signal that they care about challenges including diversity and inclusion, sexual harassment, innovation, and customer experiences. But their people do nothing else to implement the lessons. Leaders of such organizations also have a handy scapegoat for the lack of progress—the trainers!
We tracked a financial services firm for years as they trained thousands of employees in design thinking methods. Again and again, we asked the firm’s leaders, “Which product and services have been improved by design thinking?” They told us how much employees loved the training and how it gave them tools to innovate on their jobs. But the leaders were never able to identify a single product or service that was changed by someone who took such classes, applied design thinking methods, and changed it for the better (or even made it worse!). We weren’t surprised when the company abandoned this training program after a decade of such futility—and bad-mouthed faculty who taught the classes.
In contrast, the founders of Civilla were trained in design thinking methods, too. But they applied those lessons by interviewing and observing dozens of citizens and civil servants to understand their experiences with the bad old benefits form, to identify obstacles, to generate ideas for making it shorter and less confusing—and then using these lessons to redesign the benefits form.
The last trick on our list is “Outsourcing friction fixing efforts to consultants and other fellow posers—so they get the blame for inaction rather than the poser.” We met one executive who moved to a new company every few years. That well-traveled fellow explained to us that he started each new job by hiring consultants from prestigious firms to develop ideas for change initiatives. Like the digital transformation plan that IT consultants developed for his last company, where he was an executive vice president. That plan helped him land his current job as a CEO because it provided a great story to tell during his job interviews. That CEO laughed as he admitted that the digital transformation effort was never implemented at his old company, and then he blamed those “blowhard” consultants for the lack of progress. We realized this savvy organizational politician had outsourced friction fixing in part because the consultants were handy scapegoats for inaction and other failures on his watch. That executive had hired high-priced consultants, so he had spent money as a substitute for action—a favorite move by rich and powerful posers.
Copyright © 2024 by Robert I. Sutton & Huggy Rao
