March 22nd, 2005
PC Forum: Moving from friction-free to productive friction
Day three of PC Forum started with a discussion with John Seely Brown and John Hagel about productive friction, which is the subject of their forthcoming book The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends On Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization.
Seely Brown described differences between the way Toyota and Detroit car manufacturers work with suppliers as an example of how 
productive friction works. Detroit tells suppliers exactly what to do, and focuses on getting the lowest price. Toyota looks at how to build relationships where suppliers, who are encouraged to push back (friction) as a way to unleash innovation across a multi-tier supplier network.
In another example, a major distributor of motorcycle in China was able to reduce the price of manufacturing from $700 to $200 over a four-year period, and effectively pushed Honda out of the market. Seely Brown said that this "disruptive innovation" and wave of rapid improvement was driven by productive friction practiced among the suppliers, who collectively figured out how to build the modular, specialized parts of a motorcycle. "It [collaboration among specialized suppliers] meant all kinds of dynamic friction and compromise, swarming to construct the devices." The opportunity for productive friction at the boundaries of product components can lead to compressed cycle times and better quality, Hagel added.
Seely Brown and Hagel stressed the importance of having concrete, rather than abstract, action points and having access to the entire context of a problem. For example, anyone on a Toyota assembly factory can shut down the line. "Freezing the context allows everybody access to the context to figure out what went wrong," Seely Brown said.
The notion of productive friction has major implications for IT across multi-tiered process networks. Hagel said the combination of service-oriented architecture (loosely coupled), virtualization and social software (a shared collaborative workspaces like Wikis) is key to developing a work culture that can support productive friction and facilitate conflict resolution, allowing the stakeholders to browse the context to figure out how to "unstuck" an exception (problem).
Hagel also sees the potential in moving away from tightly integrated, top-down business processes to more loosely coupled business processes and modular components that can be recombined to create new innovations. When asked why more companies don’t follow a loosely coupled, productive friction approach, Hagel responded that it’s a "mindset" issue. "The assumption on how to achieve business success is challenged by new approaches. Infrastructure management businesses are being ripped out of companies and performed by specialized companies, and businesses are ripping out product innovation and commercialization, such as the rise of ODMs [Original Design Manufacturers] in Taiwan."
The two authors recommend more specialized groups who own a piece of a solution and collaborate with appropriate friction (they don’t have fist fights I assume) with each other to produce something that could be greater than the sum of its parts. It might be more loosely coupled and flexible, but requires shared objectives and the capability to persist in a more highly charged, potentially creative, environment.
You can imagine in China, the guys working on the motorcycle frame sitting around a tea house, smoking and drinking, and of course arguing about what composite to use and wondering whether the team working on the engine has a clue. No wikis, just cell phones and faxes. In the U.S. a company like Apple has lots of creative and often productive friction in creating its products, driven by Steve Jobs’ relentless pursuit of excellence. But, creating a sense of ownership and accountability, and getting the best innovations to surface, is a social dynamic that will take far more than SOA and collaboration software to enable…
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
