[Music] hello everyone my name is Emily Ma I'm here at Google in the real estate workplace Services team and it is my privilege today to introduce two incredible luminaries and real mentors and friends of mine professors Bob Sutton and Huggy Ral Bob is an organizational psychologist and professor at Stanford School of Engineering Huggy is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Business School I sure many googlers especially when Google was just a startup down the road from Stanford h
ad Bob and Huggy as teachers for the last few years Bob and Huggy have been working on a podcast which is now a book called The friction project right here in that book they humorously and wisely introduced to us the five big frictions in teams and organizations this includes addition sickness oblivious leaders broken connections jargon monoxide and Fast and Furious I am so excited to dig into this a little deeper with them today at this toxic Google perhaps with the context of how the tech indu
stry and tech companies have gone from these tiny little startups 30 years ago to mature large organizations welcome back to talks at Google Bob and Huggy it's great to be here pleasure Emily thank you and I love your friction shifter Monica that's right and we're gonna talk about friction shifter because I aim to be a great fiction shifter right okay I'm not gonna even be shy you know I read eight pages into your book and you got a little personal with me here uh so when I joined Google I actua
lly ran Global operations for Google Glass and so we were no I know the first 50,000 units of Google Glass this was 20 2013 and you know you have a page here about that project that was quite spicy and so maybe we Dive Right In Like You on the outside were observing the organization Google Glass from the outside and what did you see go not so well and maybe if there was anything that went well what went well and if I could go back and redo that again or we could go back and redo Google Glass aga
in you know what would we have done well we we you know we we're just Outsiders ourselves but and I I actually didn't talk to during that period but I knew other people who were on that team and at Google our interpretation from publicly available sources and some other folks um is that um it was a really fabulous prototype that was developed very quickly um but there wasn't enough friction about sort of uh grabbing it out of the team's hands in putting it in the marketplace so that's a that's a
case where maybe going a little slower and making the product a little bit better um before you put in the marketplace may have saved the company some money and possibly some embarrassment and and and many and to me that's a good example of people talk about organizations uh are too slow um and there's but but sometimes leaders just do things too quickly so so there wasn't enough internal friction and some organizations of course release products too late so that was a case where I think you kn
ow you were you were on the team and I don't want to have you violate any uh non-disclosures but it should look like uh that it could have had more development before it was put in the market Marketplace yeah uh very minor addition Emily I think uh when Bob of course says you know more friction would have benefited you know the go to market process what we mean by that of course are obstacles that not only slow down decision makers but obstacles that also educate decision makers so I just though
t I'd kind of make that clear you know uh I thought about this what you just said and it ties back to sometimes we have to go slow to go fast right yeah right and also um not all friction is bad I think that's a topic that you bring up in your book again and again I think a lot of people look at friction and they look at it it's like this is bad we're slowing down and yet there is actually really good friction that we can put into our organizations that help better so I think of at least three t
imes this doesn't apply to Google Glass but um if somebody's doing something unlawful or immoral maybe that should be difficult to do or impossible um if if um if if somebody is unsure and this might have applied to the Google Glass situation there's this there's this argument that when people are in a cognitive mind field and they're confused rather than rushing ahead you got to stop and figure out what's going on and and then the third thing is just the nature of creativity and my God Google's
been very creative over the years is creativity is a fundamentally inefficient process oh yeah and as long as I can remember there have been people who have said oh we're gonna finally increase the speed of creativity and who knows AI may do it but um the process of even creating AI itself is pretty inefficient so um so that's one of our arguments is that people who who um you know the two things you can't hurry are creativity and Love sometimes we say The Supremes You Can't Hurry Love so that'
s those are some of the times when a little more friction does help yeah yeah actually this is so funny because we live in the valley right so we've been in silen Valley Huggy Bob and I uh and there's been the same for a very long time it's like move fast and break things right and you know as these tech companies as all of us have grown up with this industry um it may be not so good and wise to you know move fast and break things anymore and so you know your your sort of Notions of good frictio
n are even more important now so maybe maybe I could ask you about that like you know if we Bren it out to like I I think the analogy that Huggy and I have been using forgive me might be too male but I I think that it works at least for us is is that um we still believe it's sort of like a Formula One or a NASCAR um race but there's times they only race once a week so they get ready in between and there's times when you hit the gas you break in the corners there's times when you want to have a p
it stop so and then there of course product development takes forever on those things so I think that's a reasonable analogy of when you hit the gas and when you hit the brakes and um when things are screwed up or it's dangerous and sometimes you need to get off the track because you're going to die because the thing's going to blow up so uh so I think that's sort of the analogy but the goal is to be finished first still um you know stopping and slowing down appropriately yeah if I can uh jet sk
i behind Bob a little bit verbally uh you know you um introduced this whole construct of speed moments ago and you know for us the other side of the coin of speed is time poverty Y and when decision makers have time poverty and time you know they just Avail little time to make decisions and that collides with what we refer to as addition sickness also which you mention what you have is a situation where good people find it easy to do bad things because they're cognitively overwhelmed they're not
bad people doing bad things they're actually good people doing bad things and the reason is just the sheer amount of cognitive load now our viewers and listeners might be interested in one little study so in this study which is still in the process of being refined we we asked a graduate student to comb through all the documentation that startups provide Mission Vision whatever whatever and anything else and compute if you will what's the linguistic using large language models what's the lingui
stic emphasis on speed so there was a particular number that was there and then the question is what's the relationship between the linguistic emphasis on speed and the time taken to receive a unicorn valuation predictably what our graduate student found was the more you emphasize speed the faster you became you got a time to unicorn value but when a subsequent analysis an additional analysis was done saying what's the relationship between the speed at which you become a unicorn and the probabil
ity of lawsuits two years down the line and what did we find the faster you received the Unicorn valuation the more likely you are going to be besieged with lawsuits and that kind of tells you descriptively people green light doing bad things that's right you get rich but you pay a lot of lawyers um so so so one other thing about speed that I and this is a really interesting current study which Dov tales with a lot of examples in the book so there was a German study done of IQ in uh decision- ma
king and they did it with these fmri things like the brain scan things and and and so being an old Psychology major the the evidence we were taught is the smarter you are the faster you solve problems right that's what I thought that in fact even standardized tests are kind of based on that model um but what what this research found was um people who had higher IQs did solve simple problems faster but when it came to more complicated problems they actually were slower but more accurate and I tho
ught that was just a wonderful analogy for maybe for Google Glass but also um for some of our amazing cases of friction fixing in the organization uh there's a wonderful one since we should we should talk about getting rid of bad friction where um a a group that actually started the Stanford D School believe it or not uh they they got interested in fixing a benefits form that was completed by more than 2.5 million michiganders that had had a thousand questions um 42 pages long one question was w
hen was your child conceived so this is like really a difficult um form but um to the company's called civilla it's a nonprofit to lead the effort first they they sort of recruited the top six people in in the agency who are responsible for it they they did six prototypes they complied to 1700 words of of laws and regulations and and as they sort Michael Brennan who's the CEO of this organization as he explained to us the only way to get it done was to go through and to get everybody on board an
d to do it right to comply with the the laws and they did um shorten the form by 80% so you think about 2.5 million Michigan Anders are completing a form that's 80% shorter think about how you know this idea that when you're high IQ you got to slow down to get all the pieces to fit together to me that's a pretty extreme case and I think that's even more complicated than Google Glass might have been oh my God you know I read about civilia and filling in this form and you know my day job actually
I spent a lot of time thinking about um complex systems but also food security and I'm like man you know it's like while all these benefits exist these government benefits exist they're also incredibly hard to actually access and I'm like what is it so let's maybe we could talk about dish sickness briefly right like how did that form get so long like what was it about like you know just keep adding questions let me start and then Huggy I mean the idea of dish sickness and and of course we're sel
ling our book The friction project but you got to give an advertisement to our friend Lighty classroom so subtract great book and and Lighty and his colleagues at University of Virginia was shown that when you give a human being a problem to solve and he's done everything from fixing a Lego Lego model uh improving a recipe improving a university people their natural tendency is to add and and and then and then to make things worse many universities uh many other companies that I know of um they
you get rewarded for starting new programs for having a bigger team and so forth so you end up with this tendency to fix things by adding but there's hope we as human beings if we stop and think sometimes we can fix things again maybe we should talk about like how do you how do you get rid of addition sickness yeah uh so um you know when you said addition sickness Emily you know Bob you know very rightly you know um identified the addition bias that all of us have that liy has of course research
ed uh I think the other thing is it's not just a mere Act of addition it's the fact that the time of employ emplo es is subject to the tragedy of the commons oh because nobody really cares about the time of employees right and so when you have a tragedy of the common problem you have perverse incentives to overg Grace and in in this case kind of AD oh but the operative question that Bob was implying was um how do we address this I mean even the simplest things could actually be a beginning the o
ther day I was was teaching in a Stanford program for chief operating officers and I was saying you know it's not that companies don't subtract things they do but they think of it as one and done you do it once and then you forget about it and the analogy we have to subtraction is you have to mow the law otherwise the weeds are going to overrun the place and there's no way you can plant a sapling yeah so the question so I was talking about this to the Coos of various companies and one of them a
very very sharp uh woman she said in my company when the executive committee meets every week we focus on something that she called the ridiculous and it's a list of crazy stupid things the company does and you know you can imagine I know you're laughing it sounds so obvious but like you know the amazing thing is why don't more executive committees do something as simple as that uh you know uh uh why don't leaders hold other leaders accountable for their ridiculist hey what what do you have at y
our ridiculist at the start of your review what was there at the end you know did you winow down things or did you let them faster and and I think those are like very simple ways in which we can get the idea of uh removing obstacles that that infuriate and overwhelm both you know and you can imagine that civil I mean the state of Michigan questionnaire for welfare that Bob was alluding to you know you would go crazy just kind of trying to fill it so so so I mean to to go with huggy's sort of poi
nt the two things that you need to overcome to get people to subtract uh the the first thing is very often things are treated as an orphan problem and somebody else's somebody else is doing that to me it's not my job to fix it and um so that's part of it so it's awareness and and responsibility I'll give you a specific example um and and we we talk in the book about something which is sort of like ridiculous it's called the subtraction game I think I've even done the subtraction game with some t
eams of Google um and essentially what you do is you have people come up with a list of things that used to work don't work anymore that are driving them crazy and then come up with a way maybe to reduce the the burden the subtraction Target so I was doing with another company not Google a competitor I had 400 vice presidents I was on Zoom forgive me it was not a Google product so anyways and and so we had the make a list of what was the biggest burden the biggest burden was slack messages oh se
riously that were too long that that that were irrelevant too frequent and so forth so we go through the process and they they all agree it's literally out of 400 of them uh 150 said slack messages it was amazing so then I said to them so these are the 400 vice presidents a large software company so I said to them who is sending those 400 slack messages take a look in the mirror baby so and I'm not saying that that you know it's all their faults as individuals but we that's our point that uh as
a friction fixer you've got to start and think about your cone of friction and it could be large or it could be small but even when it's small you're affecting a few customers a few employees in organizations where people are more mindful of their K of friction uh things are actually better and and the example we use in the book that we're doing a case study of now is the California Department of Motor Vehicles which really is trying to reduce the load on US citizens in the state of California a
nd it's making some progress gosh you know it blows my mind that the DMV is what you want to highlight as a positive example I loved your example in the book because you talked about how you so I used to go line up at like 6:00 a.m. right because I want to be at the front of the line by like right right right by 8: a.m. the line is like 100 people long but you talked about in your book they send somebody out to make sure as you're in the lineup you know everybody has the right forms and is you k
now moving in the right queue because it is a complex system did I get that right did I get those yeah no that's that's right so so yes yes and we've been in conversation this's a guy named Steve Gordon he used to work at Cisco he's head of the DMV he has visited all 180 field sites that's straight out of the design school they've done customer Journey mappings this this is like if isn't that is isn't that what we how we do a dchool project and they they brought in a bunch of Technology um there
there's a transaction almost all of us Californians are gonna have to go through to get a real ID they they've they've cut it from 28 to eight minutes at the desk they really I mean it's not perfect but they really are trying and and and you know my joke is I wish that my uh my internet provider Comcast would do the same thing they lot they're a lot harder to deal with they are than the California DMV oh yeah you know I loved what you're saying about your your friend who visited all 180 because
um going back to the civilia case too I think you talked about how you had like that team had Executives try to fill out the FL and that personal experience as Leaders of going through the experience themselves helped them realize so you have another Concept in your book which is oblivious leaders and I I I just realized that in order for leaders to maybe overcome some of that they actually have to experience what their customers are experiencing yeah and I I think that's right so so there this
might even be a new um Google technology one example of this I you have to check this there there's some meeting software that the more you talk the bigger your head is are you guys doing that I thought was a beautiful example so right now I guess my head would be giant a beautiful example indicating that you're talking too much in a meeting and maybe imposing too much friction I think that's a great way to deal with blabbermouth leaders leaders and possibly professors inspired well you two are
fun I can listen to you too all day long you know I wanted to sort of go back to the the addition sickness and subtraction exercises because that's such an important topic as we've been in this sort of grow at all costs um sort of industry for so long and you know it turns out I was just thinking as you said Slack messages turns out that at Google I think the number of emails that an average googler gets every day is like 10 times the industry average and so it's kind of like before you write a
nother email or add another meeting to a calendar why it's just like Tak moment being like why you know is there a more efficient way to do this could I just wait until the next time I meet this individual because we have a regular meeting like how can we actually reduce some of the the sort of the chaos by doing a little less yeah you know you know Bob's wonderful example of the head ballooning the more you spoke you know that kind of led me to wonder in response to your query given this glut o
f email you know one simple method of feedback to an email sender is as even you're composing the email if you get feedback saying your email is linguistically similar to many other emails sent before you you know you kind of say like what's the point of sending the email then you know because excuse me it's a rehash of that I think uh that kind of immediate feedback would be a helpful thing but on the oblivious leaders what Bob and I kind of firmly believe is uh leaders are insulated from incon
venience and there lies the problem uh you know if your life isn't inconvenient you know how can you actually take the perspective of a customer how can you actually empathize with their feeling because it's alien to you you you don't experience it and you think everybody else has the same life and you can imagine the fallacy of that kind of reasoning for sure for sure you know it's interesting I um I think we talk a lot about um at Google uh respecting the user and by doing so we have to be in
the arena so D School principal it's like it's not just you know observe or not just interview but also immerse right so how do we immerse ourselves you know with you know in in the situation that we're looking to solve for because it's actually impossible really truly to solve it earnestly by just observing it from afar we have to be in the arena you know fighting the fight or so to speak in order to truly like empathize with what's happening yeah well so so one of my favorite examples which is
n't software but his life is that uh some years ago I talked to a high school principal in New York City and she was upset because students were always late for class until she shadowed them for a week she spent a week shadowing them and it was a seven and she told the story seven story building in New York City she's got um a student in the basement who she shadowing woman the teacher keeps her two minutes late it's five minutes to get to class gosh um then she has to go up Seven floors to the
top it's also that time of month so she has to go and change her tampon so the student was eight minutes late and and I remember the principal saying oh clearly there's a problem so what she did was she um gave students two more minutes to get between classes and also started really leaning on faculty to let students out of class on time oh that's fantastic so those were you know more sit structural changes but to me that's a really good example that she blamed the students and until when she sh
adowed them she realized it was systemic and I and I I I think that that's the kind of thing and that is friction fixing because it's reducing obstacles for the student oh that's so good you know um I have a colleague who now starts every meeting five minutes after the half hour the hour just to give a little bit more buffer to wherever we were coming from and that's such a generous thing because sometimes I do have to hop on a bicycle to get from one building to another uh just like a Stanford
student or any college student might have to go from one you know school to another school and we don't necessarily always account for that and so that's you know including a little bit of uh actually in some ways good friction I guess good friction yeah but but it's it's reducing stress um so what else should we talk about I I have I have actually a really important topic I want to talk about since um you know we tend to end up uh speaking our own language and using you know you know too many t
hreel acronyms and whatnot and you have this incredible concept called jargon monoxide and I want to talk about jargon monoxide and how we do what is it and how do we deal with it and how do people from the outside let's say college graduates or interns who are joining who are like entering this like World of like you know they're they're speaking a completely different language how does one break in and how does you know let's say you know I'm a I'm a manager and I have a new person coming how
do I help them over like understand what's going on so let's talk let's talk about language well well first of all jargon does serve a purpose it helps experts to um communicate more efficiently and more precisely so it's not all bad okay the but but if the problem with some of it we have at least five flavors of jargon monoxide so there's just that stuff that's completely Hollow I mean that's something you could might be able to get rid of um there's ingroup Le lingo that's when people speak in
a language that who knows what they're talking about that's fine if you're a doctor and you're talking to another doctor but you know there's fair amount of evidence the patients don't understand what their doctors say because it's an it's in lingo um there's just when you make things so complicated we call that convoluted crap that's that's another one then there's my favorite one which is the jargon mish mash syndrome this is when so this is when something and this is the definition of noise
when something um means so many different things it means nothing um with all due respect to some of your colleagues in agile I think that's what happened to the word agile yes yes and maybe designed thinking to criticize us and then there's a new one which isn't in the book which is bot this is when you get hallucinations from from your large language model so yes that's our territory but I think each one requires a different sort of explanation the one that I would talk about um and this is wh
ere large language models can be good there's a recent example um from the largest Health Care system in um Rhode Island where they put the patient the patient consent form through through chat GPT and asked them to simplify it it massively simplified it so from a 12th grade level to a seventh grade level and and it's completed by 35,000 people to give them surgical consent it's shorter it's more more readable so that so that's a case where chat GPT or whatever you know Google has a different um
llm can actually help reduce the jargon monoxide that's that's sort of a that's sort of the map of the territory but it's a problem yeah I think um you know what both of us sort of feel is U uh you know any communication in a company if it's not understood by a 10-year-old I mean it's going to cause confusion and it's going to aggravate the problem but so many of the things we speak about nobody makes an effort to kind of communicate it in a you know in a particularly simple but effective way a
nd so the result is what I would call a contagion of obfuscation oh uh you know it just kind of spreads and spreads and spreads and you've no idea what the hell people are talking about but everybody seems to agree and you know you sort of say like what exactly are they agreeing on uh you know uh and you see you know all of the uh resulting challenges so the thing is keep things simple keep things you know uh and one of the things we sort of suggest is in complex organizations that keep constant
ly changing one thing you ought to think of is everybody should share a common story you know if there's no common story it's kind of hard to understand like what exactly am I supposed to do what exactly is someone else supposed to do you know well you know I love that um as as we come to an end here we only have a little bit of time left you know if if we bring it back up to the very top um having a a sort of Central purpose and a common narrative that yeah everybody is on board with is what en
ables us to be really good and cognizant and and capable friction shifters because we can tie it back to the overall narrative and who we want to be and going back to Huggy and Bob you said something earlier it starts with ourselves and you know our our our principles and our purpose and so you know I I I want to thank you both again I know I never have enough time to talk to the two no we never oh it's always so great to talk fun the chat and I hope we can do this again I am actually actively a
pplying a lot of the principles in your book right now to myself and my colleagues in my personal and professional life and wonderful it is such a thrill I also want to bring back your original book which is scaling up Excellence your first project seven years ago and these two side by side have been phenomenal Inspirations of my life so uh to the both of you thank you thank you thank you again em thank you Emily thank you so very much you know it's a delight to talk to you [Music]
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