Removing Friction

A new company used to face several major challenges, far beyond the quality and/or price of its product:

1)      Distribution: Finding a way to make its product available far and wide.

2)     Marketing: Making consumers aware of their product.

3)     Visibility: In a shop, prime positioning had to be paid for to ensure your product was placed where it would be found/noticed easily.

All of these points made it hard for new players to enter the market. They are also collectively called “friction”. Conversely, as Ben Thompson wrote:

“Initial success was hard, but once achieved, a sustainable business almost certainly resulted.”

But now with the Internet, “friction is gone”. Just think of the kinds of things you can find effortlessly thanks to Amazon.

And then there’s bureaucratic friction, what Cass Sunstein called “sludge” in his recent paper:

“Consumers, employees, students, and others are often subjected to “sludge”: excessive or unjustified frictions, such as paperwork burdens, that cost time or money; that may make life difficult to navigate; that may be frustrating, stigmatizing, or humiliating; and that might end up depriving people of access to important goods, opportunities, and services.”

And so Sunstein calls for “Sludge Audits” to “catalogue the costs of sludge, and to decide when and how to reduce it”.

So is friction always bad and something to be eliminated? Try walking on ice and you realize how friction can be necessary at times. At times. That point extends even to the topics discussed above, as Thompson had written:

1)      For businesses, “Friction was the foundation of sustainability”. Remove that, and sure, customers will probably benefit (think Amazon). But does it also means companies fall much faster than before? What does that do to the owners and employees of those businesses? Think of Uber’s impact on consumers v employees of cab companies.

2)     Gathering information, surveillance were painfully difficult, even impractical beyond a point. Now Facebook and Google know more about you than even your closest friends. So one could argue that “friction was the foundation of our privacy”…

3)     Outsourcing exploded with the Internet and higher connectivity speeds. And while it created jobs in new countries, it destroyed jobs in others. Was “friction the foundation of our job market”?

And so we see that even an apparent no-brainer like removing friction is complicated. As Thompson wrote:

“We are creating the future, and “better” does not win by default.”