Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools on how to tell better stories and grow your audiences’ attention.

Hello!

Since the last post about how Ed Catmull from Pixar learnt to see hidden friction, I’ve gone down a bit of a rabbit hole, researching academic papers and books about what causes friction in creative workflows.

This led me to the brilliant book The Friction Project by Stanford Business School Professors Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton. Their research into how companies scaled revealed two types of friction. The first, Bad Friction, is the kind we’ve been talking about so far, the kind caused by overly complex processes, sign-offs or organisational politics.

But they also recognised a second kind of friction - Good Friction - that helps slow people down so they can be more creative in how they solve a problem. In a podcast interview with HBR, Huggy Rao described how an interview with Jerry Seinfeld helped them see the benefits of good friction:

I love Rao and Sutton’s typology of Good and Bad Friction, but I think we can add a third category, the kind that Ed Catmull was talking about in his book - Hidden Friction. To build on their work, here’s my typology of Good, Bad and Hidden Friction, and how it helps or hinders your creative workflow.

This is the friction we're probably most familiar with. It's the operational stuff that makes good creative work unnecessarily difficult: getting access to contributors, finding out who actually owns a decision, getting a budget approved, waiting for stakeholder sign-off, dealing with procurement, chasing feedback, or trying to reconcile five different opinions about what the work is supposed to achieve.

To help identify bad friction, the important question is not just "How much friction is in our workflow?; but "Which friction is actually helping us, and which is just wasting everyone's time?"

Spend some time with your teams to draw out a timeline of their last creative project. When are they waiting for a decision? Who are they chasing? Where are they doing work that exists only because the organisation hasn't made a decision? Those are your opportunities to remove friction.

This becomes even more important when you're producing something long-running editorial series, the kind of thing we specialise in doing at Storythings. A five-day delay in a one-off campaign is annoying. A five-day delay in every episode of a podcast is a broken production workflow.

Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao's The Friction Project is the best place to start digging into the issue of bad friction and what you can do about it.

This might sound counterintuitive, but creative work doesn't necessarily benefit from being frictionless. As the quote from Jerry Seinfeld above shows, sometimes the constraint is the thing that makes the idea interesting.

Maybe you can't film a contributor in person, so you have to tell their story using animation and archive footage. Or you might only have 20 minutes with your subject, so you have to work out the one question that really unlocks their story. Or perhaps you have to take an audio only interview and turn it into short video clips for social.

These constraints create friction, but they're friction inside the creative problem, rather than around it, and that distinction matters. A constraint isn't automatically good friction. A pointless approval process isn't suddenly creative because it makes something harder. Good friction is a constraint that narrows the problem in a way that creates better thinking.

When I was reading about this, it reminded me of constraints-led coaching in sport (I learned about this because I coach a baseball team in the UK!). The idea is that performing well in games is not just about good mechanics or techniques, but about making decisions and using creativity in the crucial moments of a competitive game. So sports coaching is moving from repetitive drills to giving players constraints that mimic the kinds of decisions they have to make, and encourages them to find their own solutions, rather than the ‘correct’ mechanic or routine.

Like Jerry Seinfeld when he is developing a comedy routine, don’t try to optimise every bit of friction out of your creative process. Instead, ask: "Is this making the work harder, or is it making us think harder?" If it’s the first, it’s bad friction, and you should aim to get rid of it. If it’s the second, its Good Friction, so ask your team if it is leading to more creativity in their work.

In fact, when you're developing a new B2B format, you can deliberately introduce useful constraints: a fixed running time, a particular editorial structure, a limited visual language, a recurring question, or a requirement that every idea works across several channels. If this sounds familiar, its because these kinds of constraints will help you define your B2B formats and make them easy to recognise for your audience.

Further reading: Oguz Acar, Murat Tarakci and Daan van Knippenberg's Why Constraints Are Good for Innovation is a useful overview of the evidence that constraints can stimulate creativity and innovation.

As Ed Catmull found when Pixar were starting to make the follow up to Toy Story, this is the kind of friction that is easy to miss. That’s because Hidden Friction is the extra work created by a decision that isn't visible to the person who made it.

Imagine a stakeholder changes the brief two weeks before launch. That might be a perfectly reasonable and logical decision from the perspective of the stakeholder, but somewhere else in the workflow, someone now has to rewrite the script, remake the graphics, reschedule the shoot, renegotiate with a contributor and work late to hit the original deadline.

The stakeholder sees a changed brief, but the creative team experiences six hours of additional work. The project might still deliver on time, but the friction didn’t disappear, it just moved somewhere where the stakeholder couldn’t see it. This is why we can think of hidden friction as transferred friction.

It can happen inside a marketing team, between a client and an agency, or between senior decision-makers and the teams responsible for delivering their decisions. Often there can be a strong cultural reason why it gets hidden. Research on organisational silence has shown how employees can withhold information about problems when an organisation develops a culture that say speaking up is a bad idea.

In creative organisations, that can produce a particularly strange situation: everyone knows something isn't working, but the people with the power to change it never see the problem. Instead, the people downstream quietly compensate, working late, absorbing another round of changes, chasing contributors - anything they need to do to deliver the project. It might look like the workflow is ok from one perspective, but the hidden friction reveals an unhealthy and unsustainable workflow, combined with a culture that stops people from speaking up about friction, instead of working together to resolve it.

There’s a great idea in the interview with Huggy Rao where he suggests leaders need to see themselves as “trustees of other people’s time.” You need to be aware of how the decisions you make create ripples through the workflow, and how other people might be paying for that in their time.

Whenever you’re making a creative decision, ask yourself "Who is paying for this decision?" I don’t mean financially, but who is paying with their time? who is doing invisible extra work? Who is having to compensate for an unclear brief or decision, or an unrealistic deadline?

And then ask yourself -  would you make the same decision if you had to deal with the friction it creates? Hidden friction is a useful diagnostic tool. It helps you to not just see the workflow that you have in project plans and gantt charts, but all the workarounds that individual people are having to make to support that visible workflow. Your project might be gliding like a swan on the surface, but there’s a lot of splashing around underneath. Being the first person to ask where the hidden friction is will create a culture in which people feel able to speak up about how decisions impact them.

All this research is making me realise that the goal isn't to create frictionless creative workflows. Instead, we should be trying to build workflows where the right friction happens in the right place.

Bad friction lives around the creative process and stops people doing their jobs. Remove it.

Good friction lives inside the creative process and makes people think harder. Protect it.

Hidden friction lives in decisions that are transferred to somebody else. Expose it.

This becomes really important when B2B content moves from campaigns to ongoing formats. A campaign can absorb a surprising amount of friction because everyone knows there's an end point.

You can’t do this when you are producing a podcast series, video format or editorial franchise. If the same contributor-access problem, approval bottleneck or strategic ambiguity happens every week, it becomes friction within the format itself.

So the next time a B2B creative workflow feels like it has friction, don't just ask: "How do we make this faster?" Ask these three questions instead:

Is this friction bad, good, or hidden?

Who is experiencing it?

And where should it live?

Because great creative work probably doesn't need less friction. It needs better friction.

If you’ve read this far, your clearly curious about friction, so please help out by filling our our survey on where your creative workflow riction is - we’ll be publishing the results in the autumn:

Thanks for reading!

Matt