Good Friction. Bad Friction.
There's good friction, there's bad friction, and being able to tell the difference between the two is critical.
Our physical world is composed of various surfaces that constantly move past each other. That movement causes friction, and that friction is fundamental to the way the world works. Without friction, we wouldn't be able to walk, hold objects, or drive cars. We would also live in a much, much colder world.
When two materials rub against each other, they generate heat, and just like friction, there's good heat and there's bad heat. Heat can often lead to fire, so if you're camping in the woods, this would be a desirable outcome. If you work in an aluminum factory, it would be a calamity.
The amount of heat generated by friction ultimately depends on how bumpy those materials are. The bumpier the material, the greater the friction, the greater the heat. Conversely, the smoother a material is, the less friction it causes, and the less heat it generates.
For whatever reason, we live in a world that seems biased towards smooth and prejudiced against bumpy.
Smooth sailing vs. a bumpy ride.
A smooth process vs. a bumpy road.
But smooth is not always a good thing, and bumpy is not always a bad one. Sometimes we need bumps. In fact, we need bumps more than ever these days.
Taking the Bus to Abilene
There's an old anecdote introduced by management expert Jerry B. Harvey in 1974 that goes something like this (in its shortened version):
A family is sitting around playing dominoes on their porch on a hot summer afternoon in Texas when the dad suggests taking a 50-mile bus ride to Abilene for dinner. Their son says, "Sounds great!" even though he doesn't really take the idea seriously. Mom thinks Abilene is too far away, but she hears her son's response and replies, "Sure! As long as sister is okay with it." This trip is just about the last thing she wants to do, but not wanting to be the odd one out, sister replies, "Of course I want to go!"
So all four of them pile into an un-air-conditioned bus and take a steaming hot, slow, dusty bus ride to Abilene. The food in Abilene is no better than the restaurant back in their town, and after an underwhelming meal, they pile back into the bus for the miserable trip home.
When they get home, mom dishonestly says, "Well, that was fun, right?" Sister replies, "Honestly, I would've rather stayed home." Brother says, "Me too. I didn't actually think you were serious, Dad." Mom is shocked, "I only said yes because I thought everyone else wanted to go!" and finally Dad reveals, "I only suggested it because I thought you were all bored of being here!"
In short, no one wanted to take the bus to Abilene, and yet that's precisely what they did.
I love this anecdote, partly because I've actually been to Abilene, Texas, and I completely understand why this particular little town was chosen as a somewhat undesirable destination (sorry, Abilene residents). But mostly, I love this anecdote because I see people taking buses to Abilene constantly, both in my personal and professional life. I've been on many buses to Abilene, and there's nothing worse than realizing that I could've stopped it from happening if I had just spoken up earlier. But I didn't, because I was trying to avoid friction.
Social friction is just about one of the most feared forms of friction imaginable. When it comes to other people, we want things to go smoothly. But too often, smoothness comes at the cost of a trip to Abilene. At work, it may look like an initiative that no one really bought into but went along with anyway, and several months and thousands of dollars later, you all realize what a tremendous waste it turned out to be.
On the other hand, knowing how to harness constructive friction on a team can lead to gold. Steve Jobs, the iconic co-founder of Apple and someone who clearly used friction as a management tool (frankly, taking it a bit too far), would frequently tell a story about a neighbor who used a rock tumbler to create beautifully polished stones as a way of understanding how teams work together.
The best work I've ever done, and the most rewarding working relationships I've ever had, involved positive, constructive friction.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone say, "I don't want to step on your toes!" in a work setting. That's the kind of thing that cultivates a culture of non-stop buses to Abilene. So, whenever I onboard new clients at human machine, I bring up the idea of "productive toe stepping". I give people explicit permission to step on my toes, and I warn them that I definitely plan on stepping on theirs. I want people to have opinions of my work, and to express those opinions, because it'll make my work better. And I know I'll have my own opinions of their work and I want to be able to express those because I believe it'll make their work better, too.
A culture of thoughtful, respectful, and productive toe stepping needs to be deliberately cultivated. It simply does not arise from a default culture that's ignored or left alone. It needs to be discussed during new employee onboarding, project kick-offs, postmortems, and one-on-ones. Productive toe stepping is one of the best ways to accelerate an organization's ability to learn, collaborate, and be productive. It reframes collaborative friction, which is as inevitable as the physical friction we experience in daily life, as a positive trait to be harnessed, rather than a negative outcome to be feared and avoided at all costs.
Struggle with the Right Things
As a learning designer, I spend a lot of my time thinking about what makes a great and effective learning experience.
As a default, we want most experiences to be smooth and frictionless. We want them to be easy.
Filing out important government forms should be easy.
Navigating an airport should be easy.
Using a new app on your phone should be easy.
So naturally, our instinct is to apply the same thinking to learning experiences. They should be easy. But that is simply not the case.
I have two related principles as a learning designer:
- Learning should be simple, but not easy.
- Make sure learners are struggling with the right things.
These two principles make up the core responsibilities of all learning designers. It is up to us, as designers, to decide where the friction lives. The goal should not be to design a "frictionless" learning experience, but rather an experience that allows learners to struggle with the right things.
Learning anything significant is inherently hard. You're creating entirely new neural pathways, literally rewiring the way your brain works. That takes time, practice, and a lot of failure. That is a great and beautiful thing. Our job as learning designers is to create the environment and conditions that allow learners to focus exclusively on that hard work. We have to take away all of the distractions and unhelpful friction that don't contribute to the task of learning a new skill.
Let's say you're designing a learning experience that will teach participants how to build a personal budget. To help them do that, you provide them with a template (to make learning easy!) but in order to access that template, they have to get online, find an email, click a link, create an account for a tool they've never used, and finally duplicate the template document before they can start filling it in. For a lot of folks, especially if they're older or lack access to the internet, those steps are nearly insurmountable. And that friction asks them to struggle with all of the wrong things.
A good learning designer would look at that and ask themselves, "What is the right thing for our participants to struggle with?" In this case, it's thinking through their income, expenses, and savings (a personal budget!). They can do that with pen and paper. By taking away the digital template that was meant to make things easy and removing all of the unnecessary and unproductive friction, we can create a much simpler and more effective learning experience.
Friction is an Empathy Machine
One of the ways we've tried to make the world frictionless for people is via personalization. The ads you see online are hyper-targeted towards your needs, interests, and desires. Your AI companion learns everything about you and is designed to be sycophantic. It tells you what you want to hear. As virtual reality devices like Apple's Vision Pro become normalized, we can even shape the very reality we occupy to fit our specific needs. We're moving towards a world as smooth as the curves on these devices.
And that's pretty concerning.
Empathy is the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes. If we move towards a reality that tells us ours are the only shoes that matter, empathy becomes a muscle we stop flexing.
A hyper-personalized reality reinforces the idea that the external world should cater to me and my needs and less to the needs of others or the collective. Seeing content, recommendations, and ads meant for people other than myself is good and healthy! It reminds me that, while something may seem irrelevant to me, it's probably highly relevant to someone else, and that person's needs matter.
Let's say I'm watching live TV late at night and a commercial for hearing aids comes on. This happens to not be a need for me, and is therefore not personalized. But it reminds me that millions of others experience hearing loss, and I should know and care about that! A little friction, a lot of empathy.
Living in a healthy, diverse society means seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and experiencing things that are new, different, and not tailored to my specific wants, needs, and cultural background. A reality that is entirely geared toward me begins to feel homogenous, self-serving, dangerous, and boring.
The type of friction caused by living in a richly diverse and pluralistic society is very much the right thing to struggle with. It builds knowledge, develops empathy, and even generates the kind of heat that turns us into warmer human beings.
I'll see you next month,
Andre
P.S.: You can follow The Synthesizer here on Medium or subscribe directly to the newsletter here: https://thesynthesizer.ahumanmachine.com/
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