The Friction Project: Join Huggy and Me on Our Latest Adventure

Since we wrote Scaling Up Excellence in 2014, my co-author Huggy Rao and I have been deluged with stories about how organizations stymie and exasperate their executives, front-line employees, customers, and so many others.

The beleaguered people who we teach, participate in our research, and reach out to us often provide disturbing details. They explain how getting smart and necessary things done where they work requires convoluted, unnecessary, time-consuming, and soul-crushing gyrations—which get worse as organizations grow, age, and become more complex. This burden distracts them from more crucial matters. It undermines their performance and creativity. And it frustrates, discourages, and exhausts them.

These unsettling lessons prompted us to launch The Friction Project—which will be our main focus for the next few years. We are on a messy multi-pronged mission to understand the causes and cures for destructive organizational friction--and when it is wise to make things harder to do. Huggy and I believe that we will develop better ideas about friction, develop them faster, and have more fun if a "campaign of conversations" is a cornerstone of this project. If you have ideas, stories, or evidence about when and how to deal with and dampen destructive friction, and about when friction is constructive, Huggy and I would love to hear from you. Please let us know via comments on this piece, Twitter, or email.

To learn more about The Friction Project, check out the project philosophy, our articles and cases, the Friction podcast, the research tracks we are using to generate evidence and insights, and how to learn with us and from us as the project unfolds.

This Friction Project is supported, in part, by the Designing Organizational Change initiative, which Huggy Rao and I lead at Stanford. An earlier version of this piece appeared at bobsutton.net.

I am a Stanford Professor who studies and writes about leadership, organizational change, and navigating organizational life. Follow me on Twitter@work_matters, and visit my website and posts on a. My latest book is The Asshole Survival Guide: How To Deal With People Who Treat You Like Dirt. Before that, I published Scaling Up Excellence with Huggy Rao. Check out the first season of my "Friction Podcast" at Stanford ecorner or itunes.