In praise of organisation friction

Let’s be clear, organisation friction as manifested in most companies is very much A Bad Thing. It seems friction is the surly companion to scale. Its symptoms are overlong meetings, the firehose of messages in collaboration tools, the square dance of needing to get approval from our bosses before we’re allowed the time to work together. We’ve all been there and we all hate it. So why does it persist?

There seems to be a logical progression to friction. We can’t do every job in a company, so we have colleagues with differentiated roles. To make sure we all understand our own and each others’ roles, we write them down, and organisation friction is born. Doing work is to get through a big pile of stuff, which we sequence like sheet metal going through a sequence of steps before it becomes a car, thus process friction is born. We rely on bits of work from others, and others rely on bits of work from us, so we need to make sure the right work gets done at the right time, birthing planning friction. We need to prove to others that the combined efforts match the expectations of our customers, regulators, so quality friction is born.

As each of these become more complex with scale, we feel that making organisation, process, planning and quality need to be more complex to catch up. More process is better than less. This is a manifestation of our loss aversion bias.

It seems that working together, working at scale, and working with our own mental biases means that we tend to more friction rather than less. The realisation that friction means waste, and so to identify and reduce this friction wherever possible is the highest ideal of company operating models is the source of the Lean movement.

However, there are many examples of companies sprinkling a little mindful friction to speed up execution. Famously, Amazon banned powerpoint in meetings. Instead, if a decision needed to be made in a meeting, the requestor needed to write up a 6 page memo walking through the need, the pros and cons, the alternatives. The meeting spent the first 30 minutes reading and digesting the paper (because even in Amazon, nobody has time to do the pre-read). Then the meeting debated the memo, agreed the decision, then committed to executing on it.

This meeting structure introduced a good deal of good friction to the process of making the decision. The memo took 2 weeks to write, required data gathering, collaboration, crafting and editing. But this sharpened the thinking and removed the ability to persuade as the key skill for making a decision. It also improved transparency as people not in the meeting could understand the full context for the decision. All of which meant there would be no need to revisit the topic in the future, and so execution was faster.

Atlassian is also a believer in disagree and commit, so much so that it fosters a culture of active disagreement and team tension to really test decisions. This “constructive chaos” tries to fuel creativity through heated debates.

Its teams are mindfully balanced to represent a cognitive diversity, otherwise they’ll just all agree with each other. They adhere to agile ceremonies to mandate opportunities for collaboration, extending beyond software teams. Its environment is set up for collaboration by having whiteboards on all of the walls which encourages standing and drawing with others. Finally, collaboration is modelled as intellectual sparring; it’s accepted behaviour to openly disagree. The outcome is that the collaboration is robust and so the decisions are equally robust.

In these examples, mindfully introducing organisation friction really worked. But what works for Amazon and Atlassian may not work for your company. What will work depends upon your company culture. So your precursor step to introducing the right friction is to really understand your company and local team culture. Once done, I recommend you think about organisation friction with 3 principles in mind.

Change your currency from money to time. As we are custodians for our company’s cash flow, we should become custodians for colleague’s time. This encourages us to be frugal with time, but to mindfully spend it.

I need to stop having back-to-back 30 minute meetings which forces me to start every meeting with an apology for being late. Enabling other people to have access to me is a worthy goal, but overdoing it achieves exactly the opposite. Maybe that means having 40 minute meetings but leaving the rest of the hour free. What I do should model for others, because culture is what we do.

Focus on enablement. Getting team to feel psychological safety in their interactions will enable them to disagree and commit. Providing the right locus of control for the team will enable them to make and follow through on decisions quickly; couple with a responsibility to own the decision (friction to moving too quickly past) will enable the decisions to be impactful.

Quality gates needn’t solely be a source of friction. Re-orienting Quality and Regulations to be enablement functions through e.g. maintenance of pre-qualified assets or sentinel functions will take away the burden knowing what to comply and how to demonstrate compliance, so move faster.

Focusing on discipline over process will enable the culture to stick, enabling constructive behaviours. Creating friction for behaviours away from cultural norms will discourage unconstructive behaviours without stifling challenge and innovation. Spotify uses the icebreaker analogy to describe this: the organisation icebreaker clears the process path for teams to follow. But if teams can demonstrate that an alternative is better, then the organisation icebreaker can change heading.

Relentlessly prioritise. Don’t worry if the lowest priority things never get done. I recommend implementing a personal system Getting Things Done to remove the worry cycles that these low priority things take up. That little friction of thinking about which tasks are truly important will mean that you’re more confident of doing your best work. If you like, you can still keep the low priority tasks on your to do list, right at the bottom, to get to one day. The future you will look back at them fondly recalling the past naïve you that once thought they were important.

A successful organisation will move at speed. A judicious amount of friction will enable this.