Can ‘friction maxxing’ help your organization?

Key takeaways

• For too long, friction has been seen as something to remove

• A new meme has emerged that proposes doing the opposite: “friction maxxing”

• “The Friction Project” author Bob Sutton advocates for friction—but only if it’s the right kind of friction

For decades, modern enterprises have used technology to automate manual tasks, making processes more efficient and employees more productive. And that has changed both the nature of work and the workforce. No one hires typists anymore. We’re all expected to know how to operate a keyboard, and how to enter prompts into an AI interface that helps us work more efficiently.

As AI accelerates the pace of change even further, altering work in ways no one is quite sure of yet, a backlash is emerging. The concept of “friction maxxing”—a term coined by writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton—is gaining momentum. Simply put, friction maxxing is about slowing down. Going analog instead of digital. Buying groceries instead of ordering DoorDash. Reading books instead of listening to the author’s podcast. 

“I think ‘friction maxxing’ arose in part as a counterpoint to the frictionless world promised by AI,” says Bob Sutton, an organizational psychologist and professor emeritus at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “When used in the wrong ways, AI just enables people to do dumb things faster and removes many of the joys of being alive.”

In his book, "The Friction Project," Sutton and his coauthor Huggy Rao explain the differences between needless complexity that gets in the way of work getting done and “good friction”—helpful barriers put in place to prevent damaging or irrevocable mistakes. Inserting friction in the right places is especially important for midsize enterprises that are experimenting with AI but lack the resources to oversee every implementation. 

We sat down with Bob to talk about when introducing friction makes sense, where it doesn’t, and how leaders can tell the difference. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the term “friction maxxing." I understand you’re not a fan.

Bob Sutton: I think it’s too extreme. A world where everything is too hard and slow may be even worse than a world where everything is too easy and fast. As we say in the book, smart leaders know how to make the right things easier and the wrong things harder.

How can you tell the right things from the wrong ones? Where does adding friction help?

In the book, we outline 13 questions leaders need to ask themselves about whether adding friction would be constructive or destructive. The most important one centers around complexity. Is the problem so complicated that you or your colleagues are feeling confused or overwhelmed? That’s a good time to slow down and figure things out before making a decision.

Establishing cognitive trust is easy, but deep emotional trust takes time. And that has a huge impact on how much people enjoy the work they’re doing.

How does friction maxxing impact customer and employee experiences? 

A lot of companies deliberately introduce friction because they believe that slowing you down causes you to buy more stuff—think about Amazon suggesting other products you might want to buy instead of just letting you complete the checkout process. Reducing friction for customers is often better for the companies in the long run. 

One of my favorite examples is Netflix. Years ago, it used to be very hard to cancel your subscription. But some Netflix executives were embarrassed by this, so they decided to make it much easier to quit. After they removed the friction, they discovered two things: One is that they got much better data about who was canceling and why, giving them an advantage over their competitors. The second was that making it easier for customers to quit made it more likely some of them would come back.

Read more about good friction vs. bad friction: Why every company needs a ‘Simplifier in Chief’

Why should companies introduce friction into processes that rely increasingly on AI, such as IT service management?

Some of the biggest sources of bureaucratic sludge can be found in ITSM—things like the unstructured data found in old support tickets, inconsistent or missing documentation, and so on. Digging through this stuff and making sense of it is a perfect job for AI.

But that doesn’t mean all support functions should be automated. If a question can be answered quickly and easily, using AI is fine. When an issue is complicated or unprecedented, or a valued customer is upset, you want to provide easy access to human judgment, empathy, warmth, and trust. Companies need to audit their support processes and figure out how hard it is to get to a real person. If more than two or three clicks are required, you’ve probably buried the human too deep.

So does AI help to reduce friction or increase it?

Both. It all depends on how you use it. One of the challenges with AI is that it makes it easy for a small number of people to waste time for a much larger number of people, like cranking out longer and longer emails and Slack messages that other people have to respond to. It’s passing friction down the line to someone else.

The first thing you need to do is make sure you’re automating the right processes in the right way. If you’re using AI to replace your current process, and that process is dysfunctional, you’ll end up perpetuating that dysfunction. Smart automation also involves capturing parts of the process that aren’t necessarily accessible to AI systems, like workarounds that aren’t documented anywhere. 

Relying too much on AI can sometimes make you feel more productive while quietly making you dumber. If you treat it as a substitute for professional judgment, you’ll end up executing more slowly and eroding your skills. The future really belongs to organizations that pair machine intelligence with human intelligence; they know how to slow down, question assumptions, and use AI as a collaborator, not a crutch.