The Friction Project

Have you ever found yourself trapped in an endlessly long meeting, buried in confusing emails, or stuck navigating pointless bureaucracy that seems designed to waste your time? Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao ask this exact question in The Friction Project, and their answer forms the backbone of this practical and provocative book. They argue that while friction—those forces that make getting things done slower, harder, or more complicated—can be destructive, it can also be invaluable when used wisely. The real challenge isn’t to eliminate friction altogether, but to understand when to remove it and when to add it.

Sutton and Rao make a strong case that many organizations have been taken hostage by bad friction: excessive bureaucracy, endless meetings, email overload, and clueless leaders who are oblivious to how their decisions waste others’ time and energy. Yet at the same time, some organizations suffer from too little good friction—insufficient safeguards, quality checks, and moments of reflection that prevent mistakes, encourage creativity, and build ethical resilience. The Friction Project is the culmination of seven years of research and storytelling that explores both sides of this paradox.

Why Friction Matters

The authors argue that friction is at the heart of every organizational pain and success story. From the 42-page benefits form that tortured millions of Michigan residents (before a redesign made it 80% shorter) to the 113-page faculty promotion forms at Stanford, Sutton and Rao uncover how excessive complexity erodes morale, productivity, and innovation. They show how “too much bad friction” leads to burnout and disengagement, but “not enough good friction” can be equally dangerous—producing reckless decision-making, ethical lapses, and half-baked products rushed to market (as seen with Google's ill-fated Google Glass).

As they emphasize, the magic of great leadership is friction fixing: making the right things easier, faster, and smoother while ensuring the wrong or reckless things take more effort. This isn’t an individual responsibility alone. Every employee—from the CEO to the front-line worker—can contribute to identifying, reducing, or rebalancing friction. The book ultimately offers a structured playbook for anyone who wants to transform their workplace into a smoother, saner, and more humane environment.

The Friction Fixer’s Toolkit

Sutton and Rao define friction fixing as both an art and a craft. They explore it across multiple levels: personal, team, and organizational. The authors describe how true “friction fixers” don’t just grumble about obstacles—they take accountability. They pick up “orphan problems” (issues everyone complains about but no one owns) and fix them through what they call “the help pyramid.” This model progresses from reframing and navigating problems at the individual level, to shielding others from organizational chaos, and eventually to redesigning teams and systems that make good habits easier and bad ones harder.

Key examples illustrate this mindset: Dr. Melinda Ashton’s “Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff” campaign in Hawaii Pacific Health empowered nurses to identify and eliminate pointless electronic health record tasks—freeing thousands of hours of time. At Dropbox, the leadership’s “Armeetingeddon” initiative wiped hundreds of meetings off calendars overnight, showing how small design interventions can transform an entire company’s culture of time-wasting. Similarly, AstraZeneca’s simplification initiatives saved over two million employee hours by attacking unnecessary processes one step at a time.

Why You Can’t—and Shouldn’t—Eliminate All Friction

The authors warn readers against succumbing to the seductive fantasy of a frictionless organization. Removing too much friction, they note, can unleash chaos and harm. Friction serves critical functions: it slows impulsive leaders, prevents fraud, provides time to reflect, and teaches people to value what they’ve worked for. They cite research on the “IKEA Effect,” where people appreciate what they’ve labored over more deeply than what they received effortlessly. Similarly, Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull promotes “healthy struggle” in creativity; by iterating seven to nine times, friction becomes the furnace of excellence. Essentially, smart leaders craft environments where friction is the right kind: friction that protects quality, values, and humanity.

From Diagnosis to Design

Throughout the book, Sutton and Rao equip readers with diagnostics—such as “friction forensics” (when and where to make things faster or slower), “subtraction rituals” (removing unnecessary work), and a five-trap framework that targets oblivious leadership, addition sickness, broken connections, jargon monoxide, and the fast-and-frenzied culture plaguing modern companies. Each tool encourages you to step back, ask—“Is this necessary?”—and cultivate the courage to subtract. As they put it, the real work of leadership is design: to continually shift between the gas and the brakes, to protect people’s dignity and time, and to build systems that make progress more effortless for everyone involved.

Imagine if every leader acted as a trustee of time—treating every minute of a colleague’s attention as sacred. That’s the philosophy Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao call the hallmark of a 'friction fixer.' They illustrate this idea through vivid stories: Winston Churchill’s 1940 'Brevity' memo urging British officials to 'see to it that reports are shorter,' and Dropbox’s 'Armeetingeddon,' where executives deleted hundreds of meetings and told employees, 'Doesn’t it feel fantastic?'

To be a trustee of time isn’t just about cutting waste—it’s about being deliberate. It means knowing when to create constructive friction to slow people down and avoid reckless or unethical choices. Great leaders ask: “Whose time am I wasting right now?” and “What friction do I need to add to protect people?”

The Cone of Friction

Sutton and Rao introduce the concept of a 'cone of friction'—the sphere of influence where your decisions either lubricate or clog workflow. Leaders like Dr. Melinda Ashton widened their cone by listening to nurses and doctors about the 'stupid stuff' that stole their time. At Hawaii Pacific Health, changing one data entry requirement—reducing diaper-change documentation clicks—saved 1,700 nursing hours per month across hospitals.

Executives with large cones, such as NBA coach-turned-CEO examples or bureaucratic reformers, must understand their leverage. Every small friction they impose multiplies exponentially across thousands of employees—what Sutton calls 'multiplication madness.'

Five Mottos for Trustees

The authors outline five 'mottos'—simple leadership principles that keep friction fixers grounded:

• 1. It’s like mowing the lawn: Fights against bad friction are never-ending. You trim excess today, and weeds grow back tomorrow. Dropbox’s meeting load, for instance, crept back within a year, proving maintenance is essential.
• 2. Treat organizations as prototypes: Like IDEO’s David Kelley, who shaved his mustache to symbolize temporary change, good leaders design systems as experiments—changeable and reversible.
• 3. Reward doers, not posers: Becky Margiotta, who led the 100,000 Homes Campaign, celebrated those who housed people, not those who just talked about doing so. Her team’s quirky 'chicken f’er' awards honored genuine action.
• 4. Fix the problem, not the person: Instead of blaming, investigate systemic causes, as Amy Edmondson’s research on Boeing’s failed safety culture shows. Leaders should foster psychological safety so people point out flaws early.
• 5. Reward prevention, not just heroics: Great organizations honor those who stop friction fiascoes before they happen, not just those who clean up the mess. Artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles, celebrated for her maintenance art, embody this spirit.

Authentic Pride

Friction fixing, at its core, is an act of humility. Sutton and Rao highlight research on authentic pride by psychologist Jessica Tracy: true pride comes from sustained effort that earns respect, not from arrogance. Leaders like Pixar’s Ed Catmull or the developers of AstraZeneca’s simplification movement don’t boast—they take satisfaction in steady, invisible progress. Being a trustee means deriving pride from stewardship: leaving things a little better, a little smoother, and a little saner than you found them.

Before you can fix friction, you must learn to diagnose it. Sutton and Rao call this practice friction forensics: the analytical process of deciding what should be easy, what should be hard, and why. Like a detective at a messy crime scene, a friction fixer’s first job is to slow down, observe, and ask the right eight questions. These range from 'Is this the right thing to make easy?' to 'Will reducing friction here simply push the pain elsewhere?'

When to Speed Up, When to Slow Down

A prime example of getting this wrong comes from Facebook’s early “frictionless experience” ideal—a pursuit that eliminated all barriers to engagement but also eroded trust and encouraged reckless behavior. In contrast, Google’s Laszlo Bock demonstrated smart friction forensics by limiting job interviews to four. Previously, some candidates endured up to twenty-five rounds; Bock’s rule reclaimed countless hours and improved hiring speed, simply by recognizing that extra steps weren’t adding value.

The authors stress that the goal isn’t constant optimization but appropriate calibration. Organizations thrive when they design their gas and brakes deliberately, not accidentally.

Too Easy, Too Hard… or Just Right?

Using examples from hospitals, Sutton and Rao show how a little added friction can improve outcomes. At 'General Hospital,' doctors had to justify ultrasound requests with a fifteen-minute conversation and written order. At a nearby 'Flagship' hospital, they could order with two clicks. The extra friction at General reduced unnecessary tests, saved $200,000, and improved patient flow without harming care. More effort, it turned out, made the system smarter.

Weaponized and Ethical Friction

The book also exposes dark uses of friction—when corporations use deliberate hurdles to trap or exploit customers in what design expert Harry Brignull calls 'roach motels.' Canceling an online subscription can require ten screens and a phone call. Netflix, however, earned customer loyalty by doing the opposite—it made quitting as easy as two clicks, a move that forced them to build better products instead of coercing retention. Similarly, California’s new laws now require simple one-click cancellation options, turning ethical design into legal mandate.

Ultimately, friction forensics teaches an ethical and strategic lesson: friction is power. Adding speed bumps can save lives—as when Blue Cross Blue Shield made opioid prescriptions harder to issue—and smoothing rough spots can restore humanity, as when Dutch grocer Jumbo introduced slow checkout lanes for seniors craving conversation. The genius of great leadership lies not in making everything easy, but in knowing what to make easy—and why.

In chapter three, Sutton and Rao unveil the 'Help Pyramid'—a five-level model describing how friction fixers operate, from daily coping tactics to system-wide redesign. This pyramid bridges therapy and architecture: it shows you how to comfort people stuck in broken systems while also equipping you to fix those systems permanently.

1. Reframing: Changing the Story

At the base lies reframing—helping people reinterpret frustrations as temporary, fixable, or even humorous. Real estate agent Rumana Jabeen calms stressed homeowners using phrases like “this too shall pass”—a technique backed by research on temporal distancing. Humor, too, becomes therapy: teams that joke about 'death by meeting' or 'jargon monoxide' vent and bond, transforming pain into shared purpose.

2. Navigating: Acting as Guide

Some systems can’t be fixed immediately, so friction fixers become navigators. Think of the kind DMV clerk who guides people through bureaucracy instead of ignoring them. In contrast, San Francisco’s byzantine permit process—with consultants paid $200 per hour to 'expedite' applications—shows what happens when organizations leave navigation to outsiders. Mentorship functions similarly within companies: when seasoned professionals guide newcomers, turnover drops and morale rises.

3. Shielding: Absorbing Chaos

Managers who act as human shields protect teams from nonsense. Pixar’s Ed Catmull once refused to hand termination lists to Lucasfilm’s president, offering up his and Alvy Ray Smith’s names instead. That single act preserved the team who later became Pixar. Such 'shit umbrella' leaders absorb politics and confusion, ensuring creators can focus on their craft.

4–5. Designing and Repairing Systems

At the top levels, friction fixers go beyond empathy—they design better systems. Microsoft teams shortened default meeting times by five minutes to prevent burnout. Stanford’s LaunchPad class injects 'productive friction'—forcing students to launch real businesses under tight constraints—to forge focus and learning. These design tweaks embody Sutton and Rao’s mantra: make the right things easy, the wrong things hard.

The Help Pyramid reframes leadership itself: it’s not simply about command and control but about stewardship, protection, and continual redesign. Whether you’re shielding coworkers from chaotic executives or reimagining a 42-page benefits form, every level of help counts. The only unforgivable act is seeing friction everywhere—but doing nothing.

One of the book’s sharpest insights is that leadership itself is a friction factory. Sutton and Rao coin the term “power poisoning” to describe how privilege blinds leaders to the burdens they impose. At General Motors, executives who enjoyed new cars every six months and free gas could not fathom why customers loathed dealers or maintenance visits. Their perks insulated them from reality—and destroyed their ability to fix it.

Three Symptoms of Power Poisoning

• Privilege: Easier lives mean oblivious leaders. Comcast’s VIP 'Office of Tom Karinshak' shielded executives from the customer-service chaos ordinary users faced, ensuring they never experienced the system’s true pain points.
• The Fallacy of Centrality: Leaders assume, “If something important were wrong, I’d know.” This overconfidence mirrors the doctors in Ron Westrum’s study who believed child abuse didn’t exist in their city simply because they hadn’t seen it firsthand.
• Self-centeredness: Studies by Dacher Keltner show that power dulls empathy—wealthier drivers are far less likely to stop for pedestrians. When bosses forget their ripple effect, entire organizations pay.

Six Consequences of Leadership Cluelessness

The authors warn of cascading effects:

• Magnification: Every careless word becomes gospel, as when a CEO’s offhand craving for blueberry muffins caused a chain-wide obsession with ordering them.
• Multiplication Madness: Sending one long email wastes thousands of collective hours—a single message multiplied by 2,000 recipients.
• Decision Amnesia: Forgetful bosses reopen resolved issues repeatedly, wasting meetings on déjà vu loops.
• Cookie Licking: Leaders claim ownership of projects they’ll never finish, blocking others from acting.
• Sham Participation: Fake engagement—like forming 'input committees' after decisions are already made—erodes trust.
• Hurting by Helping: Misguided interventions like superficial 'management by walking around' consume time and backfire.

Antidotes to Power Poisoning

To rebuild trust, leaders must switch from transmission to reception. Speak less, listen more—what the authors dub “be an elephant, not a hippo.” Ride-alongs, shadowing frontline employees, and downward deference (as in Tsedal Neeley’s global leadership research) reconnect executives to reality. Jeff Bezos’s “two-door” decision rule—slow down for irreversible choices, sprint for reversible ones—exemplifies the skill of friction shifting. Leaders who alternate between humility and authority foster the healthiest organizations, where hierarchy exists to support people, not subdue them.

From inbox bloat to organizational sprawl, addition is our default disease. Sutton and Rao diagnose this universal tendency as “addition sickness”—the human urge to solve problems by adding more rather than removing. Whether it’s creating more rules, meetings, or approval steps, the result is the same: complexity metastasizes. Psychologist Gabrielle Adams’s research confirms this bias: even when removing a single LEGO block made a structure stronger, most people chose to add more pieces instead.

The Subtraction Mindset

Counteracting addition sickness starts with awareness and small wins. At AstraZeneca, Pushkala Subramanian’s 'Million Hours Campaign' invited employees to save 30 minutes per week. The result: two million hours reclaimed in under two years. They used simple strategies—shorter Outlook meetings by default, fewer email recipients, and “meeting-free days.” Sutton and Rao highlight this as an example of restraint as leadership: subtraction by design, not neglect.

Subtraction as Craft

The authors propose tools for cultivating subtraction:

• Good Riddance Reviews: Audit processes to find 'stupid stuff' to eliminate—like Hawaii Pacific’s pointless EHR entries or redundant emails.
• Meeting Doomsdays: Temporarily wipe all regular meetings to test which ones are actually needed—an experiment that saved Asana teams eleven hours per month.
• Rules of Halves: Challenge yourself to cut time, forms, or steps in half and re-add only essentials. As coauthor Leidy Klotz writes in Subtract, “Less is not nothing—it’s better.”
• Subtraction Rituals: Symbolic acts like smashing obsolete tools, as Celanese leader Annette Kyle did with a bulldozer to retire old processes, reinforce change.

Subtraction is how organizations free bandwidth for what truly matters: creativity, connection, and care. Jerry Seinfeld famously calls comedy 'the hard way'—telling us that friction, when intentional, breeds excellence. By pruning needless complexity, friction fixers create room for the good kind: the difficulty that disciplines minds, strengthens teams, and makes effort meaningful.

Coordination failure is one of the sneakiest forms of bad friction. The authors illustrate this through a troubling story: a state-of-the-art cancer hospital that promised 'patient-centered care' yet left patients coordinating between 50 specialists on their own. This burden, dubbed the 'cancer tax,' shows how even noble organizations can crumble under silos and arrogance.

The Psychology of Coordination Neglect

Researchers Chip Heath and Nancy Staudenmayer call this bias coordination neglect. Experts focus on their own “component” rather than the whole, assuming others will handle integration. Partitioning further fragments communication: each team optimizes locally, no one orchestrates globally. Military historian Eliot Cohen’s study of WWII naval failures and the U.S. Navy’s later creation of the 'Tenth Fleet' underscore this timeless lesson: integrate or fail.

Fixing the Coordination Trap

Sutton and Rao propose several fixes: reward collaboration rather than competition (as Satya Nadella did at Microsoft by replacing stack ranking with the 'One Microsoft' culture); tell unifying stories (like CEO Hubert Joly’s 'dinosaur surgery' story at Best Buy, which bonded employees through shared pride); and create integration roles such as CarePoint administrators at cancer centers to help patients navigate multiple services.

The most effective leaders also “flex the hierarchy”—commanding decisively during crises and flattening it during problem-solving, much like the Navy SEALs who alternate between strict structure and post-mission egalitarian debriefs. This flexibility keeps collaboration aligned without chaos.

From Chaos to Cadence

Finally, coordination thrives on rhythm. Mozilla’s 'Monday drumbeat' and team rituals at Microsoft create shared timing and pace, transforming scattered effort into synchronized progress. The ultimate insight: friction fixers know that coordination is a living process, not a one-time project. It must be tuned daily, with empathy, stories, and well-timed pauses that hold everything together.

If you've ever nodded along in a meeting while secretly thinking, “What does any of this mean?”—you’ve breathed jargon monoxide. Sutton and Rao define it as the fog of convoluted, meaningless, or contradictory language that kills clarity and inflates egos. Whether it’s consultants pushing 'helix organizations' or executives marketing 'humaning,' jargon doesn’t just sound silly—it suffocates action.

Four Forms of Jargon Monoxide

• Convoluted Crap: Over-engineered ideas disguised as brilliance. Holacracy’s 8,000-word constitution is a prime offender—so complex that even its adopters, like Zappos, eventually gave up.
• Meaningless Bullshit: Empty buzzwords like 'building brand heat' or 'leveraging humaning' that sound profound but mean nothing. As philosopher Harry Frankfurt warned, bullshitters care neither about truth nor lies—they care only about impression.
• In-Group Lingo: Specialized codes, useful within tribes but alienating outside. The 'EPO' button that shut down New York’s emergency dispatch system existed simply because technicians assumed everyone knew its meaning.
• Jargon Mishmash: When words mean everything and nothing—like 'agile,' which now covers forty different methods, from Kanban to Scrum. When definitions diverge, coordination collapses.

Replacing Bad Talk with Good

Sutton and Rao’s remedy is simple: become an 'editor in chief.' Cut, clarify, and translate. Workplaces need lexicons that define key terms—as one smart manager did by creating a shared dictionary of strategic words, preventing endless debates.

They also note that language can fuel moral leadership. Former Alcoa CEO Paul O’Neill, for instance, didn’t say “enhancing operational safety metrics.” He said, “No one should get hurt here.” His plain, powerful words transformed Alcoa’s culture—and its profitability.

The final lesson: power distorts speech, but humility clarifies it. The most effective friction fixers trade smart talk for real talk. Their words don’t anesthetize—they ignite understanding and action.

The modern workplace worships speed—but Sutton and Rao remind us that perpetual acceleration often destroys what it builds. The cautionary tale of Zenefits captures the cost: a billion-dollar start-up obsessed with “Ready. Fire. Aim.” that collapsed under regulatory violations, squandered data chaos, and burnout. In their rush to scale, leaders forgot that moving faster only works if you’re moving in the right direction.

The Perils of Hurry

Research confirms that speed can breed toxicity. Companies whose mission statements overemphasize urgency are four times likelier to commit ethics violations. On an individual level, hurry kills empathy—90% of seminary students in a rush ignored a suffering man on their walk to deliver a sermon about compassion. Sustainable speed demands stewardship, not sprinting.

Paying Down Organizational Debt

Uber’s early growth illustrates what happens when organizational 'debt' compounds. Hundreds of unsynchronized “speedboats” of engineers produced overlapping code, technical bugs, and ethical chaos. Only after new leadership, deliberate slowing, and improved coordination did Uber begin to stabilize. The moral: fast without control leads to burnout and breakdown.

Constructive Friction: The Pause that Heals

The best friction fixers master the pause. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos distinguishes between reversible 'two-way door' decisions and irreversible 'one-way' ones, fast-tracking the former and deliberating on the latter. Teams use 'premortems' and 'previctorems' to anticipate failure or success before acting. Becky Margiotta’s 'Times Square test'—proving a model locally before scaling it nationally—shows that slowing down early saves months later.

In the end, slowing down isn’t laziness—it’s leadership. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky’s compassionate layoff during the pandemic exemplified graceful deceleration: more listening, fair severance, and time for reflection. The authors conclude with a simple rule echoed by coach John Wooden: “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”

The book closes with an invitation: start your own friction project. Sutton and Rao believe friction fixing is everyone’s job, no matter your title. Whether you lead a team or just manage your own workload, you can design work that honors time, accountability, and dignity.

Three Core Leadership Principles

• Be a trustee of time: Respect every minute, like physician Michael Brennan, who asked Michigan officials to fill out their own 42-page benefits form—igniting real reform.
• Take ownership: Friction fixing thrives when accountability isn’t optional. Leaders like Becky Margiotta create cultures where people act as if “I own the place and the place owns me.”
• Design continuously: Treat every organization as a prototype. Systems never stay fixed; they require constant subtraction, iteration, and learning.

Five Lessons to Live By

The authors summarize their findings through five enduring lessons:

• 1. Focus on the journey, not the destination: Success isn’t an endpoint but a continual balancing act between effort and ease.
• 2. Link little things to big things: Like Steve Jobs obsessing over Apple Store layouts, small design choices shape enormous outcomes.
• 3. Match grease and gunk people to their roles: Visionary rule-benders and meticulous enforcers each shine when placed wisely.
• 4. Embrace friction shifting: Learn when to speed up and when to slow down. Balance innovation with intentional drag.
• 5. Lead with civility and love: WD-40’s Garry Ridge built a culture of candor and care, proving that kindness accelerates performance.

Friction fixers, the authors conclude, are not perfectionists but craftspersons. They accept that life is messy, that organizations will always generate drag, and that progress is a process of continual redesign. As Stanford design legend David Kelley advises, “Sometimes the best you can do is to love the mess and move forward.”