Friction is the Key to Translating Insights into Action
How entropy - the opposite of action - is inevitable without interpersonal friction.
“I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent — no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.”
— Seneca1
If you were to ask the average stranger on the street, most people would say they’d love to have no friction at all in their life, especially with those they interact with regularly. They’ll do anything they can to avoid awkward or uncomfortable debate, and they might even take offense at your idea that friction could be a good thing.
Why do cars have brakes? How you answer that question will tell you a lot about your inner Missionary + Mercenary balancing act, and how you think about growth and risk.
Most people would say brakes help you slow down. But in reality, the purpose of brakes on a car is to go faster. As the driver, you will only have the confidence to travel at faster speeds if you trust that your brakes will function properly when you need them to slow you down or stop.
This assumes, however, that you’ll have passable road conditions. If you’re driving in icy weather and there’s no friction between your tires and the road, there’s no traction to carry the vehicle over the roadway to your destination. Even if you had the best brakes in the world, they become irrelevant when they can’t function as they should.
In a frictionless environment, you’re already out of control.
Stakeholders will trust advisors to help move them through the Supercycle described in this book when they believe the analysis they’re using to stay on track has been thoroughly tested. Every organization needs an insights operation to help them make forward progress without risking a crash. Fresh perspectives from all angles of the Chisel Tip will help you fight the inertia that can spin the organization out of control and hinder growth.
Although usually uncomfortable, friction between you and your stakeholders is one of the positive traits we look for to indicate a healthy culture. Without it, stakeholders can’t defeat under-certainty preventing action or confront their stochasm with all its false assumptions. Overcoming biases to work through the unknown can be stressful. Revealing the truth before stakeholders are ready to accept it disables them from trusting your findings and recommendations.
The resulting entropy — the lack of energy to work towards a result — paralyzes the organization into reinforcing their stochasm rather than confronting it. There will be no apotheosis transformation and they will be left unable to guide others through their own hero’s journey.
Never assume friction means an absence of tranquility. It is the only path to achieve contentment by defeating fear, anxiety, and entropy.
As Marcus Aurelius said, the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. Apotheosis is the elevation and exaltation of a human being to a new level which appears god-like to those around them. Humans are often perfected by forces we don’t control, but which bestow upon us qualities unmatched by others.
To say someone has no equal implies humans themselves are unequal. In our egalitarian society, god-like superiority is frowned upon because it implies one person is more valuable to society than another. Human beings are equally valuable but not equally capable. Innate characteristics like strength, intellect, empathy, or even humility are unequally distributed. But the potential for improving oneself is the same for every human motivated enough to try. Without the motivation of survival — autonomically-invoked by fight or flight — a human’s potential will always remain undiscovered. Apotheosis is seldom attainable without a trial of some kind that tests the mettle of the human subject and pushes them beyond their limits to levels they never dreamed achievable.
Frailties are revealed through trials and tribulations. And friction is how people put strategy to the test.
Consider the master-and-apprentice relationships between Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars trilogy. There was friction between Obi-Wan and Yoda as Obi-Wan learned to control his emotions. But over time, that friction helped Obi-Wan develop into a Jedi knight. Then, when Obi-Wan was a master in his own right, he taught Luke enough of what he had learned to be transformed by The Force while resisting the evil power of The Dark Side. Each apprentice was frustrated as they grappled with what their masters had already learned. But working through the tension to accept the lessons of their masters was exactly what they needed.
If you’ve ever had a disengaged boss, have you considered that it might be because you lost the friction needed for a healthy, productive work relationship? Worse yet, you’ll never get hired for the next higher-level position because there’s no way to create the friction necessary to build enough trust to consent to your recommendations.
Earning respect and building trust is a matter of sacrifice. When a CEO gives up their salary increase or bonus so their employees can avoid a round of layoffs, it doesn’t matter whether the workers see the CEO putting the interests of the team ahead of their own personal gain. The feeling of camaraderie springs from putting others’ interests ahead of our own. This is the spirit of sacrifice.
Reciprocally, it’d be natural for them to give the CEO greater respect in return for being cared for this way. Even though different situations call for different styles of leadership, compassion will always earn respect and build trust faster and better than cracking an authoritarian whip. Empathy enables leaders to be willing to sacrifice for the good of group prosperity, and more specifically, to determine which of their sacrifices would benefit stakeholders the most.
The right amount of friction — in the right place at the right time — enables you to progress through the Supercycle more quickly by removing the barriers to act with confidence. Like tapping your brakes to test your traction when driving on an icy stretch of roadway to see if you start to skid, the absence of friction can erode the trust between leaders and those they lead. Empathy is what allows a leader to properly assess how much friction to apply with each stakeholder and when.
Although friction allows you to move faster to meet the future, don’t assume your work will be done overnight. It’s rumored in the CI world that it takes up to seven years to build the trust necessary for a leader to act on your recommendations. This is simply because it takes that long to have enough opportunities to put your brakes to the test. The fact that you’ll sometimes make mistakes extends this lag time. Every time you get it wrong, you have to overcome fresh doubts about your ability to give sound advice.
The Insights-to-Action Supercycle is a recipe for success to deliver insights that energize action. But if you try it without interpersonal friction between your stakeholders and teammates, there won’t be enough time left on the clock for your strategy to win the game. A fully-tested actionable esteem is irresistible to everyone. But if your organization is ill-equipped for the path ahead, you’ll have to hold them back from pouncing on it with urgency.
How do you turn your collective will to win into the willingness to prepare for elevating to the next level? To champion their cause you must commit to a system of values that grows stronger under stress every day.
References:
Lucius Anneaus Seneca, Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters, (New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1968).