358 Robert Sutton: How To Spot Bad Friction And Create Good Friction In Your Workplace

When’s the last time you felt out of place? I’m sure a lot of us have sat with that feeling, whether that’s professionally or personally. It can hit you just as easily in a boardroom meeting as when you’re out with friends.

So now that you feel like an alien that’s crash-landed, what do you do? Our guest today has built his career around finding community for these so-called “black sheep.” Peter Sims is a former corporate investor who became disillusioned with the high-powered world of finance and left to form his own creative firm – appropriately named, Black Sheep.

It’s also the name of his new book, out in May, subtitled The Quest To Be Human In An Inhuman Time.

What can we take away from Peter’s journey, to help us better navigate those moments when you feel the need to find a new tribe?

At DA, we’re all about discovering and harnessing disruption, but sometimes, disruption finds you. It’s a fact of life – our car skids on ice we didn’t see on the road up ahead. Your boat hits a reef at night. A business deal falls through out of nowhere, and there’s nothing you can or could have done.

Now that your car’s in a snowbank, what’s next?

Our guest today has been there and back. After the company she worked for collapsed while she was on maternity leave, Carol Fishman Cohen decided to leave the workforce for 11 years to raise her children.

Today, she’s the CEO of her own company, iRelaunch. Carol’s had to fight through the nitty-gritty of getting back into the office, remembering and trusting in her capabilities, and today her company helps others make the same jump. Her story is, quite literally, a case study in how people disrupt themselves in response to being disrupted.

When we talk about robots, machines, artificial intelligence, it’s usually within the context of something theorists call the singularity. That’s the moment when AI figures out how to upgrade itself, and leaves us in the dust. After all, it can learn a library in an instant – the AI doesn’t need to stop for a snack and a nap. 

In the world of the Terminator, it took Skynet a single day to become self-aware, destroy most of human life, and then send Arnold back in time to make sure no one could stop it.

But in the end, The Terminator is one person’s vision of the future – a vision that’s also designed to sell well at the box office. Isn’t it just as possible to write a different version?

Our guest today is spending his time doing just that. Paul Allen, the co-founder and former CEO of Ancestry.com, is asking instead – what if we saw AI as an ally, not an arms race? With his new venture, Soar, Paul is writing a different story, one where the robots aren’t sent back in time to strip away our humanity, but rather – they exemplify everything that’s unique about being human.

“If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

Famous words by Bruce Lee, sure, but when we’ve felt like a stone our whole lives, what does becoming water actually look like? How do we learn to be more malleable in difficult situations? And how can we be confident we’re flowing in the right direction?

Samantha Cooprider is the senior director of global leadership development at Meta – formerly Facebook. Today, Sam’s shaping leaders at a corporate level, but her path to the top has been anything but straightforward. She’s had to learn how to flow from a Midwestern childhood, through the non-profit world, and into the C-suites of Tesla, Meta and Google. 

So how does Sam keep her mission top of mind when she’s moving from one cup to another?

After 49 days fasting under the Bodhi tree, Siddhartha Guatama was struck by an idea. We suffer because we are attached to things, to people, to desires. When we can’t have it, we feel an emptiness. But what if we never wanted it in the first place?

Guatama taught his philosophy for the next few decades, and centuries after that his followers would give him a new name – the Buddha. Total, complete elimination of your yearnings was called Nirvana.

In our networked world, where we broadcast on social media what we want others to see of us, Nirvana can seem far away. But our guest today says that the yearning to belong shapes our behaviors in ways we’re not often conscious of.

Dr. Michael Gervais is host of the podcast Finding Mastery, where he pulls on his experience as a high-performance psychologist to draw out what makes these top athletes and board room professionals tick.

He’s out with a new book – The First Rule of Mastery, Stop Worrying About What Other People Think Of You.

When’s the last time a customer service phone menu left you… genuinely angry? We build these systems to make things easier, layer systems on top of other systems, but who’s doing the gardening and pruning – the upkeep?

Our guest today calls this phenomenon friction. Robert Sutton has taught at Stanford since 1983, in that time covering everything from psychology to business management. Now he’s out with his 8th book, The Friction Project.

Bob and his co-writer Huggy Rao took on this idea of a maddeningly-frustrating phone menu to nail down where friction comes from – and how to treat it. But also, how can friction in our organizations actually be a force for good?

What does it take, day in and day out, to lead a group of people effectively? It’s not easy, that’s for sure. On a very granular level, leading is balancing a thousand decisions, huge and small, every day. So what guides your hand?

Republican Governor of Utah Spencer Cox is an anomaly in a time of waning bipartisanship. His vice chair in the National Governor’s Association is a Democrat – and a close friend at that. He’s also been a bit of an anomaly in how he’s charted his life, too, turning down Harvard and a cushy lawyer job for his family farm in Fairview.

But Governor Cox is an anomaly we can learn from. How do you build a belief system as a leader – and strengthen it, when it seems like the political winds are blowing against you? 

We find ourselves compromising every day – it’s how things get done in a society where we all want something else. But what’s the root of compromise? Isn’t it this idea that solving the issue, whatever it is, is more important than checking off everything we want?

It can seem that those ideals have been left by the roadside in the past couple years, but the issue of honest compromise has crept into our boardrooms, too.

Our guest today is working to instill that idea of meeting folks halfway back into our political culture. Keith Allred is the executive director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse, a DC non-profit dedicated to pushing through bipartisan legislation.

What can we take from the House of Representatives into our own C-suite?

In middle school physics, we learned that an object at rest has potential energy – an amount of currency it has to spend, if it wants to move. When you pull back an arrow, the potential energy flows from your muscles, to the bow, to the string, and then the string pays all that money in one go to propel the arrow – turning potential into kinetic energy in a single motion.

Our lives are organized around those same flows of energy, too. We dream, we store energy, and then we trade in potential for kinetic.

Ashley Smith has made a career out of translating these flows of energy – and showing others how to do it, too. It’s in her dance studio, turning emotion into movement. It’s in her partnership with her husband, Ryan Smith, the executive chairman and co-founder of Qualtrics. And it’s in her love for the state of Utah, flowing from Ashley’s love for community, downstream, to ownership of the Utah Jazz basketball team with Ryan.

How can we better understand the flows of energy in our own life, and in our bodies?

Do you know that feeling when you’re cooking, and you’ve got all your ingredients chopped and ready to go, spices measured, oven pre-heated? All that’s left is for you to spin your magic as a cook. In the kitchen, the French call it mise en place, everything in its place.

In that same vein, to disrupt yourself, your strategy and support need to be in place. You need to give yourself the room to roam, so to speak, to realize your full potential. 

Our guest today is all about creating spaces that let you realize that potential. Chip Conley is the former founder of Joie De Vivre, a boutique hotel chain. He’s worked with AirBnB as a quote unquote modern elder, and now Chip’s turning his attention to the potential of midlife – a word so laden with stigma, he’s building regenerative horse ranches to change that.

His new book, "Learning To Love Midlife", is out January 16th.