Make the Right Stuff Easier and the Wrong Stuff Harder with Friction Project’s Bob Sutton
Season 3 Episode 5
Is your time being wasted? Or are you wasting other people’s time? So often, it seems that calendars fill up, processes multiply, and simple tasks become unnecessarily hard.
In this episode, Bob Sutton joins Lisa Kay Solomon to examine how friction shows up at work: the meetings that shouldn’t exist, the processes that are way too complicated, and the small design choices that quietly shape whether people feel respected or drained.
Drawing from years of research behind The Friction Project, Bob breaks down why leaders often add instead of subtract, and why that instinct creates hidden costs across teams and organizations. Bob shares why some forms of friction are worth protecting, how savoring plays a role in good design, and why clarity (not certainty) has become a leadership advantage.
In this conversation, you’ll learn:
Why to treat time as something you’re accountable for, not entitled to spend
How “sham participation” quietly erodes trust
How leaders unintentionally magnify friction through weak signals
When slowing down actually improves performance and experience
This episode is for anyone who wants to make work feel more humane without adding another framework, meeting, or tool.
Links from the episode:
The Friction Project by Bob Sutton & Huggy Rao
Subtract by Leidy Klotz
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Bob Sutton: A leader invites you to a meeting to give you input about a decision that’s already been made, and you have no influence over and maybe don’t care about either. The problem with if you do this as a leader is you’re not only not being a trustee of your employee’s time, they very quickly conclude that you are full of shit and don’t know how to do your job.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today.
If you’ve ever thought, “Why is this process so complicated?” or even, “Why am I at this meeting?” This episode is for you. Today’s conversation is about friction, when it helps, when it hurts, and how small choices can dramatically improve people’s daily experience at work and in life.
Our guest is Bob Sutton, organizational psychologist, professor at Stanford, and co-author of The Friction Project and eight other bestsellers. Bob has spent decades studying why organizations unintentionally make things harder than they need to be and what leaders, designers, and teams can do to fix that. In our conversation, Bob and I play what I’m calling the friction fixer game. We diagnose real examples of bad friction at work and how to become what Bob calls a trustee of others’ time.
We also explore good friction, the kind that slows us down just enough to savor what matters, like a great meal or a meaningful conversation. This episode is about getting intentional with the choices we make and the burdens we create. If it resonates, please leave a comment or rating. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Let’s jump in with Bob Sutton.
I am so excited for our conversation today. Welcome, Bob Sutton, to the How We Future podcast, where we, this season, are talking about skills we wish we learned, classes we wish we had taken. Your latest work on friction is one that I think is at the heart of skills we can learn to make everybody’s lives better. Thank you for joining us.
Bob: Well, it’s always a delight to talk to you. Any excuse. It’s great to be here.
Lisa: Well, Bob, one of the things I like to do is, of course, dress to the theme of my guests. I, this morning, picked out my skier sweater for you. For those that are looking, I’ll hold it up because I thought, what a great metaphor for friction. You want just enough to make it challenging and fun and even all the hassle bonds you with your ski person, but you don’t want too much where it gets totally overwhelming, and you’re like, “Why bother?’ You don’t want zero because that’s dangerous. I’m not even a skier, but I thought, “I think this metaphor works.”
Bob: Yes. Skiing, race car driving, I think all those metaphors sort of work.
Lisa: They can be super instructive about the Goldilocks of friction, really thinking about it intentionally as opposed to having friction happen to you.
Bob: It even applies to love. There’s all this stuff about labor leads to love. If you love something or someone more, if you suffer too much, uh-uh.
Lisa: No, too hard. Too hard. That explains my relationship. I made my husband struggle for a year while we were long-distance. I can’t wait to go back and tell him that. It was all worth it.
Bob: See, all that labor leads to love, it’s worth it.
Lisa: Right. I think you even have a case study in the book that we’re going to talk about, The Friction Project, right here, totally dog-eared, about the IKEA effect of just enough labor to make sure that that thing that you bought in the box that you hauled out is something you absolutely love.
Bob: That’s how life is. Assembling an IKEA box, falling in love, car racing, you all need the right amount of friction.
Lisa: Well, reading the book also felt a little bit of a good old homecoming for me. I think I’ve shared with you that my mother, who was a past guest on How We Future, was a chief learning officer who focused on total quality management.
Bob: Wow.
Lisa: Very early, she focused on reducing variance and getting slop out of the system. Reading it was like, “Oh, yes, this feels very relevant.” It also feels very relevant to design, which is a passion that you and I share, that the intentional choices we make can either make people’s lives better or not so great.
Bob: With friction, what I think about it, if I was going to pick one concept that runs through the whole project and is the one-sentence summary, it’s that when we’re designers, we’re leaders, that we see ourselves as trustees of others’ time. It’s funny to link to your mom’s total quality management thing. It’s related to that, too. That doesn’t mean that you don’t slow them down and don’t force them to think, and even make things impossible or make a struggle for them sometimes. Easing the burdens is important.
Since we both are part of Stanford University, right now there’s a Simplify Stanford movement, which is making some progress. I used to be cynical, but our senior administrators are making progress. For example, it should be difficult at Stanford to add even more software that you force other people to use because we have too many different kinds of software. That’s where, actually, some friction is good. We all know this. The size of our tech stack is overly large.
It should be easy to reserve a room, order a T-shirt that says Stanford on it for our 50-person group, or to get our receipts reimbursed. In the Simplify Stanford movement, it’s trying to do things like making it easier for us to get reimbursed or to reserve a room, for example.
Lisa: I’m so glad you’re a part of that. It’s such a worthy effort. I know you talk a lot about in the book, which is that we often add things and we don’t pause to say, how do we make life easier by subtracting? I think that when I hear you talk about why it’s important for everyone to pay attention to friction, whether they’re creating it or the recipient of it, it’s very much aligned with the definition of design that I love, which is as a designer, it’s your job to make choices that trigger the right responses.
This comes from Nathan Shedroff. It suggests that there’s a responsibility you have to understand the impact of your choices. If you really want to be good at design, then you need to understand what you’re trying to design for the other person. If you don’t want them to be frustrated at the end of the night, someone on your team, then you have an opportunity to think about, well, what choices are you making to make them frustrated?
Bob: I love that analogy. You’re making me think-- one of the things in my post-book life that I’m obsessed with is this thing called savoring. Savoring is the idea of looking forward to something wonderful, wallowing in it while it occurs, and then looking back on it fondly. It’s the opposite of coping. Coping is, well, things suck. How do I worry about it less? How do I not go back and perseverate over it? How do I not let it ruin the rest of my life?
Savoring is the opposite. It’s embracing and focusing on the good things in life. I’ve really been thinking a lot about restaurant meals as part of that. I think of, I’ve had two meals at three-star Michelin restaurants that were terrible, not because the food wasn’t great, but because they rushed us through the process.
Lisa: I love that you bring up restaurants, Bob, because I think that’s what started my journey in design. I was a kid-
Bob: Wow.
Lisa: -who was completely obsessed with restaurant design. My grandfather was in restaurants. As a kid, it was just something that I always paid attention to around the choices people made, exactly what you’re talking about, to either create a fabulous experience that all came together. One of my favorite words is congruent, like it makes sense. Or you have that scratch on the nail board where you’re rushed through French Laundry. How frustrating is that?
Bob: One other thing. Now we’re on restaurants. I’ve been thinking about this. This is a local thing, but there’s a restaurant in Chinatown called Sam Wo’s. They had this famous waiter named Edsel Ford Fong. He was famous. This is before your time, Lisa. You would go there to have him insult you. The food was just, eh, but he would run around, and he would insult you. I think he had a master’s degree. He was absolutely brilliant. I remember. This would be a terrible experience if you weren’t expecting. One, if you weren’t insulted, you’d feel hurt. I asked him for a fork in a Chinese restaurant. He goes, and he gets the fork, and he parades through the restaurant holding the fork-
Lisa: Oh my gosh.
Bob: -insulting me and just telling me a loser for not being able to use chopsticks. I’m still savoring that moment. It was an insult. That was probably like $2.99 for tomato beef or whatever they used to have 1,000 years ago. What you expect in terms of a good experience can vary wildly, because we would go to Sam Wo’s to be insulted by Edsel Ford Fong. If we didn’t get on his floor, we would be disappointed.
Lisa: Oh my gosh. Well, I just love that because how many years ago was that, and still that memory?
Bob: 40 years.
Lisa: I mean, how many meals have you had?
Bob: 50 years ago.
Lisa: Oh, my gosh.
Bob: I’m 72. That’s 51 years ago.
Lisa: By the way, it’s important to say, no extra technology, nothing special. It was just that interaction that was so memorable.
Bob: Yes.
Lisa: One thing I love about that word savoring is that it’s hard to savor when you’re too busy thinking about the future. It really asks you to stay present. Bob, I’m so excited. We’re going to do something we’ve never done before on How We Future. We are going to play a game.
Bob: Yes.
Lisa: Who’s more fun to play a game with than you? We’re going to play the game. For friends that are just listening, we are looking at a slide. It’s called the Friction Fixer Edition Game featuring Bob Sutton. Bob, here’s how the game is going to work. I’m going to show you some slides because, as I was reading your book, every example was so salient and resonant that I wanted to show it visually. Then we’re going to diagnose and discuss what is happening.
Bob: Let’s diagnose and discuss. Let’s also do a test since I often don’t remember what I wrote, so you have to tell me.
Lisa: Exactly. Well, first, maybe we should talk about before we get into the game. The Friction Project is really, as you share, like an accidental 7-year project with you and Huggy, your colleague and fellow professor, Stanford’s Huggy Rao, that came out of Scaling Up Excellence. Maybe you could talk just a little bit about how you stumbled upon friction.
Bob: Huggy and I wrote this book, Scaling Up Excellence, how you grow an organization and spread good things around it. What happened is there were all these organizations that we knew when they were cute and little. Facebook and Google would be two examples, Salesforce too. As they got larger and more complex, things got harder and harder to get done. Then, at the same time, with all due respect to, I guess, our employer, Stanford University, I’ve been here for 42, 43 years, and just things have gotten harder and harder to get done, which is one of the reasons we have the Simplify Stanford movement.
The book starts out with a 1,266-word email with a 7,500-word attachment inviting all Stanford faculty to spend a day on Zoom brainstorming about the new Sustainability School, which I thought was actually the opposite of being a trustee of other people’s time. If you just do the multiplication, the idea of organizations intentionally or unintentionally adding unnecessary burdens on people, that’s the puzzle Huggy, and I got interested in. We spent a lot of time studying it, writing about it, doing little experiments, and stuff. We wrote a book. I still work on The Friction Project every day. Yesterday, I did some stuff at Google and at Stanford, just talking to folks about friction.
Lisa: Well, I love what you say in the book. We started this project because we were disgusted with organizations that make it difficult to do simple things. Even though there’s a lot of emotion in that, there’s also something very hopeful. The book is very hopeful because you don’t need a PhD to actually make people’s lives better.
You can just pay attention to some simple choices, like simplifying an email, or getting rid of a meeting, and you can make a world of difference. I find that to be just very, very positive, very agentic, and all the good stuff that we’re trying to promote here on How We Future. I love that you stumbled upon this book with your deep sense of care for leaders to help them.
Bob: We started the book because we were pissed off about bad friction and things in our way. As things unfolded, two things happened. One was there were all these reasons for optimism. We ran into all these people who actually fixed stuff, who actually routinely reduced friction for others. Just since we’re part of the d.school, I think she might be retired, but Kim, who was the finance person there for years, she was great at clearing the way, and she wanted to say, yes, she was a friction fixer in a difficult environment.
Then the other thing, which you already have alluded to, is some things in life should be slow, difficult, or impossible, so friction isn’t all bad. That’s where we went. To your point, we started out grumpy, and I’m pretty optimistic. Just what I’m seeing happen at Google, at Stanford, is making me optimistic.
Lisa: Well, I think that’s super important. You’re reminding me, as I got into my design journey after my love of restaurants as a young kid and restaurants design, the very first book I wanted to write, and you know I’m a very optimistic person, was We Hate Our Customers. [laughter] Because if you look at how most companies treat the people that keep them in business, it’s as if they hate them. I remember this. There was a distinct moment. I was in my 20s, I was living in New York, I was on Amtrak, I was coming back from visiting my family in Philadelphia, and I bought the wrong ticket on Amtrak.
I bought a Metroliner, I needed to get the Slowboat, and I’m halfway in the journey, and the conductor comes around, takes my ticket, and this is before e-tickets. He looks at my ticket, and he says, “You’re going to have to get off.” I was like, “What do you mean?” He said, “You brought the wrong ticket, you’re going to have to get off.” I was like, “Well, can I pay you more to stay on this train so I can get to where I need to go?” He said, “No, you have to get off.” I got off at Metro Park, whatever, had to wait another half hour, had to get--
Then here’s the gall of it, though. This is like my version of your insulting waiter. I remember going up Penn Station on the elevator with the voice of God of Amtrak coming over the loudspeaker saying, “We at Amtrak love our customers.” [laughter] I thought, “No, you don’t, you actually don’t. I think you hate me.” It’s a total change of mindset. It’s like, “Wait a minute, I don’t think that’s-- I keep you in business.” Anyway, lots to say there, and I’m glad you found it to be an optimistic end.
We’re going to go to our first example of Friction of Fixer Game. Bob, have you ever seen a calendar that looks like this, just like bumper to bumper to bumper to bumper?
Bob: Yes, I’ve seen worse, sure.
Lisa: Worse, right, overlapping. In the identifiable friction offenders, and we don’t need to look exactly what’s going on here. For those that are listening, it’s basically a screenshot of a week’s schedule where there’s back-to-back meetings. What comes to mind when you see a calendar like this?
Bob: Oh, I just get tired.
Lisa: Tired, yes.
Bob: When I look at it, I just have that feeling of just relentlessness, like it just looks tired. The other thing is that there’s no time for this person to contemplate, to recharge, to think about what’s next, to take care. I don’t even know when they get to go to the bathroom half the time. Look at this.
Lisa: Yes, or eating or inhumane. When I read about one of your first chapters talking about the addition sickness that we have, more meetings, more this, more that, more to-dos, and that organizations are actually incentivized to reward you if you have a bigger team, if you have more things on your plate.
I think you talk and Huggy talk a lot about the importance of both being more aware about how our calendars-- I often think like there’s a meeting on your calendar and you don’t even know why it’s there, and you’re like, “I’m just showing up.” How we don’t actually have processes to subtract things from our calendar, and how important that is.
Bob: To me, there’s three forces. If you have a situation where you are adding in more and more stuff and the people around you are adding more and more stuff, it’s not because they’re evil people, it’s because you’re a human being in a human organization. There’s a bunch of experiments, including by my friend, Leidy Klotz, who wrote a great book, Subtract. He’d be a great guest, actually. The notion is that when we human beings face a challenge, our natural response, problem-solving response, is to add stuff.
If you ask people, improve a recipe, improve your trip to Europe, improve a Lego model, improve a university, the natural tendency is to add. We’re wired that way. It’s probably evolutionary that the ancestors that survived to breed were the ones who poured all the firewood and food and stuff. The second one is that organizations tend to reward addition. My favorite one is the bigger the team you have, the more you get paid. This is true at both Stanford and Google. Then the third thing is what I call the George Carlin issue. Can we swear in your podcast?
Lisa: Yes, do it. Do it.
Bob: It’s a mild swear word compared to the F-word, which is, my shit is stuff, your stuff is shit. The meaning of that is that the reason that my shit is stuff isn’t anything I add or anything I want. Let’s just take something we love dearly, design thinking. In my heart, I think design thinking should be injected into virtually everything, and it should be added, and everybody should take classes in design thinking.
I actually know that just because that’s my shit. That’s the stuff that’s my shit. That’s the other reason that we keep adding stuff is that we think other people should subtract and not add stuff, but there might be that one meeting we think everybody should go to because it’s so important, even though nobody else cares.
Lisa: Many great points in there remind me of a phrase I heard early on in my design career when I started actually doing it as a practice. We talked about, be careful about sucking from your own exhaust.
Bob: Yes.
Lisa: That’s like the George Carlin, like, my shit is stuff, and also coupled with the idea that everyone is the hero of their own journey. That’s why I think what you’re asking for is empathy for a larger whole, and responsibility is the other side of it, which gets me to my next one. Okay, you ready for the next one?
Bob: Yes.
Lisa: Here we go. This is a cartoon by Tom Fishburne, who’s brilliant.
Bob: Yes, he is good.
Lisa: He’s like a modern-day Dilbert, but better.
Bob: I invited all of you-- it’s a cartoon, they’re sitting around a table, and they’ve got people on Zoom in London, Hong Kong, and New York, and Tokyo, and stuff-- not because the topic is relevant, but because I didn’t want you to feel left out. Well, this has got two problems. First thing is the topic is not relevant, but even if it is relevant, this reminds me of what Huggy and I call sham participation, which in sham participation, this is something that leaders want to be caring, compassionate, and go through a process.
That’s where your leader invites you to a meeting to give you input about a decision that’s already been made, and you have no influence over, and maybe don’t care about either. Sham participation is a great way to waste people’s time in the name of being a participative opening, allegedly listening manager. The problem with if you do this as a leader is you’re not only not being a trustee of your employee’s time. They very quickly conclude that you are full of shit and don’t know how to do your job.
That’s one thing, by the way, our friend Tina Seelig has worked for years with John Hennessy. John Hennessy was president of Stanford for 14 years, has been the lead board member maybe 17 years at Google for years, amazing guy. The thing I always liked about John when he was our dean is John didn’t do that. John doesn’t waste people’s time. He says, yes, no, or I want your input. Maybe he makes decisions a little bit too fast, but I like that. I never saw him do sham participation.
Lisa: Well, I think what you’re also talking about, too, is the toxic trust erosion that happens when you waste people’s time again and again. It’s not even just that you lost time, which, by the way, is one of the most important currencies you can’t get back. These meetings show up, and you’re like, I guess I have to attend. You’re like, you wouldn’t give money away without saying, what am I getting in return from this? Yet we routinely give our time away because this tends to be the practice.
The sham participation is so poisonous, particularly when you’re asking people to weigh in on important things, and you’re asking them to brainstorm, and they give you your heart and soul and their ideas. You’re like, “But here’s what we’re going to do.” You whip it out at the end. You’re like, “What were we doing here? What else could I have been doing with this time?”
Bob: Yes. I have that too, where people ask what they think. I’ve been involved in some building design fiascos at Stanford. In particular, we were part of a process where open offices were imposed on our PhD students in particular. They pretended like they wanted our expertise. There’s all sorts of evidence that when you put people in open offices, it’s very compelling evidence that they’re less productive, they have higher stress, and they collaborate less because they want to be quiet and not disturb people.
After going through all the evidence, it’s like, “Well, we’ve already made the decision, and we’re going to have an open office because Google and Facebook have them. They’re cool, and they’re right.” The faculty weren’t going into closed office, only the PhD students and the staff. There was a status thing that was going on here more than anything else. Open offices are cheaper. That’s why designers like them and administrators like them.
Lisa: Maybe they needed more good friction to really figure out if it was the right move.
Bob: By the way, I think this is one thing to emphasize for your audience, is the more power you have, the bigger your cone of friction or cone of frustration, and the more damage you can do. Be careful. One of the things that happens, of course, when you’re in power is that people watch you more closely than you are watching them. I like to use the analogy of baboon troops. There’s great research on baboon troops that-- I think this is done by Robert Sapolsky at Stanford.
He’s been following a baboon troop for decades, that the members of the baboon troop glance up at the alpha male every 20 or 30 seconds because whatever that alpha male does has a big effect on whether their life is good or bad. You got to be very careful when you send out weak signals and people unintentionally react to them and do stuff that’s silly.
Lisa: I think that connects to another big concept you have around oblivious leaders that just don’t really understand the impact of the choices that they made. They think even intentionally, let’s have best intention that they’re doing something good, but they don’t check their assumptions about how it’s being read and how others interpret it. It can be absolutely treacherous.
Bob: We have an example in the book of, as we call this, executive magnification of early in my career. I studied courtesy in 7-Elevens because one of my colleagues was a researcher for the Southland Corporation. They were spending millions of dollars to improve courtesy in 7-Elevens stores. They had contests. They gave away $1 million for some store manager. All employees were evaluated on whether they smiled, established eye contact, greeted customers, and said, thank you. They’re all evaluated.
In the end, they had all this evidence that came out that 7-Eleven customers don’t care about that. They just want to get in and out fast without encountering a really rude clerk. That’s all they want. They don’t want any violence. They want to feel safe. That’s all they want. This happened because the CEO had a little temper tantrum because he encountered a rude clerk and forgot about it. They went off and spent millions and millions of dollars on this courtesy contest and all this courtesy movement.
He didn’t even realize he set off this whole stream of events. That’s a lot of friction and a lot of money. You got to be careful when you’re a leader because very often, there’s all this discussion of resistance to change. Oh, I want them to use AI. I want them to use design thinking they’re resisting me. The opposite problem is often worse that they over-amplify your weak signals as a leader.
Lisa: Doing some early work around status with our friend, Dan Klein, teaches improv. That was so eye-opening to me about the ripple effects of status, of position, of how you show up. Again, it’s one of these skills we’re not taught. I think everybody should take a class on improv for this very reason, to handle ambiguity, to understand signals, which just make us more empathetic, more resilient. I think it’s so important. You also talk about speaking of weak signals. This one killed me. I chuckled when I read it because I often talk about this as well.
This study that you cite that was in HBR. I’m a hoarder, by the way, Bob. Here’s something you’re going to learn about me. I hold onto everything. Oh, my gosh. This is from 2014. This is the study that showed the ripple effects throughout an organization of a weekly executive meeting that cost the company collectively 300,000 hours because of that unintended consequences of everybody that needed to be involved in preparing things in order to get the executives ready for this meeting.
Bob: We do talk about the meetings on the calendars because we could go to the executives, and we could look at the meetings on their calendar, but we don’t talk about the magnification. It’s all the pre-meeting preparation and all the stuff that goes on backstage. I remember I discussed this. It was at Genentech. I wasn’t on disclosure, so I can say this. This was about years ago. I got a bunch of middle managers, and I talk about the 300,000 hours, and they all flip up their laptops. We have to have five minutes of therapy where they all talk about the stuff they were doing right then, to prepare for the executive committee meeting next week.
There’s 60 people in the room, and almost everybody seemed to have a role in helping to prepare something for this one-hour meeting that was going to happen a week later. That’s a case where to bring back your mom’s old total quality management and process stuff, you need somebody like your mom to go in and to look at the process of establishing a meeting. That’s a good design thinking project. It’s a good d.school project, too. How would you fix this meeting?
Lisa: Totally. How would you fix this meeting? Do we even need this meeting? That’s the most important. Do we even need this meeting?
Bob: I have an old d.school story I forgot about. We had a class that I taught with a woman named Deborah Dunn for years on design thinking. Perry Klebahn, who teaches with us at the d.school, he was CEO of a company called Timbuk2. They make messenger bags. We all got on the bus, like all 14 of us, went up to San Francisco and watched his all-hands meeting, which was the worst all-hands meeting I’ve ever seen in my life. It was disorganized. People were sleeping. It was hot.
There was no food. It just sucked. What our students did was-- thank goodness, we know Perry well, Perry will give people criticism, but you can criticize the hell out of him. He’s like, “Give me more. Beat me, Daddy.” He wants more. What our students did for him and his top management team is they acted out his terrible meeting, which was just terrible, for him. They showed people sleeping. They showed the disorganization, the 17 conversations going on at once.
Perry started looking at his feet and mumbling. It sucked. Then they showed him what a good meeting could look like. He actually did improve the meeting. That’s one of those things about the self-awareness of executives. I think Perry is unusual in that he actually wants criticism instead of wants ass-kissing. It feels really good to be flattered and to be told how wonderful, and smart, and brilliant you are. Criticism’s harder.
Lisa: Well, one of the things that makes me think of that you say so beautifully in the book is that the friction fixers within organizations, well, they’re designers. They’re craftspeople. You talk about it as a craft. There’s no one way to give someone feedback to take it out or to let them really understand the implications of their choices. It is a little bit of art and science to help them both demonstrate like, here’s the wasted time or here’s why this isn’t working, and also having some empathy to say, and you can get better at it.
Bob: Let me talk about one of my favorite friction fixers. I’m not going to use her name. This is current. This is just somebody who I just was talking about yesterday, I’ve been working with. She’s a friction fixer, let’s just say, at a large, famous Silicon Valley company. They have a thing that’s called Unblock. What Unblock is-- it looks like Slack. What you do is, if you have problems-- let’s just say you wanted to use software for another company or it was too hard for you to get funds to do prototyping, anything like this.
What you do is you put in this sort of bulletin board thing that’s called Unblock. Then other people like Slack can jump in and complain, and they add their two cents. She was a diplomat in the US State Department for 20 years before she worked for this company. What she does is she goes in, and she either says, “We can’t fix that. That’s impossible. This is, for example, the performance evaluation system. We have no control of it,” or, “Let’s work on fixing that.” As a diplomat, she’s the key person.
She goes in in this large decentralized organization and figures out, for example, how to make it easier to use a competitor’s software on one of the company’s machines or to come up with a solution. The reason I like that is she’s such a good friction fixer, is there’s both a process, which is the Unblock tool, but there’s this human being who tends to it and has the diplomatic skills to actually make changes to make it easier for this company to ship products. That, to me, is what great friction fixing looks like because there’s a process, a person, and permission to fix it.
Lisa: I love that story. I think when we think about roles of the future, every organization’s going to need someone like that. Whether they’re looking specifically for friction or they’re cross-pollinating or they’re helping, it’s a form of learning. This, I think, is the future of what a learning organization looks like. You have someone who is constantly on the lookout for making connections, for making things better, for surfacing initiatives that have potential that I just don’t think can be automated yet, even as good as AI is getting.
Bob: That’s interesting. In this, in some ways, we’re veering into our chapter on broken connections. One of the things that AI is really good at, and we see this in our students, we see this in the organization, is allowing individuals to move really fast in their own direction. The problem with that is coordinating them. You end up in situations where each individual team member is racing really quickly in a different direction, but stopping and figuring out how do we weave this together, how do we connect together, who does what for an overall final product is actually more challenging because you’ve got the boats racing at high speed in different direction. My friends who are AI geniuses would say, “Yes, the agents will eventually be able to do that, or the agents are already doing it, but you still need to have the humans on board.”
Lisa: Absolutely, because you need someone who can take that systems lens, the holistic lens. Ron Heifetz, I think, talks a little bit about the balcony and the dance floor. I call it a strategic toggler to go from both. You also need the discernment to be like, no, no, no, no, no, this is another way to think about it, but then it brings in another design principle around framing it, which gets to your diplomacy idea, like who can frame it in a way that doesn’t make someone defensive, that allows people to see the opportunity.
It’s a very nuanced human skill. I just think that’s not going away anytime soon. When we think about supporting our students who want to build durable skills where they’re going to be useful no matter what, that connective tissue, understanding, oh, this is a broken connection. Oh, I can reduce pain. I can make a suggestion here. I just think that is so valuable.
Bob: David Webster, a friend of mine who works at Google and ex IDEO, he and I were talking about, in designing, there’s two things. One is what you’re talking about, which are pain killers. I’ve spent a lot of my time, we’re talking about this, a lot of pain killers, of getting rid of the things that add burdens or are bad in life. The other part of the design, and that’s the part that I’m interested here lately, is, well, how do you make the good things even better?
There’s two sides of that because a lot of times it’s really easy to get focused on what sucks in life and to wallow in the bad and all that because there’s often things that suck, but there’s also good things in life. That’s one of the problems with the efficiency of AI is that as humans, we’ve got to remember to slow down and to enjoy the good things, not just to check off the boxes and the tasks as quickly as possible. No matter how much we do, we’re all dead in the end. We might as well enjoy the ride.
Lisa: Oh, my gosh. Amen. I always say that’s what is going to be on my tombstone. She made a difference, and she had a good time doing it. That’s an important second part. She made a difference, had a good time doing it. Listen, there’s a lot to unpack in that and a little bit of why we’re doing How We Future, which is that we’re great problem-solvers. We can react, but who are the imaginers? Problem-solving is not enough in many ways.
You have to imagine something better. If you can architect something better, something that didn’t exist, if you think about not only are you pointing points on their game, you’re reimagining the game. That is such a powerful skillset. I just continue to believe that futures and design, the ability to imagine new futures and the ability to bring them to life through experimentation, prototyping, those give you outside influence.
Bob: That’s really interesting. You just said something just a little earlier about maybe we don’t need the meeting at all. This idea, and Jobs was famous for this, was why don’t we just remove it? It reminds me of a great old IDEO story from our hero, David Kelley, the main founder of the d.school and IDEO. David told me this story that they did, IDEO did, the mouse for the Apple computer. They did that. It’s ugly design, but it had one button.
He said, “We’re in a meeting with Steve Jobs, and we’re arguing about whether they have one or two buttons on the Apple mouse, but the mouse had one button instead of two.” The Microsoft mouse had two buttons. In the final moment, the decision was made. They had a woman there who wrote the user’s manual. In the old days, they give you a manual about how to use something. Now it’s online. She said, “It would be so much easier to write the user manual if there was only one click rather than two. It would be infinite.”
That just drove the decision because they just realized, just think the instruction, push, hold, click, all this sort of stuff. Anyways, that’s just one of those decisions about reframing the problem. They actually talked to somebody who had a different point of view. As David Kelley said, she was the lowest, least powerful person in the room, but she had the most influence because she had us look at it from another perspective, which is, how do I learn to use the thing?
Lisa: That’s a great story. It reminds me-- maybe you’ve heard this joke is my favorite joke about design. How many designers does it take to change a light bulb? Why do we need a light bulb?
Bob: Oh, okay. Perfect. Yes. [laughs]
Lisa: Exactly right. You could see that same theme again and again. I love the story about Apple retail when they first started, and they had the traditional checkout, and they noticed there was a long line. It’s like, “Why do you need the checkout?” Give the ability for everybody that works there take your money. Just get rid of it. I think it takes some courage. First, you got to see it, and it takes some courage. Then, a big part of my practice, which was really just celebrating bright spots among other things. Identify the bright spots and then shape the path, make decisions. Get people there.
Even as you know, I’ve been doing a lot of civic work, moonlighting in my spare time. I brought together about 120 democracy makers, movers, and multipliers to help imagine new narratives for democracy. This wasn’t about gerrymandering and the legal, but this was like, are we just reacting? Oh my gosh, house on fire, or do we imagine something better? One of my big points to them, to your earlier part in the conversation of addition sickness, is I said, your job is not to start something. Do not start. It’s all here. Build on it. Connect with it.
Reduce something you’re working on by partnering with someone else because we got to get to better. The whole thing was centered on existing bright spots. The one final thing I’ll say about that, we celebrated each one of these makers, we called this civic imagineers, with a question. What if professional sports were incentivized to get involved with civics as much as winning? Before someone could say that would never happen, we were like, here’s someone doing it. Here’s a QR code. Just getting them into that mode.
Bob: I love that example. The reason Huggy Rao and I wrote our Scaling book got interested initially was that, for innovation, we realized in almost every company, no matter how unimaginative and stifled it was, there almost always was a small group of people who were doing cool, innovative stuff. Sometimes they were under the radar. Sometimes they were overly glorified. The problem was rarely that it didn’t exist. The problem was, we call it the problem of more, which is what you were talking about too, which is how do you take this bright spot and spread it to other places?
With hospitals would be a great example. There are hospitals that have much lower mortality rates than other hospitals. The question is, well, how can you take the practices they use and spread it throughout the country? There was a campaign called The 100,000 Lives Campaign that did exactly that, and reduce the number of preventable deaths in the United States by 122,000 by spreading practices from hospitals that did it right to hospitals that needed to learn to do it better.
Lisa: What an empowering practice when you feel stuck, to look for analogous examples. It may not be exactly right, but what can you learn from that? I have to say, there are no facts from the future, but you can go and explore what’s happening just by opening up your peripheral vision to see what’s happening, and to explore what about this could work here.
Bob: It is interesting. We have not had this conversation before. This might be a good time to have it, that I’m always skeptical of people who try to predict the future of exactly what it’s going to be. Especially, there’s even some evidence from a guy named Phil Tetlock that the more confident people are, the more likely they are to be wrong. That’s different than what you’re describing. I think what I’m talking about, The 100,000 Lives Campaign, which is that you find a bright spot. That means the future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed. It actually exists.
Lisa: Exactly.
Bob: What can I do to learn from this and to spread it so it’s more widely used? That to me is useful, featuring instead of making a bold prediction on the basis of no facts.
Lisa: Absolutely. Especially these days. It also reminds me of Steven Johnson’s great work around the adjacent possible. How do you look beyond your current box to see what else might be there? Bob, I could talk to you for hours. I’ve got one more that is so--
Bob: Oh, no. It’s so fun to talk to you, as usual. I even forget we’re recording, so I better control myself.
Lisa: I know. No. No, no, no. This is my favorite one. You talk about this in your book. This is an actual slideshow from years ago. This is an actual strategy presentation. This is part one. Then this is the other side of the coin. [laughter] Again, for those that are listening, not watching, the first slide that I showed Bob was about 100 slides, each one with a different complex chart on it that was impossible to understand.
Now, on the flip side of that, we’re now looking at a presentation to a group of people that says blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, death by PowerPoint. Bob, you and Huggy, I’m just in the spirit of time because I just want to get right to it. These, I think, are both phenomenal examples of what you call jargon monoxide.
Bob: Jargon monoxide. Oh, jargon monoxide is our silly term, which I first heard from a woman named Polly Labarre years ago, so I stole it from her. It’s everything from bullshit, which is just stuff that is just complete nonsense, to specialized jargon that nobody else can understand, which might be useful for efficiency in your world, to the one you’re actually talking about to us is when you have two massive a mishmash of ideas. When you have so much overload, you can’t figure out what is signal and what is noise, and people don’t know what to do.
Danny Kahneman, the famous Nobel Prize winner, his last book with some co-authors was on noise. He talked about the idea, and this is one of the reasons that design thinking and agile have some problems in the world in terms of people understanding what they are. They become applied to so many different things and mean so many different things to so many different people that it’s a random scatter of ideas. You don’t actually know what it all means.
With AI, we’re starting to get to that situation, too, where there’s so many different LLMs and variations of LLMs. I look at my desktop, I seem to jump from one to another. I don’t know what’s going on anymore. There’s all this slop and confusion. We really need to be careful when we lead teams and run our own lives to focus on a relatively narrow set of language that people understand.
Lisa: I often quote Bob Johansen, who used to run the Institute for the Future. One of my favorite quotes that he says that I’ve probably said a number of times in this podcast series is that the future will reward clarity but will punish certainty. The certainty that comes in too often, that’s when the jargon comes out, where you’re trying to convince people it’s the right thing versus what you’re talking about around clarity of purpose and clarity of values.
Those are enduring regardless of what LLM model happens. I think that is the work of leaders right now, to really identify what those are, say what they mean, and mean what they say. I love that in the book, you even say, you even have a chart that talks about how to break through jargon monoxides. Say this, not this. Do this, not this. Really force yourself ahead of time to get clear, that clarity piece. That’s the work, I think, that’s so vital.
Bob: Something on jargon, to me, a lot of it is understanding your audience. Jargon isn’t all bad. When people are within the same field, it allows quick communication. A term stat MI might not mean anything to most people. If you are in an emergency room, stat means go fast, and MI means myocardial infraction, somebody’s having a heart attack. That sentence is better than saying the three sentences I said afterwards. Jargon can improve communication among specialists. You’ve just got to be careful when you go across boundaries.
Lisa: That makes a lot of sense. You check in to be like, “Hey, am I actually saying something that has meaning to you? Does this help our job be more efficient, go faster, create more meaning? I think, again, throughout the book, there’s so much around context that’s important. Bob, I want to end with a thing that I think everybody listening can do, which is something I’ve heard you and Huggy encourage others to do, which is the subtraction game. This is something that everybody listening can bring into their life in some way. I wonder if you could describe the subtraction game.
Bob: Huggy and I have done the subtraction game. So many different, 40, 35 groups at Stanford, including the cabinet, Google, Facebook, nonprofits, the Girl Scouts. We’ve done it with 600 people in an audience and strangers. Essentially, it’s you have a conversation, maybe with the person next to you, about what’s driving you crazy and what you would like to get rid of. There’s two levels of this subtraction game. The first level of subtraction game, you sort of do it for fun to raise complaints. It’s sort of like therapy.
When it works, what it does is it leads to actual changes, sometimes self-awareness, and sometimes changes. I’ll do a self-awareness example. Oh, I can use the company because I wasn’t under non-disclosure. I was doing a subtraction game with 400 vice presidents on Zoom at Salesforce. 400, okay? The top thing that was annoying people at Salesforce, and this cracked me up, was too many Slack messages. Too many irrelevant Slack messages that people were dumping on one another and driving them crazy. That was the number one thing.
They make Slack just in case people don’t know. They were complaining about the misuse of their own product. The head of learning development interrupts and says, “Okay, you’re complaining about other people. I want each of the 400 of you to look in the mirror. You are the people who are sending these Slack messages. I love that.” As sort of an awareness thing. Then, when it really works, to me, people actually start getting rid of stuff. We have everything from a vice president at Microsoft who ended sort of a walking dead project. I thought that was good.
Then another example, I did this live in a room at a pharmaceutical company in Chicago. The general counsel raises his hand and says, “We have 87 different family leave policies.” 87. They’re in different countries. Different states. Have different laws, blah, blah, blah. He writes me two weeks later that he got it down to something like 60. I think that’s progress. 60 is a lot, but it’s better than 87. Just as one more caveat, just remember if you don’t add something in the first place, you don’t need to play the subtraction game.
I won’t name the company, but I did a talk at a large sort of tech company about four months ago. A senior VP came in, and he talked about the no map. There’s the roadmap. That’s our strategy. The no map was things that we’re not ever going to do, or we’re not going to do now. It might be a service or a kind of software. That sounds cool. Let’s at least keep it on the shelf and not do it for at least the next year. In all of our lives, the things that I’m not working on now and I’m not going to stop, that’s even better than the subtraction game because you don’t have to get rid of something that’s driving you crazy anyways.
Lisa: I love it. You’re reducing the startup cost from the very beginning, but still naming it, still naming it. I’m always looking for a accolade. I’m like, “Can I get an accolade for that thing I didn’t do?” Then, of course, my children are like, “Really, mom, again? You need more accolades again?” Well, I love that. I just want to emphasize another thing I’ve heard you say about subtraction, and you’ve been playing this game, is that it’s not one and done. Keep doing it. Build it in as a practice. I love it. The mow your lawn, I’ve heard Huggy say.
Bob: The discipline of mowing your lawn. I think that if there’s one thing that I would say for this idea of being a trustee of others’ time, of constantly doing it. Then the other thing, and I think it’s worth ending with this for all of us, is just to embrace that if you’re doing something new or interesting, if you’re futuring, since we’re at the How We Future podcast. You’re trying stuff that you’ve never done before or is new to people, it’s always going to be messy, and things are always going to be screwed up.
If you can find me an organization that’s doing new, interesting things where everything is predictable and beautiful every day, I want to see it. I don’t believe it exists. I think that actually, in most cases for us, the grass is browner rather than greener in other cases. While I strive for perfection, going back to your mother, and how many-- 17 holes in one? Do I remember the right number?
Lisa: Oh, gosh, not quite, but I think it’s either 9 or 10. At 82, still competing. God bless her.
Bob: She’s got 9 or 10 holes. The way that you get there is-- and she’s had a lot of bad shots too, so that’s how you get there.
Lisa: Oh, my gosh. Absolutely. Dare I say, savor it, right, to really realize, thank God we’re human. I always feel like that’s the messiness means we’re human. Huzzah. Amazing. Amazing. Bob, thank you so much. It is so fun to talk to you. I love being a part of your orbit. I’m always learning. I love how much joy you bring to this work, how much energy and passion. Thank you for making sure that we’re being good bosses. Not bad bosses. That we’re eliminating assholes, that we’re closing our knowing and doing gap, and that we’re scaling up the good stuff and trying to get rid of the stuff that’s not working for us. Thank you so much.
Bob: Well, thanks, Lisa. It’s always a joy to talk to you. Your range of experience and curiosity never seeks to amaze me. Thanks so much for being you.
Lisa: Before you go, here are a few ways to keep this conversation going. First, look for one moment where someone else’s time is being wasted. Maybe it’s a meeting, a process, or a handoff, and ask, what could we remove, simplify, or slow down just enough to make this better? Small fixes often compound faster than big overhauls.
Second, if this episode sparked a thought or made you see something differently, leave a comment or review. Your thoughts shape future conversations. You can also follow How We Future wherever you listen to podcasts, and follow us on social for clips, prompts, and behind-the-scenes insights.
Finally, if you want more tools for designing better futures, visit the How We Future sub-stack linked in the show notes. I’m Lisa Kay Solomon. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.