Do you want to fix the slowdowns, bottlenecks, and everyday hassles that drain organizations? How do you know when friction is a costly drag versus a helpful safeguard? In their book The Friction Project, Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao answer those questions by giving you a clear path for diagnosing, reducing, or adding friction so your team can work smarter and avoid avoidable frustration.
This article will discuss the authors’ advice on becoming a friction fixer. First, we’ll explain what friction is, its costs, and its benefits. Then, we’ll discuss how to determine an appropriate level of friction for the different components of your organization, and how employees can reduce harmful friction within their sphere of influence. Read more in our overview below.
Overview of The Friction Project
All organizations face friction—areas of reduced productivity and efficiency that frustrate employees and customers alike and potentially harm the organization. However, Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao argue that friction isn’t always bad. Sometimes, slowing things down can be vital for ensuring safety, quality, and good decisions. In their book The Friction Project (2024), the authors explain that the key to ensuring that friction is productive rather than detrimental is for everyone to become “friction fixers”—people who care about others’ time and efforts, recognize time-wasting friction problems, do what they can to find a solution, and encourage others to do the same.
Sutton and Rao are Stanford University professors who study how organizations work and change. Sutton is a psychologist who has written eight best-selling business books, including The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide. Rao, the author of the book Market Rebels, is an organizational behavior expert who studies how companies grow and innovate. Sutton and Rao are regular collaborators, having coauthored the Wall Street Journal best seller Scaling Up Excellence.
What Is Friction?
The authors explain that organizational friction occurs when processes slow down due to obstacles like complex rules or procedures, lengthy emails, unnecessary meetings, and so on. Friction often decreases productivity and frustrates employees, customers, and stakeholders alike, causing negative effects like employee turnover, reduced growth, and damaged customer relations.
However, Sutton and Rao argue that friction also serves vital purposes. Sometimes adding time and difficulty to procedures ensures good decisions, quality work, and safety. For example, lengthy hiring processes can be necessary to ensure the most qualified candidates are selected—without this friction, unqualified hires could cause major problems.
Therefore, the authors assert that the key is not to avoid friction, but for everyone—from lower-level employees to CEOs—to manage it: understand when friction is unnecessary and should be reduced, when it’s effective and should be maintained, and when a lack of friction is causing problems and must be increased. In the following sections, we’ll explore the authors’ recommendations for effectively managing friction in organizations—getting everyone involved and targeting the causes of bad friction.
Diagnosing Friction
The first step in managing friction is diagnosing it—determining whether something should be easy and have low friction, or if it should be hard and have high friction. This will allow you to identify existing friction problems and implement solutions. It will also help you consider the impact new ideas or changes will have—like releasing a new product or creating a new role in the organization—so you can determine whether you should proceed and at what pace.
The authors contend that friction should typically be low if something functions well, is safe, and is low-stakes—whether it be a product or procedure. In these cases, it should be easy and fast to take action and get results. On the other hand, friction should be high if something has the potential to be unsafe, ineffective, or is otherwise problematic. In these cases, you’ll have to decide if the product or procedure should be eliminated, or if the process of getting results should be difficult and time-consuming enough to ensure the outcome is satisfactory.
To determine whether a product or procedure is safe or unsafe, high or low-stakes, effective or ineffective, and whether it has any other potential problems, Sutton and Rao recommend considering the following:
- The Consequences of Failure: What costs will you incur, financial or otherwise, if the product or procedure doesn’t work? Can you backtrack or reverse any damage done? Can you learn from your potential mistakes?
- The Effect on People: Does it require collaboration and coordination? Do people have the bandwidth for the additional work, or will it cause burnout? Will reducing friction in one area cause more friction for others in another area, and is that fair?
- The Results of Struggle: If it causes employees or the organization to struggle, will growth follow? Will the struggle result in more pros than cons?
- The Costs of Action and Inaction: Will delaying action cause frustration, waste resources, or be dangerous? Will acting quickly prevent these issues?
Principles In Action: Determining Appropriate Friction
Let’s put these principles into action. For example, hiring someone to mow the headquarters’ lawn should probably be low friction—a quick and easy process that requires minimal oversight. This is because if the process fails and the hire ends up being unfit, the consequences are negligible—there are no major safety risks, minimal financial risks, and little to no impact on the organization or other employees.
On the other hand, releasing a new diet supplement with untested ingredients should have high friction and be difficult to do. It could be dangerous to consumers, and failure could incur major costs—loss of money, resources, employee effort, and more.
If You Can’t Diagnose Friction, Research and Wait
In situations where you lack the evidence or insight to determine an appropriate friction level, the authors recommend taking time to observe and research the problem. For example, look for other companies or individuals who did what you’re considering, and study their results. While this might set you back, it will help ensure you’re successful when you do take action.
Affecting Friction Within Your Sphere of Influence
The authors explain that while everyone can help manage friction, your power and authority determine the type of impact you can make. Employees without authority may not be able to solve friction problems, but they can alleviate the symptoms of friction by supporting colleagues who are negatively affected. Understanding where you fit in and who you can help will allow you to take targeted actions that produce results.
In the following sections, we’ll discuss the authors’ framework for being effective based on where you fit in the organizational hierarchy.
Level 1: Employees Without Authority
Sutton and Rao state that those without authority should focus on supporting and encouraging themselves and others. The most basic way to build support is to change how you think about obstacles. When something goes wrong, avoid imagining the worst-case scenario, don’t blame yourself, find humor in the situation, and remember this will pass. Support colleagues and customers by encouraging the same mindset. This improves mental health, helps endure friction’s frustration, and builds social bonds.
Next, the authors recommend encouraging others by helping them navigate friction—find the path of least resistance through a flawed system, and help others follow it. Direct people away from difficult individuals like tattletales and over-complicators. Give them advice on how to avoid obstacles and solve problems so they can move faster.
Level 2: Leaders With Some Authority
Sutton and Rao say that leaders with some authority—like supervisors or managers—should support and encourage others while protecting them from friction and resolving issues that are within their purview.
Lower level leaders might not be able to make structural changes that resolve friction, but they can absorb some of the fallout so their teams don’t have to. For example, the authors explain that this might mean asking upper management clarifying questions or turning complex instructions from higher up into simple and straightforward guidelines that make it easier for your direct reports to do their job.
Leaders who have the ability to make local changes should do what’s in their power to resolve friction issues, the authors contend. For example, team leaders can do things like making their email communication direct and concise, shortening meeting times, and simplifying team processes.
Troubleshooting Friction From the Top
While high-level leaders should encourage and support others in the same way as lower-level employees, their authority grants them the power to resolve systemic friction problems from the top. In particular, the authors identify five causes of systemic friction that top-level leaders like CEOs should address because these issues create problems for the whole organization: disconnected leaders, overzealous leaders, coordination failures, ineffective communication, and rushed decisions.
Factor 1: Disconnected Leaders
According to Sutton and Rao, friction problems often stem from disconnected leaders with so much power, authority, and privilege that they lose touch with their organization’s reality and the normal experiences of employees and customers. Disconnection usually happens for three main reasons: Privilege grants immunity from normal people’s struggles; some leaders’ high position gives them a false sense of expertise while isolating them from the reality of organizational operations; and power makes some leaders selfish, focusing on their own needs rather than subordinates’.
Sutton and Rao offer four principles that leaders can follow to avoid disconnection and the friction it causes:
1. Speak Carefully: Leaders’ words carry disproportionate weight—even casual comments can prompt employees to launch unnecessary initiatives that divert focus from priorities. Leaders should speak less and listen more, asking thoughtful questions to gain perspective rather than making offhand suggestions that employees may over-interpret.
2. Shadow Employees: The authors advise that rather than assuming they know everything about their organizations, leaders should shadow lower-level employees to gain first-hand understanding of their roles and experiences. This helps leaders see how their actions and decisions impact those working under them and create organizational friction.
3. Rely on Others’ Expertise: Leaders who fail to leverage others’ expertise often make poor decisions and take on tasks beyond their ability or bandwidth, causing delays, wasting resources, and decreasing employee morale. Instead, the authors say leaders should seek input from experts before making decisions and delegate tasks to trusted employees rather than attempting to do everything themselves.
4. Know When to Use Authority: While it’s important for leaders to rely on others, the authors recommend that they also recognize when it’s necessary to use their authority and make executive decisions without getting others involved. This is often necessary when conflict needs to be resolved or decisions need to be made quickly.
Factor 2: Addition Addiction
The authors explain that the second common cause of bad friction is when leaders go overboard by adding elements to the organization—meetings, rules, processes, and employees—but don’t remove anything to make room. While the new additions might seem logical and helpful to the boss, they often complicate things for employees and cause more organizational problems in the long run. Sutton and Rao argue that instead of adding things when you face a problem, you should consider how you could simplify or remove things first—a technique called subtraction.
To start subtracting, identify areas of friction in the organization that are caused by over-addition:
1. Survey Others: Ask employees and customers about aspects of the organization that frustrate or slow them down due to complicated rules, processes, or systems. Where are things getting bottlenecked? Are there coordination failures that contribute to this tension?
2. Weigh the Values and Costs of Tasks: Do your employees spend a lot of time on meetings, emails, or employee evaluations? Are these things valuable and productive, or do they waste time that’s better spent elsewhere? Can you simplify these tasks to save time?
To get these subtractions rolling, the authors suggest you start by collaborating with employees on how to implement subtraction strategies and create organizational processes that help people stick to minimization methods. For example, cap slideshow presentations at 10 slides to encourage clarity and brevity. You can even hire specialists to identify clutter and ways to improve efficiency if you need extra help.
Factor 3: Failure to Coordinate
The third cause of bad friction is coordination failure—breakdowns in communication and collaboration between departments, roles, and teams. These failures create burdensome systems that hinder rather than help employees. For instance, requiring a social media manager to get approval from four different executives before making a post online may be intended to improve content quality, but it actually reduces posting frequency. The result is ineffective social media content and a harder job for the social media manager.
According to Sutton and Rao, coordination failure in organizations is often caused by two issues. The first is when people hyperfocus on their own work while ignoring how it might impact or be impacted by what others are doing. The second issue occurs when leaders focus too much on strengthening individual parts of the organization and not enough on ensuring those parts can work together smoothly.
The authors say that to overcome coordination failures, leaders must emphasize the importance of collaboration and unite employees under shared goals and values. To do this:
1. Help employees understand how their roles connect to others’ and the organization as a whole. Ensure they understand others’ roles as well to improve coordination abilities when unexpected situations arise.
2. Tell an influential company story that emphasizes the importance of coordination and cooperation, and tell the story repeatedly so every employee knows it. For example, describe a time an employee upheld company values and made a meaningful impact on someone’s life. These meaningful stories will become a representation of the company and will help establish values and cultural norms.
3. Establish roles and teams dedicated to improving collaboration and connecting different parts of the organization, especially ones that have grown out of touch.
4. Improve information handoffs—create communication protocols so that when one team or team member hands off a task or piece of information to another, everybody understands the current situation and what needs to happen next.
Factor 4: Ineffective Communication
The fourth cause of bad friction is ineffective communication from leaders. The authors explain that communication issues happen when leaders use complex language and jargon, communicate to impress rather than inform, and overuse buzzwords until they become meaningless. This confuses people, causes misunderstandings, wastes time, and decreases productivity. For example, if a leader sends a directive full of jargon and overly complex guidelines, employees will struggle to understand their objective, let alone how to accomplish it.
To avoid ineffective communication, Sutton and Rao make a few recommendations.
First, they say to simplify language. Eliminate unnecessary organizational jargon, and use everyday language instead of complex words and lengthy sentences. Encourage this by rewarding clear, simple communication and creating a company communication editor to reduce confusing messages.
Next, the authors say to focus on clarifying language using a few simple guidelines: Use concrete rather than vague language, speak in the present tense, frame actions as choices rather than something forced upon people, use metaphors that connect to the senses, and describe work as an ongoing journey rather than something to be finished.
Finally, the authors recommend adopting procedures to ease communication between groups with different specialized terminology. For example, content and marketing teams may struggle to understand each other due to their specialized jargon. Address this by creating a dictionary of specialized terms and their translations, or training generalists who can translate between different specialists’ terminology.
Factor 5: Moving Too Fast
Sutton and Rao’s fifth cause of friction is when leaders move too fast. This happens when they prioritize urgency over thoughtful consideration of actions and decisions, creating a culture where employees feel constantly rushed. This leads to employee burnout and turnover, poor and unethical decision-making, negative workplace attitudes, including bullying and selfishness, and reduced creativity. Fast-moving organizations tend to leave destruction in their wake.
Instead of adopting a fast and furious culture, the authors recommend that leaders apply positive friction—slow processes down to ensure actions and decisions are in the organization’s best interest. There are a few ways they recommend doing so:
1. Pause to imagine the future. Before taking action, consider what both failure and success would look like. This will help your team develop a shared understanding of the path ahead, anticipating potential problems and recognizing success factors.
2. Ask questions that prompt reflection. Leaders should ask questions that force them and their employees to think critically before making decisions: Why is this a good idea? Is it safe? Is it smart?
3. Be sure you can master something on a small scale before attempting large-scale success. For example, before offering a service to the public, make sure your specialists can do the job perfectly within the organization. Before offering the same services within the organization, make sure your specialists can do the job perfectly in trials.
4. Take time to reassess. Organizations are constantly evolving, which means that goals, values, or processes that worked before might not work now. This is especially true after major changes in the world, the market, or the organization. As such, leaders should periodically take time to evaluate these elements and make sure they’re still effective.
