131. Friction Fixing: How to Use Obstacles to Your Advantage 22:57

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Each week, guest speakers will join me for interactive lectures and Q&A sessions on topics like persuasion, storytelling, nonverbal presence, and reputation management. The course starts September 24th, and registration is now open. Learn more at continuingstudies.stanford.edu. To become our best selves, the most creative and generous, we must focus on friction.

I'm Matt Abrahams. I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today, I am thrilled to speak with my GSB colleague and friend, Huggy Rao.

Huggy studies collective action within organizations and in markets. His research and teaching focus on scaling up mobilization, innovation, and talent in organizations. Huggy teaches many popular classes, including people operations, from startup to scale-up.

He also has written several helpful and popular books, including Scaling Up Excellence, Getting to More Without Settling for Less, and Market Rebels, How Activists Can Make or Break Radical Innovations. Along with his partner in crime, Bob Sutton,

He has a new book out called The Friction Project, How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder. Well, Huggy, it is so good to have you on the podcast. Welcome. I'm excited to continue what we have done many times before, have fun in educational conversations. It's a delight to be here. Thank you so very much for having me here, Matt. I'm very much looking forward to our conversation. Excellent. Are you ready to get started?

Absolutely. Let's do it. You have done a lot of research, teaching, and writing about best practices for how companies can best scale. Can you share some of these practices and what role does communication play in successfully scaling businesses? That's a great question, Matt. So,

One of the big ahas for us when Bob and I wrote Scaling Up Excellence was scaling is actually about the mindset. In fostering and sustaining the mindset that we want, communication plays a critical role. Because as you scale, the problem with mindset is voltage loss.

I think Howard Schultz put it really very well when he was the CEO of Starbucks for the first time. He said, hey, we grew from 1,300 to 13,000 stores. And of course, they could tell you the

margin on a macchiato, but they forgot somebody, namely the customer. And that's the problem in a sense. So when we really think of mindsets, communication does play a very central role. A lot of the difficulty I have with the way corporate leaders communicate their mindset is they tend to use very abstract language that doesn't strike a chord, or at worst, it's confusing.

So you do a random search of companies and look at their values. Integrity plays a role.

I don't know about you, when I see the word integrity, my reaction is typically one of confusion. What does that mean? Does that mean I tell you the truth when you ask me a question? Or I tell you the truth even before you ask me a question? I mean, there are different kinds of integrity we talk about. And so communication matters a lot. Now, there's also another aspect of scaling, which for us was a revelation. And the revelation was scaling isn't more of the same. Scaling is like reinvention.

And the person who really encapsulated it well was a senior executive at Uber when we wrote a case study. We asked him a simple question. Hey, how long have you worked in this company? The guy looks at us and says, I've been working in this company for four years, but you know what? Feels as though I worked for 16 different companies.

That just tells you immediately each quarter Uber is a different company. 100,000 rides, you're one company. Quarter million rides, a different company. And so it tells you as you become larger and larger and larger and larger, the premium on simplicity and emotional resonance really goes up. And often I tell people, look,

When you want to say something, when you want to do something, the simple rule is make sure a 10-year-old can understand it on the first try.

So when it comes to scaling, it actually, from a communication point of view, is about simplifying. It's about being clear. It's about being very specific. The temptation, I think, as you get bigger is to add more and more detail when in fact being specific, clear, and concise is what makes a difference. That's right. You and I first collaborated, Huggy, on a case study you ended up documenting on the value of simplification in a complex work environment.

I know communication played a really critical role in that. Can you briefly talk about that case and any key learnings that you like to share from it? First, thank you for the wonderful opportunity that you presented. I'm glad we went on that adventure. Yeah. We certainly learned a lot. For me, what was striking was how they created a social movement to actually...

take out what we refer to as bad friction. Friction is simply obstacles. So this young woman who was your wonderful contact, Pushkala Subramanian, so she was able to bring together a team of 40 people. And what they did was they actually went back to basics. But most importantly, they didn't approach anything with an efficiency orientation.

So in that endeavor at AstraZeneca, they saved the company 2 million hours. 2 million hours, roughly speaking, would be equivalent to around 1,248 FTEs given the cost accounting conventions at AstraZeneca. They weren't interested in saving 1,248 jobs. They were interested in saving 2 million hours and giving it back as a gift. You can imagine when something is presented and given to people as a gift of time, what do people do? They reciprocate.

The research on gift giving says, if I give you a gift worth a buck, Matt, you likely are going to respond with a gift anywhere between $3 to $7. And for me, that was a very powerful lesson because what it taught me a lot about was the crushing role of time poverty in company. Time poverty leads to burnout.

The problem is we're making it very hard for employees to choose a more curious and generous version of themselves. I mean, how can you be curious and ask questions if you're buried under a delusion? I mean, it's very hard to do that. Hard to be generous.

And I think when presenting it as the gift of time addressed the problem of time poverty, Bob and I interviewed Pushkala in one of the podcasts we did at the School of Engineering. And I asked her, I said, how was this simply an activity done by elite managers or did it percolate to the rank and file? And she told a story that really touched me.

me. Apparently, what was happening when you go to Astra, people work begins at eight o'clock, everybody shows up at 740. And then there's a traffic jam because at HQ, you got to put your ID card through and there's a gate that goes up and down and everybody comes at the same time and so on. So they had a world simplification day. And the next day, Pushkala goes to work, there's no traffic jam. And she asks the security guard, if you can believe it,

This is a guy who's not even an employee of AstraZeneca. He's a contractual employee. And she says, hey, what happened to the traffic jam? And the guy apparently looked at her and said, madam, you had the world simplification day yesterday. You're all about, you're all trying to give people the gift of time. And he told her, it seems I thought I could give you a gift of half an hour every day. Wow. I mean, can you imagine that? A security guard, a sentry. And I just thought to myself, that is amazing.

Yeah. That is really amazing. And that, in a sense, opened some of the doors for Bob and I to think about what really is the role of leadership in organizations and what really is the role of friction fixing in them.

I love that case study, not just because all the people involved were fantastic. But for me, what was so fascinating is the strategic choices they made of how to frame it. It could have been efficiency, but no, they looked at hours and that made it very specific. And people understand hours. You can look at your watch and you can say, hey, this is how long. And then the way in which they marketed it, they were posters, there were competitions.

And it got everybody excited about doing, in some cases, hard work. And I found that fascinating. It was a lovely example because the moment as you imply, Matt, the moment you say efficiency, we're subtracting, people think downsizing. Right. You're putting people in a room called fear. Right. Instead, you want to put people in a room called gratitude so that they're willing to do more. Right. And they were incredibly successful. So that to me was really, really fascinating.

We've been talking about friction and your new book with Bob Sutton is The Friction Project. Part of your introduction title is Why is Friction Terrible and Wonderful?

Can you help us understand the wonderful part? I can get the terrible part. Where's the wonder in this? Let me quickly level set what friction is. The simplest way to think of friction is anything that's an obstacle for you to do your job is basically a source of friction. The bad obstacles in organizations create, as I mentioned, time poverty. They make it hard for people to embrace their curious and generous self.

Conversely, employees and decision makers can easily embrace an overconfident and myopic version of themselves. And there, you strategically have to insert obstacles to slow them down.

So that what they do is they deliberate. They actually think about things a little bit more carefully. So that's the real challenge of being a leader. So all the time, what you're thinking about is, hey, where do I take out the bad friction to make the right things easy to do? Where do I put in good friction to make the wrong things harder? And in our book, our advice is

Leaders, when they begin what we refer to as friction forensics, the big question you've got to ask is, what kinds of decisions are we making? Are we making difficult and costly to reverse decisions? One-way door decisions, like making an acquisition, launching a new product, hiring somebody at the senior rungs of the enterprise in the C-suite. In all of these places, putting in good friction to slow things down is a good idea.

Conversely, when the cost of failure is low, decisions can be easily reversed without much cost or consequence. You actually want to strip out as much bad friction as possible because you want to make it easy for people to do.

I am somebody who loves memorable and powerful phrases. And you use this notion of friction forensics, which I think is perfect. It's an analogy and it focuses us in the right way. In your book, you also talk about jargon monoxide. And I would love for you to define it for our listeners because I am on a personal mission to reduce jargon and acronyms. So jargon monoxide, I think is fantastic. Tell us more about it.

Our participants who come through our executive programs, as you know, Matt, they use very memorable phrases. Yes. Jargon monoxide, if I recall rightly, was one of the ones used by one of the executives. And when you think of jargon monoxide, first of all, you're talking of a specialized, impenetrable vocabulary. Like monoxide, it suffocates thought.

It suffocates conversation. And it really leads to a lot of silence. And that's the problem in organizations, making simple things super, super, super complicated. And unfortunately, we have perverse incentives to mystify things. Tell me more. I'm curious. Because how do you convey mastery over something by making it more opaque and harder for you to understand? And that's what that is. And so...

What we need in organizations is simple language. I mean, for me at an organization of scale, the first test is can a 10-year-old get it? Let me give you an example of what I mean. So you could say, we want to foster superior customer service.

People are thinking, what the hell does that mean? I don't know what it is. How do I get hold of it? So you could say that or you could tell the employees, hey, when you do something, make sure you try and put a smile on a customer's face. Now, what's easier to understand? Right. So to me, that's the jargon free, easy, experiential communication. We need to de-jargonize companies, make things simple.

When I talk about acronyms and jargon, I often tell people that the only solution is empathy, is really understanding what's needed in the moment and addressing the terms in that way. You know, Huggy, I have seen you teach. You are a master at telling stories. I'm going to ask you to get meta for a moment. When you think about the information you want to get across and the stories and analogies you want to use,

What are you thinking? What's that thought process? Because I think we could all benefit from some of the tools you use in terms of storytelling and analogy. Can you reflect on your process? Yeah. For me, what really is the goal of a story? When I think of the goal of a story, one way to think about it is, well, it's to actually inform. But what we really want people to do is we want people to not just be informed, but to imagine.

So we've got to take them on a little mental time travel. And the story is like a great vehicle to engage in that mental time travel because you're taken away from the press of your immediate circumstance and surrounding. And so the first thing is, can a story actually resituate the member of the audience?

The second thing is any story ought to be effective or to create moral elevation. Because if you're not elevated morally, it's hard to do much. The other is stories also give insight. So what's the insight? Stories also create connectivity.

There's evidence that say one study, for example, shows if you expose people to the same story and you take functional magnetic resonance images of their brain, the same portions of the brains of people light up. And then what you can do is you can compute correlations amongst the brains to see how much of a shared brain there is in the company. And that's what stories do.

That's so powerful in terms of the idea is to educate, is to get people focused and a shared view. I love this idea of moral elevation. A lot of people when they talk about storytelling, they talk about emotional connection. But this notion of moral elevation, I think, adds even more insight into what effective storytelling is. Huggy, I want to go back a little bit in time. I know you did some research on job titles.

And one of the ways that we identify ourselves and we identify others is by the roles and titles they have. Can you share a little bit about that research you did and the impact it had? Absolutely. So the key thing when you scale a company is you've got to create felt accountability. It's got to be felt in the gut. Felt accountability has two pillars.

People should feel, hey, I own the place. But at the same time, you also ought to feel the place owns you. So there's obligation that always tempers the feelings of psychological ownership. In this experiment, what we did was we created an example of we inserted good friction. So what did we do? We took 82 new venture teams, randomly put them into two groups, 41 in the control condition, 41 in the treatment condition. All of these were tech startups. Every team had four people.

To the teams, we told everybody, hey, your job is to build a new product. We'll get expert judges from the outside to evaluate it. But to the 41 people in the treatment condition, we introduced good friction by telling them, hey, before you start building the new product, take a little bit of time. Think of a job title that showcases your best strengths. And you can choose any title that you want. Think of the title, share it with your colleagues, and then go and build a product.

Since these were all tech startups, people chose titles like guru of cybersecurity, defender of the source code, queen bee of customer service, chief mischief maker, chief instigator, all kinds of names, titles like that. They shared them. And who do you think did better at the end? Teams where people chose their own titles or teams where people didn't? Predictably, the teams that chose their own job titles did far better. Why was that? One is that feeling of ownership. I chose my title.

It's part of me. But if I tell you I'm the guru of cybersecurity, I'm fostering an expectation in you saying I'm good at it. And I got to live up to that. All of a sudden, we got obligation in the picture. So a simple thing like this both amped up obligation, amped up ownership, and led to superior performance. So introducing good friction really does pay off.

So I'm going to have a new title for myself. I am the collector of communication wisdom, and I am going to have to live up to that. And all of our listeners and you, Huggy, will keep me to task. I love that. If I can be mischievous, I love the title of the collector of communications wisdom. I think of you as like a treasure hunter for the wisdom. Oh, I like that. I like that better. I'm going to put my Indiana Jones hat on and I'm out. You got it. You got it.

Huggy, this has been an amazing talk. Before we end, I'd like to ask you three questions, two of which I ask everybody and one I create just for you. Are you up for that? Absolutely.

In looking at your own life, having written a book about friction, is there anything you have changed to reduce friction in your own life? Yes. What is it? Before I do anything, I always ask myself, is this activity going to recruit my curious and generous self? If it does, I'm on it. If it doesn't, I just don't go to that meeting. I don't participate in things. It's just not for me.

Well, then I am honored that you chose to spend your time here. I hope we're fulfilling both your curiosity and certainly your generosity. In fact, you've been both generous and curious. So thank you. Oh, excellent. That's good. Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why? The communicator I would say I admire the most probably is the wonderful American social activist Saul Alinsky.

So Saul Alinsky was a labor organizer. And most of the time organized people who felt they had no hope, they had no power. They simply didn't matter. How do you get these people to realize they matter? And Alinsky was really a master at doing that. I'm just going to give the listeners one simple example of what he did.

This was during the times of the old Daley, the senior Daley, who was the mayor of Chicago. Right. He had a machine. And apparently Alinsky was trying to organize workers. And he asked Daley for time. Daley didn't even give him the time of day, you know. Right. Alinsky did something super clever. He got all these people he was trying to organize, arranged for a bunch of buses to go to O'Hare. And he got them to line up.

before the men's and women's bathrooms so that they were in like eight, ten people and they would constantly recirculate and enter the queue. And somebody told Daly, you've got all these people clogging up the bathrooms daily. Can you imagine in O'Hare? Hell yeah, absolutely. You can't go to the loo. I mean, you'd have a mutiny in no time.

And daily, the moment he found out about it, he said, Alinsky, where are you? Right. And he got the meeting. Of course he got the meeting. It was his way of telling them, hey, you have numbers. Numbers are a source of strength. I admire him because he made people who had no hope

actually feel imbued with hope and confidence. And that's a hard thing to do. It's that moral elevation you talked about. Exactly. Wow. Final question. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

Ideally, if I were to describe my successful communication recipe, I'm going to purloin these three steps from a friend of mine in India called Ramji Raghavan, who leads a nonprofit organization called Agastya, where they teach science to rural children.

It's one of the things that matters a lot to me. The three things are the first stage is surprise. Ah, what's that again? You've already hooked them with something new and novel. And then you've immediately got to make sure it's familiar and not alien. So should immediately be followed by aha. I got it. Hopefully, the third step is ha ha, you laugh. I love ah, ha ha.

Aha. Haha. Exactly. How lovely. That is a classic Huggy example of how you take something very complex, make it simple and make it memorable. And in many cases, fun. So Huggy, thank you for this frictionless conversation. Your ideas are impactful in so many spheres, how we scale up businesses, how we connect with people, how we simplify messages,

prioritize generosity, curiosity, and time. Thank you. And I wish you and Bob best of luck with your new book, The Friction Project, How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder. Thank you, Huggy. Thank you so very much, Matt. My pleasure.

Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast from Stanford GSB. To learn more about how to make organizations more effective and to scale, please listen to episode 14 with Bob Sutton.

This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. And check out FasterSmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter.

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