The Friction Project*
“This is the ultimate guide to diagnosing and fixing the problems in your organization. No one knows more about making work better than this pair of experts, and they’ve produced a remarkably insightful, engrossing, evidence-based, and actionable read. If every leader took the ideas in this book seriously, the world would be a less miserable, more productive place.”
~Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of THINK AGAIN and host of the TED podcast WorkLife
Forthcoming, January 2024, St. Martin’s Press
We spent seven years studying the forces that make it harder, slower, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done in organizations. The Friction Project is about why and when such friction is destructive, useful, or a mixed bag. Above all, it’s about how to think and live like a friction-fixer, so that your team or organization doesn’t squander the zeal, damage the health, and throttle the creativity and productivity of good people—and burn through cash and other precious organizational resources.
We kick-off the book by unpacking how skilled friction-fixers think and act like trustees of others’ time. We provide friction forensics to help people identify where to avert and repair bad organizational friction and where to maintain and inject good friction. Then the help pyramid show hows friction fixers do their work, which ranges from reframing friction troubles they can’t fix right now so they feel less threatening and upsetting to designing and repairing organizations. Then the heart of book digs into the causes and solutions for five of the most common and damaging friction troubles. These traps are oblivious leaders, addition sickness, broken connections, jargon monoxide, and fast and frenzied people and teams. We wrap things up with mental provisioning for friction-fixers, including the virtues of focusing on the journey rather than the destination, how their craft entails linking little things to big things, how skilled friction fixers get “grease” and “gunk” people in right places, how the craft is very much about “friction shifting”( knowing when to change gears from high to low friction) the power of civility, caring, and love for propelling designs and repairs, and the importance of embracing the inevitable mess that is an inevitable part of the change process (while still trying to clean it up).
* Not the actual cover
