Working Smarter and Harder to Overcome Friction

Ah the School year group Whatsapp.   It’s seen some things.  When not juggling lost jumpers and asking for photographs of the spelling list, it can also provide inspiration for a lean blog!  Strap in and try to think less of me as you read. ☺️

Some parents are organising a primary leavers’ disco for my daughter’s year and have requested a £20 donation for each child towards the celebrations. The selfless person who volunteered to be the banker put their full name and bank details in the chat for everyone to send their £20.

“Great, have you got a Monzo or Paypal link, something easy, by any chance?” I asked.

I didn’t think much as I thought it, wrote it, and then pressed send, but as the little satisfying ‘delivered’ sound blurumphed in my ears, I saw my message for what it was and how it could be perceived – a seemingly ungrateful suggestion that someone and something could and should have done better.

You see this is the problem with me.  I wasn’t trying to be difficult, I wasn’t trying to be ungrateful, I was asking for a better way, genuinely, because I was trying to be helpful.

Unfortunately, my ‘pure of heart’ intentions are often confused by people as just the actions of an annoying and demanding git.

“Err 😑 (never a good face to receive) how do I do that?!” was the reply.

Another parent replied to my post with the following gif

Not keen on being a social pariah, I responded

“Hehe don’t worry 😘” (jokey laugh of lightness and kiss emoji of reconciliation and affection)

But I also texted her privately asking “Do you have a Monzo or Paypal account?”

Could have just left it couldn’t I, but no, no, I didn’t. 😁

I had already envisaged the video screen recording I could make to send her, of me going into either my Monzo or Paypal app, and showing her (of course it’s a her) step by step how to set up a link which she could copy and then put in the year group Whatsapp. A link which every parent could just press to transfer the £20 easily without having to set her up as a payee.

Helpful! Fun!

No reply.

🫤

A reply arrived the next day at 8.41 am

“I think I have PayPal. Tbh it’s probably quicker for you to do a BACS rather than try and teach me how to set up a link! 🤣”

And whilst I finally got the message to stop being so annoying, in a scene similar to when Taylor Swift had an idea for a video concept for her latest hit single ‘Opalite’ when on the Graham Norton show, I too had sudden blog inspiration.

She was absolutely right. It was quicker for me to set her up as a new payment recipient in my banking app than for her to learn how to set up a payment link because from her perspective, her work was done once her details had been posted.

The work I needed to do hadn’t however. I needed to do two separate copy and pastes of her sort code and then of her account number, going in and out of Whatsapp and my banking app, then chill my bank account out and convince it that I’m not in the middle of being scammed, and then transfer the £20.

This hassle, or friction, is one of the reasons why I asked for a link.

I’m not knocking this parent in any way by the way, even though it may sound like I am!  She is exceptionally lovely and helpful and has provided me with her official signature for important documents, the trustworthy and upstanding member of society that she is! She, and my Irish Nanny, are the reasons why I am now an Irish passport holding citizen of Eire.  *Beam*

I think what is interesting to me, and triggered the blog inspiration, is that when it comes to work, we often see the activity that we need to engage in BEFORE we see the customer and organisational benefit that would be gained from additional employee effort. We’re just not encouraged to think about our work in that way.

The reality here is that one person’s extra effort would have made it easier for 45 other people.

There’s a common misconception about the application of lean that lean is about ‘doing more with less’, cutting, waste removal, reduction, simplification. I mean, it is often all of these things, but sometimes, when it comes to investigating and improving services for example, if we carefully consider what constitutes customer value, we’re often just not doing enough. We often need to do more to make the customer’s life easier.

Repenning and Sterman’s seminal work “Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened” discusses how organisations should focus on Working Smarter, as opposed to Working Harder, but the paper does recognise the extra work that you need to put in so that you are able to work smarter.  In their famous graphs, there is a dip in performance as a team shifts to a working smarter paradigm, because of the extra work and thought needed to work in a new way. This is the Improvement Paradox.  Things get worse before they get better.  Their positioning of ‘harder’ vs. ‘smarter’ might not be a helpful dichotomy to build their points around however, because often, to work smarter, you have to put the extra effort and work harder initially to make a new way happen.

I’m also reminded of a famous John Seddon System’s Thinking case study where, using his ‘Check Method’ they improved a housing benefit team’s work, and revolutionised the customer experience, by moving away from complicated forms being sent back and forth between the citizen and between the various benefit teams, and just gave members of the public the opportunity to sit with members of staff and fill out the forms together.

It radically improved the service. Even though it feels more work, more expensive, because of the time now taken by a member of staff to engage with a member of the public face to face, it actually saved money in the longer term because the work is enacted quickly, to high levels of quality. The work gets done ‘right first time’ and costs less as a consequence.  It just probably feels like ‘more hard work’ from an employee’s perspective.

The School Leavers Party Whatsapp case offers an interesting new insight into this dilemma I think.  Whereas, you could argue, that an organisation might not be desperate to be amazingly effective at giving out benefits (often I think that services are made deliberately long and complicated as a mechanism to deter entrants from engaging and as some kind of twisted endurance test to determine acceptance. ‘Hang on in there’ long enough and you must really mean it/need it, ergo your request will be, finally, granted). Requesting £20 + from each family doesn’t have that ‘if we’re too good at this, we’ll be inundated’ challenge. The better we are at collecting the money, the more money we’ll accrue.

I’m not sure who first coined a term that I am using more and more, Nelson Repenning and Bob Sutton have brought it to my attention, most recently in Bob’s “The Friction Project”, but to set up the parent as a new payment beneficiary in your banking app adds quite a lot of process ‘friction’. ‘Friction’ is a great term because it does exactly what it says on the tin.  It’s parts of a process grinding up against each other, causing irritation and requiring of additional effort. The more friction exists in a process, the slower and less effective it will be.  In fact, the more friction there is, the more difficult everything is, the less anyone will actually engage.

Everyone having to set up the recipient in their individual banking apps, is friction.  You look at the task ahead, realise it will take a bit of effort, you’re in the middle of something, you think “I’ll do it later”. When I had a moment and I sat down and worked through my various Whatsapp admin tasks, I set her up as a new payee and transferred the £20 in a couple of minutes.  This wasn’t a tax return or a life or death decision.  I get it. I’m also sure that everyone else will also put in the effort to set up a new payee in their respective apps and pay the £20, but I can’t help thinking that they would have got more money, more quickly, with an easy to pay link. Sorry, but I stand by my lean principles. 😁

So perhaps the takeaway is simply to just try to consider whether there is any extra work that you can do which might ultimately deliver a better outcome or make it easier for your customers to engage.  Try to look out for points of ‘friction’ and think about how a bit of extra work from you, might get rid of some friction for someone else …. but also try to do it without becoming a School group chat pariah.