0:07

Welcome to the Talks at Google

0:09

Podcast, where great minds meet. I'm

0:12

Matthew, bringing you this week's episode

0:14

with Professors Bob Sutton and Huggy

0:16

Rao. Talks

0:18

at Google brings the world's

0:20

most influential thinkers, creators, makers,

0:23

and doers all to one place.

0:26

Every episode is taken from a video that

0:28

can be seen at

0:31

youtube.com/talks at Google. Professors

0:35

Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao visit

0:37

Google to discuss their book, The

0:39

Friction Project, how smart leaders make

0:42

the right things easier and the wrong

0:44

things harder. This

0:46

book is a useful guide to eliminating

0:48

the forces that make it harder, more

0:51

complicated, or downright impossible to

0:53

get things done in organizations.

0:57

Every organization is plagued by

0:59

destructive friction. Yet

1:01

some forms of friction are incredibly

1:03

useful, and leaders who

1:05

attempt to improve workplace efficiency often

1:08

make things even worse. Drawing

1:11

from seven years of hands-on research,

1:14

Sutton and Rao teach readers

1:16

how to become friction fixers.

1:19

Sutton and Rao unpack how skilled

1:21

friction fixers think and act

1:23

like trustees of each other's time.

1:26

They provide friction forensics to help

1:28

readers identify where to avert

1:31

and repair bad organizational friction

1:33

and where to maintain and

1:35

inject good friction. The

1:37

heart of the book digs into the

1:39

causes and solutions for five of

1:41

the most common and damaging friction

1:43

troubles. Oblivious leaders,

1:46

addition sickness, broken connections,

1:49

jargon monoxide, and fast and

1:51

frenzied people and teams. Sound

1:55

familiar? Sutton and Rao are

1:57

here to help. They wrap

1:59

things up with lessons for leading your

2:01

own friction project, including

2:03

linking little things to big things, the

2:06

power of civility, caring, and love

2:08

for propelling designs and repairs, and

2:11

embracing the mess that is an inevitable

2:13

part of the process. Moderated

2:16

by Emily Ma, here

2:18

are Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao, the

2:21

friction project. Hello,

2:28

everyone. My name is Emily Ma. I'm

2:30

here at Google in

2:32

the Real Estate Workplace Services team, and

2:34

it is my privilege today to introduce

2:36

two incredible luminaries and real mentors and

2:38

friends of mine, Professors Bob Sutton and

2:41

Huggy Rao. Bob is an

2:43

organizational psychologist and professor at Stanford School

2:45

of Engineering. Huggy is a

2:47

professor of organizational behavior at Stanford

2:49

Business School. I am

2:52

sure many Googlers, especially when

2:54

Google was just a startup down the

2:56

road from Stanford, had Bob and Huggy

2:58

as teachers. For the last

3:00

few years, Bob and Huggy have been working on

3:03

a podcast, which is now a book called The

3:05

Friction Project, right here. In

3:08

that book, they humorously

3:10

and wisely introduced to us the

3:12

five big frictions in teams and

3:15

organizations. This includes

3:17

addition sickness, oblivious leaders,

3:19

broken connections, jargon monoxide,

3:21

and fast and furious.

3:24

I am so excited to dig into this a

3:26

little deeper with them today at this talks at

3:28

Google, perhaps with the context of

3:31

how the tech industry and tech companies have

3:33

gone from these tiny little startups 30 years

3:36

ago to mature large

3:38

organizations. Welcome back

3:40

to Talks at Google, Bob and Huggy. It's

3:43

great to be here. Pleasure. Emily,

3:45

thank you. And I love

3:47

your friction shifter, Monica.

3:50

That's right. And we're going to talk about friction

3:52

shifter because I aim to be a great fiction

3:55

shifter. All right. Okay,

3:57

I'm not gonna even be shy. You know, I read eight

3:59

pages into your book and

4:02

you got a little personal with me here. So

4:05

when I joined Google, I actually ran

4:07

global operations for Google Glass. And so

4:09

we were, the first 50,000 units of Google Glass,

4:13

this was 2013. And

4:16

you have a page here about

4:18

that project that was quite spicy.

4:21

And so maybe we dive right in.

4:23

Like you on the outside were observing

4:25

the organization, Google Glass from the outside.

4:27

And what did you see go

4:30

not so well? And maybe if there was anything

4:32

that went well, what went well? And

4:34

if I could go back and redo that

4:36

again, or we could go back and redo

4:38

Google Glass again, what's

4:41

what we have done? Well, we're just

4:43

outsiders ourselves, but I actually didn't talk

4:45

to you during that period. But I

4:48

knew other people who were on that

4:50

team and at Google, and our interpretation

4:52

from publicly available sources and

4:54

some other folks is

4:56

that it was a really fabulous prototype that

4:59

was developed very quickly. But

5:02

there wasn't enough friction about

5:04

sort of grabbing it out

5:06

of the team's hands and putting it in

5:08

the marketplace. So that's the case where maybe

5:10

going a little slower and

5:12

making the product a little bit better before

5:15

you put it in the marketplace may have

5:17

saved the company some money and possibly

5:19

some embarrassment. And

5:22

to me, that's a good example of people

5:24

talk about organizations are

5:26

too slow. But

5:31

sometimes leaders just do things too

5:33

quickly. So there wasn't enough

5:35

internal friction. And some organizations, of course, release

5:37

products too late. So that was the case

5:39

where I think, you were on

5:41

the team and I don't want to

5:43

have you violate any non-disclosures, but it

5:46

looked like that it

5:48

could have had more development before it was put in

5:50

the marketplace. Yeah,

5:53

very minor addition, Emily. I

5:56

think when

5:58

Bob of course says, you know,

6:00

more friction would have benefited, you know, the

6:02

go to market process. What

6:05

we mean by that, of course,

6:07

are obstacles that not only slow

6:09

down decision makers, but

6:11

obstacles that also educate

6:13

decision makers. So

6:16

I just thought I'd kind of make that

6:18

clear. You know, I thought about

6:20

this and what you just said, and it ties back

6:22

to sometimes we have to go slow to go fast,

6:24

right? Yeah. Right. And also,

6:26

not all friction is that.

6:29

I think that's the topic that you bring up

6:31

in your book again and again. I think a

6:33

lot of people look at friction and they look

6:36

at it as like, this is bad, we're slowing

6:38

down. And yet there is actually really good friction

6:40

that we can put into our organization. So

6:43

I think of at least three times this

6:45

doesn't apply to a Google Glass. But if

6:47

somebody's doing something unlawful or immoral, maybe that

6:49

should be difficult to do, or impossible.

6:54

If somebody

6:56

is unsure, and this might have applied to

6:58

the Google Glass situation, there's this

7:01

argument that when people are in a cognitive

7:03

minefield and they're confused, rather

7:05

than rushing ahead, you got to stop and figure out what's going

7:07

on. And then

7:09

the third thing is just the nature of creativity. And my

7:11

God, Google has been very creative over the years, is

7:14

creativity is a fundamentally inefficient process.

7:18

And as long as I can remember, there have been

7:20

people who said, oh, we're going to finally increase

7:23

the speed of creativity and who knows AI may

7:25

do it. But the

7:28

process of even creating AI itself is pretty

7:30

inefficient. So that's

7:33

one of our arguments is that people

7:35

who, you know, the two things you

7:37

can't hurry are creativity and love, sometimes

7:39

we say. The Supremes you can't hurry

7:42

love. So those are some of

7:44

the times when a little more friction does help.

7:47

Yeah, yeah. Actually, this is so funny because

7:49

we live in the Valley, right? So we've

7:51

been in Silicon Valley, Huggy Bob and I,

7:53

and there's been the same for a very

7:55

long time. It's like move fast and break

7:57

things. Right. And you know, as these as

8:00

all of us have grown up with this industry, it may

8:03

be not so good and wise to

8:05

move fast and break things anymore. And

8:07

so your notions of good

8:09

friction are even more important now. So

8:11

maybe I could ask you about that.

8:14

If we broaden it out, we're like... I

8:16

think the analogy that Huggy and I have been using,

8:20

forgive me, it might be too male, but I think

8:22

that it works at least for us, is

8:24

that we still believe it's

8:26

sort of like a formula one or

8:28

a NASCAR race, but there's times...

8:31

They only race once a week, so they get

8:33

ready in between. And there's times

8:35

when you hit the gas, you break in the corners. There's

8:37

times when you want to have a pit stop.

8:40

And then of course product development takes forever in

8:42

those things. So I think that's a reasonable analogy

8:44

of when you hit the gas and when you

8:46

hit the brakes. And when

8:49

things are screwed up or it's dangerous, and

8:52

sometimes you need to get off the track because you're going to

8:54

die because the thing's going to blow up. So

8:56

I think that's sort of the analogy. But the goal

8:58

is to be finished first still, stopping

9:02

and slowing down appropriately. Yeah,

9:05

if I can jet

9:08

ski behind Bob a little bit verbally. You

9:14

introduced this whole construct of speed

9:16

moments ago, Emily. And

9:19

for us, the other side of the

9:21

coin of speed is time poverty. And

9:25

when decision makers have

9:27

time poverty and time,

9:29

they're just waiting time to make decisions.

9:32

And that collides with what we refer

9:34

to as addition sickness, also which you

9:36

mentioned. What you have is

9:38

a situation where

9:41

good people find it easy to

9:44

do bad things because they're cognitively

9:46

over well. They're

9:48

not bad people doing bad things. They're

9:50

actually good people doing bad things. And

9:52

the reason is just the

9:55

sheer amount of cognitive load. Now,

9:58

our viewers, listeners, might be

10:00

interested in one little study. So

10:02

in this study, which is

10:05

still in the process of being refined, we

10:09

asked a graduate student to come through all

10:11

the documentation that startups

10:13

provide, mission, vision, whatever,

10:15

whatever, and anything else,

10:18

and compute, if you

10:20

will, what's the linguistic, using large

10:23

language models, what's the linguistic emphasis

10:25

on speed? So there was

10:27

a particular number that was there. And

10:30

then the question is, what's the

10:32

relationship between the linguistic emphasis on

10:34

speed and the time taken to

10:36

receive a unicorn valuation? Predictably, what

10:39

our graduate student found was, the

10:41

more you emphasize speed, the faster

10:43

you became, you got a time

10:45

to unicorn valuation. But

10:48

when a subsequent analysis, an

10:50

additional analysis was done saying,

10:53

what's the relationship between

10:55

the speed at which you become

10:57

a unicorn and the probability of lawsuits two

10:59

years down the line? And what did we

11:02

find? The faster you

11:04

received the unicorn valuation, the more likely

11:06

you are going to be besieged with

11:08

lawsuits. And that kind of tells you

11:10

descriptively, people green

11:13

light doing bad

11:15

things. You get rich, but you pay a

11:17

lot of lawyers. So

11:21

one other thing about speed that I, and

11:23

this is a really interesting current study, which dovetails

11:26

with a lot of examples in the book. So

11:28

there was a German study done of IQ in

11:31

decision making. And they did these fMRI

11:33

things, like the brain scan things. And,

11:37

and, and so being an old psychology major, the,

11:39

the evidence we were taught is the smarter you

11:41

are, the faster you solve problems, right? That's what

11:43

I thought that, in fact, even standardized tests are

11:46

kind of based on that model. But

11:48

what, what this research found was people

11:51

who had higher IQs did solve

11:53

simple problems faster, but

11:55

when it came to more complicated problems,

11:57

they actually were slower, but more accurate.

12:00

I thought that was just a wonderful analogy,

12:04

maybe for Google Glass, but also

12:06

for some of our

12:08

amazing cases of friction fixing in

12:10

the organization. There's a wonderful one

12:12

since we should talk about getting rid of bad friction,

12:15

where a group

12:17

that actually started the Stanford D-School, believe it or

12:19

not, they got interested

12:22

in fixing a benefits form that

12:24

was completed by more than 2.5 million

12:27

Michiganders that had 1,000

12:29

questions, 42 pages long. One

12:32

question was, when was your child conceived?

12:35

So this is really

12:37

a difficult form, but

12:41

the company's called Sevila. It's a

12:43

nonprofit. To lead the effort, first

12:45

they recruited the top six people

12:47

in the agency who were responsible

12:49

for it. They did

12:51

six prototypes. They complied to 1,700 words

12:54

of laws and regulations.

13:00

Michael Brennan, who's the CEO of this organization,

13:02

as he explained to us, the only way

13:04

to get it done was to go through

13:06

and to get everybody on board and to

13:09

do it right to comply with the laws.

13:11

And they did shorten the form by

13:13

80%. So you think about 2.5 million

13:15

Michiganders are

13:18

completing a form that's 80% shorter. But

13:20

think about how this idea

13:22

that when you're high IQ, you got to slow down to

13:24

get all the pieces to fit together, to me,

13:27

that's a pretty extreme case. And I think that's even

13:29

more complicated than Google Glass might have been. Oh

13:31

my God. I read about Sevila and

13:34

filling in this form. And

13:36

my day job, actually, I spent a

13:38

lot of time thinking about complex systems,

13:40

but also food security. And I'm like,

13:42

man, it's like, while all these benefits

13:45

exist, these government benefits exist, they're also

13:47

incredibly hard to actually have. And

13:49

I'm like, what is it? So maybe we

13:51

could talk about decision sickness briefly. How did

13:53

that form get so long? What

13:56

was it about just

13:58

keep adding questions? I mean, let

14:01

me start and then Huggy get the

14:03

idea of addition sickness and of course

14:05

we're selling our book, The Friction Project,

14:07

but you got to give it advertising

14:09

to our friend Lydie Plath's subtract grade

14:11

book. And Lydie and

14:13

his colleagues at University of Virginia was shown

14:16

that when you give a human being a problem to solve,

14:19

and he's done everything from fixing a

14:21

Lego model, improving a

14:23

recipe, improving a university, people, their

14:26

natural tendency is to add. And

14:30

then to make things worse, many universities, many

14:33

other companies that I know of, you get

14:36

rewarded for starting new programs, for having a bigger

14:38

team and so forth. So you end

14:40

up with this tendency to fix things by adding,

14:42

but there's

14:45

hope. We as human beings, if we stop and

14:47

think, sometimes we can fix things. I mean, maybe

14:49

we should talk about, like, how do you get

14:51

rid of addition sickness? Yeah.

14:57

So, you know, when you

14:59

said addition sickness, Emily, you know,

15:02

Bob, in a very rightly, you

15:05

know, identified the addition bias that all

15:07

of us have, but Lydie is, of

15:09

course, researched.

15:12

I think the other thing is it's not

15:14

just a mere act of addition. It's

15:17

the fact that the

15:19

time of employees is subject

15:21

to the tragedy of the commons, because

15:25

nobody really cares about the time

15:27

of employees. And so when

15:30

you have a tragedy of the commons

15:32

problem, you have perverse incentives

15:34

to overgrade, and in

15:36

this case, kind of add. The

15:39

operative question that Bob was implying was,

15:42

how do we address this? I

15:44

mean, even the simplest things could

15:47

actually be a beginning. The other day, I was

15:50

teaching in a Stanford program for chief

15:52

operating officers, and I was saying, you

15:54

know, it's not that companies don't subtract

15:56

things. They do, but they think of

15:58

it as one and done. You do

16:00

it once and then you don't forget about it. And

16:03

the analogy we have to subtraction is you

16:05

have to mow the lawn. Otherwise,

16:08

the weeds are going to overrun the place and there's

16:10

no way you can plant a sack. So

16:13

the question, so I was talking about

16:15

this to the COO's of various companies.

16:18

And one of them, a very,

16:20

very sharp woman, she

16:22

said, in my company, when the

16:24

executive committee meets every week, we

16:26

focus on something that she called

16:28

the ridiculous. And

16:31

it's a list of crazy, stupid things

16:33

the company does. And you

16:35

can imagine, and I know you're laughing,

16:37

it sounds so obvious, but like,

16:41

you know, the amazing

16:43

thing is why don't more

16:45

executive committees do something as

16:47

simple as that? You know,

16:50

why don't leaders hold other

16:52

leaders accountable for their ridicule?

16:55

Indeed. What do you

16:57

have at the start of

16:59

your review? What was there at the end?

17:01

Did you window down things or did you

17:04

let them fester? And

17:06

I think those are like very

17:08

simple ways in which we can

17:10

get the idea of removing

17:14

obstacles that

17:16

infuriate and overwhelm

17:18

both. And you can imagine that

17:22

civil, I mean, the state of Michigan, questionnaire

17:24

for welfare that Bob was alluding to, you

17:27

know, you would go crazy just kind of

17:29

trying to fill it. So

17:32

I mean, to go with Huggies sort of

17:34

point, the two things that you need to

17:37

overcome to get people to subtract. The

17:40

first thing is, very often

17:42

things are treated as an orphan problem, it's somebody

17:45

else's, somebody else is doing that to

17:47

me, it's not my job to fix it. And

17:50

so that's part of it. So it's

17:52

awareness and responsibility. And I'll give you

17:54

a specific example. And we talk in

17:56

the book about something which is sort

17:58

of like the ridiculous. It's called the subtraction game.

18:01

I think I've even done the subtraction game with some

18:03

teams at Google. And

18:06

essentially what you do is you have people come

18:08

up with a list of things that used to

18:10

work, don't work anymore, that are driving them crazy,

18:13

and then come up with a way

18:15

maybe to reduce the burden, the subtraction

18:17

target. So I was doing with another

18:19

company, not Google, a competitor, I had

18:21

400 vice presidents, I was on Zoom,

18:23

forgive me, it was not a Google

18:25

product. So anyways, and so

18:27

we had to make a list of what was the biggest

18:29

burden. The biggest burden was Slack

18:31

messages. Oh, seriously? That

18:34

were too long, that

18:36

were irrelevant, too

18:39

frequent and so forth. So we

18:41

go through the process and they

18:43

all agree, it's literally out of 400 of them,

18:47

150 said Slack messages, it was amazing.

18:50

So then I said to them, so this is a 400

18:52

vice president, it's a large software company. So I

18:54

said to them, who is sending those 400 Slack

18:57

messages? Take a look in the mirror, baby.

19:00

So, and I'm not saying that it's

19:02

all their faults as individuals, but that's our

19:05

point that as a friction fixer, you've got

19:07

to start and think about your cone of

19:09

friction, and it could be large, or

19:12

it could be small, but even when it's

19:14

small, you're affecting a few customers, a few

19:16

employees in an organization where people are

19:18

more mindful of their cone of friction. Things

19:22

are actually better. And the

19:24

example we use in the book that we're doing a case study

19:26

of now is the California Department of

19:28

Motor Vehicles, which really is trying to reduce

19:31

the load on us citizens and the state

19:33

of California is making some progress. Gosh,

19:36

you know, it blows my mind that the

19:38

DMV is what you want to highlight as

19:40

a positive example. What's

19:42

your example in the book? Because you talked about

19:44

how, I used to go

19:47

line up at like 6 a.m., right? Because I want to

19:49

be at the front of the line, because by like, right,

19:51

right, right, by 8 a.m., the line is like 100 people

19:53

long. But you talked about

19:55

in your book, they send somebody out to

19:57

make sure, as you're in the line up,

19:59

you know, everybody has the right forms and

20:01

is moving in the right

20:03

queue because it is a complex system. Did

20:06

I get that right? Did I get those things right?

20:08

Yeah, that's right. Yes, and we've been in

20:10

conversation. This guy named Steve Gordon, he used

20:12

to work at Cisco. He's head

20:15

of the DMV. He has visited all 180

20:18

field sites. That's right out of the

20:20

design school. They've done customer journey mappings.

20:22

This is like, isn't that

20:24

how we do a diesel project? And

20:28

they've brought in a bunch of

20:31

technology. There's a transaction almost all of

20:33

us Californians are going to have to go

20:35

through to get a real ID. They've cut

20:37

it from 28 to eight minutes at the desk.

20:39

They really, I mean, it's not perfect, but

20:42

they really are trying. And

20:45

my joke is I wish that my

20:47

internet provider Comcast would do the same

20:49

thing. They're a lot

20:51

harder to deal with, they are, than the California DMV.

20:54

Oh, yeah. You know, I loved what you're

20:56

saying about your friend

20:59

who visited all 180, because

21:01

I'm going back to the civilian case too.

21:03

I think you talked about how you had

21:06

like that team had executives

21:08

try to fill out the

21:10

force and that personal experience

21:12

as leaders of

21:14

going through the experience themselves helped them

21:16

realize. So you have another concept in

21:19

your book, which is oblivious leaders. And

21:21

I just realized that in order for

21:23

leaders to maybe overcome some of that,

21:25

they actually have experienced what their customers

21:27

are experiencing. Yeah. And I

21:29

think that's right. So, so there, this might even

21:31

be a new Google technology.

21:34

One example of this, I used

21:36

to check this, there's a meeting software

21:38

that the more you talk, the bigger your head

21:40

is. So

21:43

I thought it was a beautiful example. So

21:46

right now, I guess my head would be

21:48

giant, a beautiful example of indicating that you're

21:50

talking too much in a meeting and maybe

21:52

imposing too much friction. I think

21:54

that's a great way to deal with blabbermouth leaders,

21:57

leaders, and possibly professors. Inspired.

22:02

Well, you two are fun. I could listen to you

22:04

two all day long. I wanted

22:06

to go back to the addition sickness

22:08

and subtraction exercises because that's such an

22:10

important topic as we've been in this

22:12

sort of grow at all costs for

22:15

so long. And

22:17

it turns out, I was just thinking, as

22:19

you said, Slack messages, it turns out that

22:21

at Google, I think the number of emails

22:24

that an average Googler gets every day is

22:26

like 10 times the industry average. So

22:28

it's kind of like before you write another

22:30

email or add another meeting to a calendar,

22:33

why? Why? Why?

22:36

This is like taking a moment

22:38

and being like, why? Is there a more efficient

22:40

way to do this? Could I just wait until

22:42

the next time I meet this individual because we

22:44

have a regular meeting? How can

22:47

we actually reduce some of the sort

22:49

of chaos by doing

22:51

a little less? Yeah.

22:54

You know, Bob's

22:57

wonderful example of the head ballooning

23:00

the more you spoke, you

23:02

know, that kind of led me to

23:04

wonder in response to your

23:06

query, given this glut of email,

23:08

you know, one simple method

23:11

of feedback to an email sender

23:14

is as even you're composing the

23:16

email, if you get feedback saying

23:18

your email is linguistically

23:20

similar to many other emails sent

23:23

before you, you know, you

23:25

kind of they're like, what's the point of sending the

23:27

email then? You know, excuse me. It's

23:31

a rehash of that. I think

23:34

that kind of immediate feedback would be a

23:36

helpful thing. But on the oblivious

23:38

leaders, what Bob and I kind of firmly

23:40

believe is leaders

23:44

are insulated from inconvenience. And

23:47

there lies the problem. You

23:50

know, if your life isn't inconvenient,

23:53

how can you actually take the perspective of

23:55

a customer? How can you actually empathize with

23:57

their feeling because it's alien.

24:00

to you. You don't experience it and

24:02

you think everybody else has the same

24:04

life. And you can imagine

24:06

the fallacy of that kind of

24:08

reasoning. For

24:11

sure. For sure. You know, it's interesting. I

24:14

think we talk a lot about at

24:16

Google respecting the user and by doing so we

24:18

have to be in the arena. So a musical

24:22

principle, it's like not just, you know,

24:24

observe or not just interview, but also

24:26

immerse. Right. So how do we immerse

24:28

ourselves, you know, with, you know,

24:31

in the situation that we're looking to solve

24:33

for? Because it's actually impossible really truly to

24:35

solve it earnestly by just observing it from

24:38

afar. We have to be in the arena,

24:40

you know, fighting the fight or so

24:42

to speak in order to truly like

24:44

emphasize with what's happening. So

24:47

one of my favorite examples, which isn't software,

24:49

but it's life, is that

24:51

some years ago, I talked to a high

24:53

school principal in New York City and

24:56

she was upset because students

24:58

were always late for class until

25:00

she shadowed them for a week. She spent

25:02

a week shadowing them. And it

25:05

was the seventh and she told the story,

25:07

seven story building in New York City. She's

25:10

got a student in the basement

25:12

who she shadowing woman. The

25:15

teacher keeps her two minutes late. It's five minutes to

25:17

get to class. Gosh, then she

25:19

has to go up seven floors to the

25:21

top. It's also that time of month. So

25:23

she has to go and change her tampon.

25:26

So the student was eight minutes late.

25:29

And I remember the principal saying, Oh,

25:32

clearly there's a problem. So what she did was

25:34

she gave students two more minutes to get

25:36

between classes and also started

25:39

really leaning on faculty to let

25:41

students out of class on time.

25:43

Oh, that's fantastic. So those are

25:46

more structural changes but to me, that's

25:48

a really good example that she blamed

25:50

the students until when she shadowed them,

25:52

she realized it was systemic. And I

25:55

think that that's the kind of thing and

25:57

that is friction fixing because it's reducing obstacles.

26:00

for the student. Oh, that's so

26:02

good. I have a colleague who

26:04

now starts every meeting five minutes

26:06

after the half hour, the hour, just

26:08

to give a little bit more buffer to wherever

26:11

we were coming from. And that's such a generous thing

26:13

because sometimes I do have to hop on a bicycle

26:15

to get from one building to another. Just

26:18

like a Stanford student or any college student, I have

26:20

to go from one school to another school. And

26:24

we don't necessarily always account for that.

26:26

And so that's, including a little bit

26:28

of, in

26:30

some ways, good friction, I guess. Yeah, but

26:32

it's reducing stress. So

26:38

what else should we talk about? I

26:40

have actually a really important topic I

26:42

wanna talk about since we tend to

26:44

end up speaking our own language and

26:46

using too many

26:49

three-letter acronyms and whatnot. And you

26:51

have this incredible concept called jargon

26:53

monoxide. And I

26:55

wanna talk about jargon monoxide and how we do

26:57

it. What is it and how do we deal

27:00

with it? And how do people from the outside,

27:02

let's say college graduates or interns who are joining

27:04

who are entering this world of speaking a

27:08

completely different language, how does one break

27:10

in? And how does, let's say I'm

27:12

a manager and I have

27:14

a new person coming, how do I help

27:16

them understand what's going on? So let's

27:19

talk about language. First

27:23

of all, jargon does serve a purpose.

27:25

It helps experts to communicate

27:29

more efficiently and more precisely, so it's not all

27:31

bad. Okay. But

27:34

if the problem with some of it, we

27:36

have at least five flavors of jargon

27:38

monoxide. So there's just bullshit,

27:40

that stuff that's completely hollow. I

27:43

mean, that's something you might be able to get rid of. There's

27:46

in-group lingo, that's when people speak in

27:49

a language that who knows what they're

27:51

talking about. That's fine if you're

27:53

a doctor and you're talking to another doctor, but

27:56

there's a fair amount of evidence that patients don't understand what

27:58

their doctors say because it's an... It's in lingo.

28:02

There's just when you make things so complicated,

28:04

we call that convoluted crap. That's

28:06

another one. Then there's

28:08

my favorite one, which is

28:11

the jargon mishmash syndrome. This

28:15

is when something, and this is the definition

28:17

of noise, when something means so

28:19

many different things, it means nothing. With

28:22

all due respect to some of your colleagues in Agile,

28:24

I think that's what's happened to the word agile. And

28:28

maybe design thinking to criticize us. And then

28:30

there's a new one, which isn't in the

28:32

book, which is botchit. This

28:34

is when you get hallucinations

28:37

from your large language model.

28:39

So that's our territory. But

28:41

I think each one requires

28:43

a different sort of explanation.

28:46

The one that I would talk about, and

28:49

this is where large language models can be good.

28:52

There's a recent example from

28:54

the largest health care system in

28:57

Rhode Island, where they put the patient

28:59

consent form through chat

29:01

GPT and asked to simplify

29:04

it. It

29:06

massively simplified it from a

29:08

12th grade level to a 7th grade level.

29:11

And it's completed by 35,000 people. And

29:14

it gives them surgical consent. It's

29:16

shorter. It's more readable. So

29:19

that's the case where chat GPT

29:21

or whatever, Google has

29:23

a different LLM, can actually help

29:26

reduce the jargon monoxide. That's

29:30

sort of the map of the territory. But

29:32

it's a problem. Yeah,

29:35

I think what both

29:37

of us sort of feel is any

29:42

communication in a company, if

29:45

it's not understood by a 10-year-old,

29:48

it's going to cause confusion. And

29:51

it's going to aggravate the problem. But

29:53

so many of the things we speak about, nobody

29:56

makes an effort to kind of communicate

29:58

it in a way. in a particularly

30:01

simple but effective way. And so

30:04

the result is what

30:06

I would call a contagion

30:08

of obfuscation. You know,

30:10

it just kind of spreads and spreads and

30:12

spreads and you've no idea what the hell

30:15

people are talking about, but everybody seems to

30:17

agree. And you

30:19

know, you sort of say like,

30:21

what exactly are they agreeing on?

30:23

You know, and

30:26

you see, you know, all of the resulting

30:29

challenges. So the thing is keep

30:32

things simple, keep things, then

30:36

you know, in one of

30:38

the things we sort of suggest is in

30:41

complex organizations that keep constantly

30:43

changing. One thing you ought

30:45

to think of is everybody should share a

30:48

common story. You

30:50

know, if there's no common story, it's kind of

30:52

hard to understand

30:55

like, what exactly am I supposed to do? What exactly

30:57

is someone else supposed to do? Well,

31:02

you know, I love that as

31:04

we come to an end here, we only have a little

31:06

bit of time left. You

31:08

know, if we bring it back up to the

31:10

very top, having a sort of central purpose

31:12

and a common narrative

31:15

that everybody is on board

31:17

with is what enables us to

31:19

be really good and cognizant and and

31:22

capable friction shifters, because we can tie

31:24

it back to the overall narrative and

31:26

who we want to be. And

31:29

going back to Huggy and Bobby said

31:31

something earlier, it starts with ourselves and

31:33

you know, our principles and our

31:35

purpose. And so, you know, I want

31:37

to thank you both again. I know, I never have

31:39

enough time to talk to you. It's always so great

31:42

to talk to you. So fun, the chat. And

31:44

I hope we can do this again. I

31:46

am actually actively applying a

31:48

lot of the principles in your book right

31:50

now to myself

31:52

and my colleagues in my personal and professional

31:55

life. And it

31:57

is such a thrill. I also want to bring back

31:59

your. original book which is

32:01

scaling up excellence your first project seven years

32:03

ago and these two side-by-side have been phenomenal

32:06

inspirations in my life so to the both

32:08

of you thank you thank you thank you

32:10

again thank you Emily

32:12

thank you so very much you know so the

32:15

light to talk to you thanks

32:23

for listening to discover more

32:25

amazing content you can always

32:27

find us online at youtube.com/talks

32:29

at Google or via

32:31

our Twitter handle at talks

32:33

at Google talk soon