Eliminating Friction at OpenAI

Fidji Simo, CEO of Applications, recently said, “Companies rarely become bureaucratic all of a sudden. It happens one unnecessary meeting, one extra approval, one small frustration at a time. Each makes it only 1 or 2% harder to do your job, which is why they’re easy to ignore, but those frictions compound.” She offered this quote in the context of an article about OpenAI's process for identifying "friction" within the company and cutting through the bureaucracy to eliminate these pain points. Fortune's Emily Forlini explains:

At OpenAI, a special process—and a magic word—helps employees instantly cut through layers of bureaucracy and clear bottlenecks slowing things down.  It’s called “friction.” And it has the power to supersede just about anything a team is doing, often carrying the force of CEO Sam Altman or President Greg Brockman with it.  The process starts when someone emails a special friction@ address to report an internal bottleneck. The issues range from a technical system that isn’t working, a process that’s not having the intended result, or office-related frustrations, such as there not being enough IT vending machines. OpenAI’s leadership team triages the emails sent to friction@, moving forward with ones they deem worthy. To help alleviate full parking lots, for example, the company started a pilot to prioritize spots for those with long commutes. Another time, employees asked for a better process to grant API credits reliably and at scale. If the matter is considered important enough, Altman or Brockman will get involved to ensure it’s resolved.

A former OpenAI employee who spoke to Fortune praised the friction system as an effective way for leadership to get ground-level feedback. The process helps teams keep moving forward, tackling issues before they can fester, the person said. That’s especially important as OpenAI’s headcount grows to more than 8,000 employees expected by the end of this year, with offices across the U.S. and the globe. “It’s a good thing—literally anybody can complain about big company bullsh*t directly to Sam and they can act on it,” the former employee said. “If you want to ruthlessly cut through bureaucracy, you have to be ruthless about it.”

The process reminded me of the fantastic book, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder, by Stanford Professors Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao.  Perhaps Altman and Simo read the book and built this process in light of those insights about eliminating friction.  One word of caution though - Forlini writes in the article that some employees have complained about the tremendous burden and pressure it puts on people to drop everything and address an issue that has suddenly been escalated to Altman and Simo.  As always, balance and moderation is critical.  You want a process for cutting through bureaucracy, but you don't want it to become abused by those annoyed at small inconveniences, or by those trying to reallocate resources to their pet projects or ideas.  

Reducing Customer Pain Points: The Savannah Bananas

My former student, Jon Huntley, and I are working on a new case study about the Savannah Bananas, the wildly successful and highly entertaining barnstorming baseball team co-founded by Jesse and Emily Cole.  The company provides a wonderful example of how to identify and alleviate pain points in the customer experience.  In his book, Banana Ball (written with Don Yaeger), Jesse explains how the Bananas sought to find and eliminate all the friction in the fan experience.  

“Here’s what I don’t understand about many businesses.  Why do they continually do the things that their customers hate? Why are people endlessly put on hold, while a message plays that tells them how ‘important’ their call is, but they do a slow burn while waiting to talk to an actual human being… and maybe they still hang up in frustration.  In the Bananas’ organization, we have a word for this – friction.  We looked at all the friction points from a baseball experience – ticket fees, price gouging on parking and concessions, as well as limited access to autographs and fan photos with their favorite players – and we did the opposite.”

Jesse Cole explains that improving the customer experience involves a focus on both macro-frictions and micro-frictions.  At the macro level, the Bananas had to overcome the perception that baseball games were too long, slow, and boring.  At the micro level, the Bananas mapped the entire customer journey, from buying tickets to arriving at the ballpark, watching the game, and returning to their cars in the parking lot.  They identified each of the frictions, or pain points, along that journey.  They are relentless about eliminating friction.  

They use several methods to identify and eliminate pain points. First, employees pose as Undercover Fans during games.  Second, senior leaders in the organization work on the front lines at times to see the processes and fan interactions up close.  Third, the organization takes photos and video of the fans throughout the ballpark to see when and why they are frustrated.  Finally, they constantly look for opportunities to transform pain points into moments of joyful entertainment.  For instance, most people hate being put on hold.  The Bananas have created such entertaining voicemail messages and hold music that fans enjoy the wait.  Many people become frustrated by the wait times in the concession areas.  The Bananas try to reduce those wait times, but they also have developed all sorts of entertainment on the concourse.  

Sounds simple, right? Why do many organizations fail to alleviate these pain points?  In my view, three main reasons exist. First, managers become too isolated from the true customer experience.  When they "experience" the customer journey, it's not real.  Employees know they are watching and inspecting, and they create a "false" process for managers. Second, managers do not empower front-line employees to eliminate those frictions.  They constrict their freedom and autonomy such that the employees feel powerless to address problems that are clear to them on the front lines.  Third, and perhaps most importantly, managers convince themselves that an amazing product should be sufficient to satisfy customers.  It's like the doctor who thinks that patients should be happy if they receive the appropriate treatment to remedy their illness, even if patients had to experience long wait times, confusing insurance forms, an array of unexplained fees, and unclear instructions about medication and other treatments.  A great product alone is not sufficient to satisfy customers.  How you deliver that product matters.  In baseball, a competitive, well-played game is far from enough to satisfy fans.  That's the key insight that the Bananas have used to transform the ballpark experience into a magical one for fans.