![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/554\/2026\/02\/Confused-man.gif\")
<\/figure>\nNot keen on being a social pariah, I responded<\/p>\n
\u201cHehe don\u2019t worry \ud83d\ude18\u201d (jokey laugh of lightness and kiss emoji of reconciliation and affection)<\/p>\n
But I also texted her privately asking \u201cDo you <\/em><\/strong>have a Monzo or Paypal account?\u201d<\/p>\n Could have just left it couldn\u2019t I, but no, no, I didn\u2019t. \ud83d\ude01<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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 \u00a320 easily without having to set her up as a payee.<\/p>\n Helpful! Fun!<\/p>\n No reply.<\/p>\n \ud83e\udee4<\/p>\n A reply arrived the next day at 8.41 am<\/p>\n \u201cI think I have PayPal. Tbh it\u2019s probably quicker for you to do a BACS rather than try and teach me how to set up a link! \ud83e\udd23\u201d<\/p>\n And whilst I finally<\/em><\/strong> 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 \u2018Opalite\u2019 when on the Graham Norton show, I too had sudden blog inspiration.<\/p>\n She was absolutely right. It was quicker for me to set her up as a new payment recipient in my banking app than to teach her how to set up a payment link because from her perspective, her work was done once her details had been posted.<\/p>\n The work I needed to do hadn\u2019t 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\u2019m not in the middle of being scammed, and then transfer the \u00a320.<\/p>\n This hassle, or friction, is one of the reasons why I asked for a link.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not knocking this parent in any way by the way, even though it may sound like I am!\u00a0 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.\u00a0 *Beam*<\/p>\n 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\u2019re just not encouraged to think about our work in that way.<\/p>\n The reality here is that one person\u2019s extra effort would have made it easier for 45 other people.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a common misconception about the application of lean that lean is about \u2018doing more with less\u2019, 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\u2019re often just not doing enough. We often need to do more<\/em><\/strong> to make the customer\u2019s life easier.<\/p>\n Repenning and Sterman\u2019s seminal work \u201cNobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened<\/a>\u201d 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Things get worse before they get better.\u00a0 Their positioning of \u2018harder\u2019 vs. \u2018smarter\u2019 might not be a helpful dichotomy to build their points around however, because often, to work smarter<\/strong>, you have to put the extra effort and work harder initially<\/em><\/strong> to make a new way happen.<\/p>\n I\u2019m also reminded of a famous John Seddon System\u2019s Thinking case study where, using his \u2018Check Method\u2019 they improved a housing benefit team\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2018right first time\u2019 and costs less as a consequence.\u00a0 It just probably feels like \u2018more hard work\u2019 from an employee\u2019s perspective.<\/p>\n The School Leavers Party Whatsapp case offers an interesting new insight into this dilemma I think.\u00a0 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. \u2018Hang on in there\u2019 long enough and you must really mean it\/need it, ergo your request will be, finally, granted). Requesting \u00a320 + from each family doesn\u2019t have that \u2018if we\u2019re too good at this, we\u2019ll be inundated\u2019 challenge. The better we are at collecting the money, the more money we\u2019ll accrue.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not sure who first coined a term that I am using more and more, Nelson Repenning<\/a> and Bob Sutton<\/a> have brought it to my attention, most recently in Bob\u2019s \u201cThe Friction Project<\/a>\u201d, but to set up the parent as a new payment beneficiary in your banking app adds quite a lot of process \u2018friction\u2019. \u2018Friction\u2019 is a great term because it does exactly what it says on the tin.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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.\u00a0 In fact, the more friction there is, the more difficult everything is, the less anyone will actually engage.<\/p>\n Everyone having to set up the recipient in their individual banking apps, is friction.\u00a0 You look at the task ahead, realise it will take a bit of effort, you\u2019re in the middle of something, you think \u201cI\u2019ll do it later\u201d. 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 \u00a320 in a couple of minutes. \u00a0This wasn\u2019t a tax return or a life or death decision. \u00a0I get it. I\u2019m also sure that everyone else will also put in the effort to set up a new payee in their respective apps and pay the \u00a320, but I can\u2019t 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. \ud83d\ude01<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Try to look out for points of \u2018friction\u2019 and think about how a bit of extra work from you, might get rid of some friction for someone else \u2026. but also try to do it without becoming a School group chat pariah.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ah the School year group Whatsapp.\u00a0 \u00a0It\u2019s seen some things.\u00a0 When not juggling lost jumpers and asking for photographs of the spelling list, it can also provide inspiration for a […]","protected":false},"author":151,"featured_media":1332,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,12,8],"tags":[104,16],"custom_author":[44],"class_list":["post-1329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lean","category-operations","category-value","tag-friction","tag-lean","custom_author-sarah-lethbridge"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/554\/2026\/02\/Friction.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/151"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1329"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1348,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329\/revisions\/1348"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1329"},{"taxonomy":"custom_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/custom_author?post=1329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/554\/2026\/02\/Wide-Taylor-Lightbulb.gif\" "\\"Screen")