Bob Sutton: The power of subtraction in the world of SaaS
The bestselling author explains why creating great experiences depends on overcoming ‘addition sickness’
Stanford professors Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao spent seven years studying “the forces that make it harder, slower, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done in organizations” and conducted case studies at Uber, JetBlue, AstraZeneca, and other companies to collect insights.
Their new book, “The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder,” explains why friction slows productivity and explores how leaders can identify and eliminate friction holding back their organizations.
In the world of SaaS, AI, and the digital enterprise, much of that friction has roots in overly complicated software solutions and poor software design, Sutton says, the results of which can often leave customers and employees frustrated, unproductive, or both.
Solving that problem doesn’t require better product or engineering talent—or new software, Sutton argues; it means finding ways to counteract the hardwired human instinct to continually add complexity and saying no to everything but the most essential features that deliver great experience. (Check out a brief essay from the book, which describes other strategies leaders can implement to ease friction.)
Sutton shared some of his insights about “The Friction Project” in a recent interview. An edited version of the conversation follows.
Why is friction such a big problem in businesses and organizations today, especially when technology has certainly made tasks frictionless?
The primary core argument of our book is that the best leaders see themselves as trustees of others’ time—as part of that, they look and see how they make the right things easier and the wrong things harder. That sounds really simple, but there are all these things that organizations and human beings do to undermine that instinct.
Leidy Klotz (University of Virginia professor and author of “Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less”) and his colleagues ran a series of experiments, and what they show is that human beings—when faced with a problem, whether it’s coming up with a soup recipe, planning a vacation, or fixing a university—is that our natural tendency, left unchecked, is to add more and more complexity.
This is what you call ‘addition bias,’ right?
Yes. The other thing that amplifies this problem—and certainly in my organization at Stanford—is that the people who add more stuff and complexity tend to get all the rewards. The people who don't add, who remove complexity, aren’t rewarded because removing stuff usually pisses somebody off.
In the world of software, people who add more and more features are often the people who get rewarded instead of those who subtract features or don't add them in the first place. Add it all together and we are naturally predisposed to add complexity, and we don't take it away. That’s the bad news.
Jobs was famous for pushing for subtraction and simplicity. Reed Hastings at Netflix was also well known for it.
So how can companies—especially technology companies—turn that around and practice doing more with less?
What we talk about in the book is when you prompt people to subtract, and when you reward people to subtract, they might actually do it. [Steve] Jobs was famous for pushing for subtraction and simplicity. Reed Hastings at Netflix was also well-known for it. So, it can happen.
I was one of the four authors in an Harvard Business Review article where we tried to get 30 Amazon and 30 Asana employees to reduce the size of their collaboration tech stack because lots of companies have this problem where everybody can add more and more and more stuff. [The pilot study revealed that while eliminating some tools gave some workers more focus in their work, others found the task of elimination itself to be exhausting and futile.]
The best leaders—and this would apply certainly to software designers—see themselves as editors in chief, because that's what great movie and book editors do: They know what to cut, what to add, and how to design the person's flow through the experience.
What’s an example of someone who practices what you’re preaching?
One of my favorite examples from the time we worked on the book is when I went to the DMV in Redwood City, California. I was out of there in 15 minutes with a complicated transaction. They opened at 8, and I was done by 8:15. I was so confused!
We are actually doing a Stanford case study now with Steve Gordon, the head of California’s Department of Motor Vehicles, who is really into designing experiences so they're more efficient for all 175 of DMV’s field offices.
When Steve talks to employees, he says he has two goals: One is "How do we make things easier for our customers?"—our residents—and the other is "How do we improve the quality of your work life?" There are road bumps, of course, and nothing is perfect, but Gordon has this mindset of being trustees of others’ time.
In the world of SaaS, there is an obsession with designing seamless, frictionless customer experiences, for obvious reasons. Why has it been so much harder to deliver on the promise of ‘frictionless’ experiences for employees?
That's a hard question. I have two contradictory answers. One is that the process of designing software for employee experiences to reduce friction is actually a very high-friction, slow, and complicated activity.
What it takes to design software and systems that reduce the burden on employees is so much harder than it looks. It requires a lot of discipline, and it takes a long time. One irony about all this is that fixing friction is a high-friction experience because there are certain things that are impossible to make efficient, and one of them is creativity.
The other part I would argue, which is unfortunate, is that employee experience is very often relegated to not being important enough. I know many CHROs, and many are often treated as second-class citizens on the team. So, to me, that’s a symbol.
There is a third problem, which is: You can’t blame the leaders when you have really decentralized organizations that are big and complicated, and there is no standardization or sharing. When you create a decentralized organization and everybody can do what they want, you end up with a real clusterf*ck.
Bob Sutton is professor emeritus at Stanford University and New York Times-bestselling author of eight books, including “The No Asshole Rule,” “Good Boss, Bad Boss,” and (with Huggy Rao) “The Friction Project.”
