In support of Friction

I loved that line. Kara was on a podcast talking about how she’s sick of hearing Silicon Valley types talk about removing friction, making everything seamless, etc. and tossed that nugget as an aside in one of her rants.

This isn’t a new idea by any stretch, and it has gained momentum as AI greases the gears (or simply removes them) more than ever before.

In theory, AI collapses the many steps between me and my desired outcome. No more travel agents, real estate brokers, navigating dozens of websites, sifting through endless reviews, navigating maps to find the closest theatre, creating a custom travel itinerary from scratch, etc. So long, friction!

Friction is the worst…?

There’s clearly a balance to strike here. Friction is bad when it adds no value or slows things down unnecessarily. Examples include:

• Corporate types that cling to relevance by not working transparently, e.g. holding the keys to important systems

• Using regular snail mail vs. having a portal¹ 

• Adding layers of middlemen / management because of ego, empire building, or because you forget how to do work.² 

But friction can also manifest in very useful ways, like slowing down bad decisions (e.g. gun registration minimum wait times), age gating social media, or paywalls to pay creators. When applied constructively friction can result in expertise and mastery - some things just take time to learn, and shortcuts can be detrimental.

Taking frictionless too far

I’m a big fan of efficiency and automation where it makes sense, but blindly optimizing every aspect of life leads us to a downward spiral.³ The professional class is locked into making everything faster, cheaper, smoother, etc. Which all sounds reasonable!

Until you pull your head up for a second and ask What’s it all for? The techno-capitalist party line is something like “so you can spend less time typing boring emails and more time pursuing artistic endeavors or challenge yourself in other ways, you know, more human things”. And that’s a fine position to take. I’ve been able to build more, and move faster than ever before thanks to AI.⁴ 

That all said, we need to resist the urge to blindly seek automation and efficiencies for the sake of it. Case in point: teams often use metrics like “time to ____” as a KPI they want to minimize. The faster the better right?

Friction as an enabler

What about the better the better?⁵ As in, instead of optimizing for faster (see below: the difference between velocity and speed), we slow down and think more deeply about if we’re heading in the right direction.

Sure, this runs counter to the “move fast and break things” ethos.⁶ Or even to my own proclivity to iterate, learn, iterate, and prize speed over other things.

And in a local sense that’s probably the right approach. Broadly though, societally, or for decisions that are very impactful (think company wide, public policy) we need some friction. We need to slow down, because in the space between actions, there is analysis⁷, deliberation, consensus building and intentionality.

You are more than an elevator pitch

We are not automatons. Our Game of Life is a real one. I don’t want to one-click buy a house. It’s okay if my algorithm is wrong some of the time.⁸ Even in sales, when deals close too fast (a problem we all wish to have) there’s a risk of under-scoping / mis-setting expectations. Deals that drag on, while they risk not materializing, are much less likely to be poorly scoped.⁹ 

I’m not big on slogans, often manifested as Instagram / TikTok one-liners that lack nuance and betray a lack of thoughtfulness¹⁰ by the person posting it. I get it - we need to make things succinct. But is your entire existence a 30 second elevator pitch? Must we boil everything down to 5 words we can signal to our ingroup? There’s a time and place, but I keep seeing short, quippy, surface level versions of…everything? Facades all the way down.

It takes years to become an expert. Why are we so allergic to that? What are we racing towards? I don’t want my doctor to fast track through Med School. I don’t want to Neo-style download the History of Rome¹¹ - I want to read it, debate it, hold incorrect ideas and get educated by others. That feeling of admitting you’re wrong? It’s a great one (something I’m continuing to work on!). Have you ever changed anyone’s mind in a 30 minute chat about something meaningful? Or does it take multiple conversations, proof / data, iteration, backtracking, arguments, time, space, and only then, do they start coming around.¹² 

All this - time, space, deliberation - are examples of friction that LinkedIn influencers are telling me needs to be removed. But I don’t want it all to go away. I don’t want to get stuck in local optimums, where we see how fast we can go from sign-up to purchase in the fewest clicks. Sure, it helps the company out, and the team who designed that flow can get the credit for improving the shopping cart conversion rate by 0.2%.

But what happens when we’re all buying shit we don’t need because it’s faster? Or we waste hours on social media cause its easy and rewards part of our lizard brain that we aren’t equipped to deal with? Or we fall into herd mentality when people we trust post stuff online about things we never cared about until that instant? Maybe a little friction isn’t all that bad. I sure could’ve used it when I was posting nonsense on Facebook in the mid-late 2000s.¹³

¹ Don’t tell me you love receiving mail, or that you don’t trust the internet. It’s over, we’re moving past this. Many transactions need to happen using software.

² A recruiter once asked me if, despite being senior, I feel comfortable “doing work” and her example was “you know, like putting together a presentation and delivering it”. LOL - when I don’t know how to do even do that, I hope I’m not in charge of anything important.

³ Recall, velocity is speed & direction. When people say they are increasing their velocity, make sure they aren’t just moving fast, but also going the right way.

⁴ I’ve also heard (and written about) the other side of the story as well.

⁵ You read that right.

⁶ Despite this Facebook motto being deprecated as of 2014, it persists in the zeitgeist, though sometimes as a foil.

⁷ Remember doing that before ChatGPT?!

⁸ Indeed, fundamental machine learning approaches bake in randomness (“exploration-exploitation”) for this reason.

⁹ And they are more likely to pre-qualify. This is part of the anti-sell, a very effective sales tactic.

¹⁰ Or more likely, display their vacuousness.

¹¹ Though that would be so cool!!

¹² Or…*gasp*...maybe you were wrong the whole time?

¹³ Don’t tell my employer!!¹⁴

¹⁴ Lol its fine, I already know.