The Friction Project
It's great to see how excited everyone is to talk about friction in Bob Sutton 's viral post here about his new book with Hayagreeva Rao about how to "eliminate bad organizational friction and inject good friction." If it sounds familiar to you it's because I talk about toxic environments a lot.
People especially like the way the Stanford academics identified the “five of the most common and damaging friction troubles: oblivious leaders, addition sickness, broken connections, jargon monoxide, and fast and frenzied people and teams."
My Commentary
The Stanford professors have based their entire theory on turning bad friction into good friction, and of course elements such as building trust and emotional ties between people are key here.
This is progress people. These are the right conversations to be having. But this topic is much bigger and far more complicated than their understanding. It's the entire foundation for this transition we're currently going through. But there's a problem.
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In this entire universe we share, there is a single element that is unpredictable. And that is human behavior.
So before we invest so much in new theories we need to understand human behavior, and how that whole system operates.
These authors put together a great concept, but who can implement it? You can take a group of people and hold them together for a while. But the minute there's a significant outburst, everything will fall apart.
People need to have a basic awareness of what we're dealing with before putting them through a process. They have to become familiar with the system of the human ego - there is no way around this.
If we want to live in a world where people are wise and kind, we need to choose synchrony and harmony over friction and dissention. And to get there we need to consciously raise the importance of synchrony everywhere. But to do that successfully we need to understand what we're working against - the human ego. We need to become fully familiar with it to advance to the next stage of our development.
Organizational psychologist, Stanford faculty, New York Times bestselling author, and speaker. Eight books including Good Boss, Bad Boss, The No Asshole Rule, and Scaling Up Excellence. NEW:The Friction Project.
1 年I am grateful that you find our forthcoming book interesting. And your ideas are also interesting. Please note however we have not based our entire theory on turning bad friction into good friction as you claim. That notion would account for fewer than 1% of the ideas and examples in the book. And in fact the descriptions available already on Amazon and such make no such claim. I am not going do the back and forth to straighten out your flawed statement. But if you are interested in reading the book, I will make you a deal, please email at [email protected]. And send a mailing address. I will preorder a copy of the book for you on Amazon and it will arrive in January when it is published. Again, I appreciate the spirit of your post and many of the ideas, but I am not wild about the inaccurate oversimplification. I thought rather than arguing point by point, I would offer you the chance to wait to read it!