In an AI World, We Can Still Choose the “Hard” Way

Much of my work is about making it easier for groups to achieve their goals. Often, that entails finding ways to eliminate friction. But sometimes, the best way to help groups achieve their goals is to add friction. Consider exercise. Most of us don’t live in a world where we need to lift large weights above our heads or run long distances to get from one place to another. Technology has eliminated that friction in our lives. But many of us voluntarily reintroduce that friction, because we realize that it makes us healthier. When I’m co-designing meetings with others, I use a template that helps me capture lots of information — intentions, tradeoffs, different scenarios, etc. This is great for having clear design conversations with others, but it’s distracting on the day of the meeting itself. When I’m facilitating, I need to be able to find specific information easily — timing, for example — and want extra whitespace where I can take notes. About a dozen years ago, I decided to tackle this problem. I thought it would be useful to have a tool that automatically converted a meeting design document into a format that was optimized for facilitation. I started by trying to figure out what that format might be. I created a new template and manually transferred and reformatted information from the old one, which took me a few hours. My team and I tested it and found it useful. It validated the idea of an automatic conversion tool, because we certainly were never going to spend a few extra hours manually converting the information ourselves. Except that I discovered something weird: Those few extra hours I spent copying the document over manually made me a better facilitator. Even though I had already spent days poring over a meeting design with my colleagues, the act of transferring the design from one template to another surfaced inconsistencies that we had missed. It also helped me absorb almost every detail of the design until I felt like it was part of my body. This enabled me to be even more present on the day of the meeting, which made it easier for me to adjust and improvise. The act of creating this new version of the design almost made the document itself unnecessary. In the decade since, I’ve spent hundreds of hours manually transferring my designs from one template to the other for all of my meetings. I’ve tried to encourage my colleagues to do the same, but they have all demurred. I get it, and I’ve never pushed anyone too hard. Most of them are doing fine without it, and the performance boost they might get from spending those additional few hours may not seem worth it. But it’s been worth it for me, and I have no plans of stopping. What are areas in your work or in your life where adding friction might actually help you? I think this is an especially important question to ask in this world of artificial intelligence. Technology has always been a catalyst for eliminating friction, and AI is continuing this trend in potentially transformative ways. However, we can still decide that eliminating friction is not always helpful and choose a different path. I shake my head when I work with teams and see blocks of back-to-back meetings on their calendars with no breaks in-between. When you are meeting with people face-to-face, you have to schedule time in-between so that you can physically get from one place to another. That extra time gives you the chance to breathe, grab a snack, go to the bathroom, have a followup conversation, or prepare yourself for your next meeting. It turns out that the friction of moving from one meeting to another gives us an opportunity to rest, and that humans need rest (and food and bathroom breaks) to be at our best. With remote meetings, we don’t have to schedule a break, and so most of us don’t. Then we’re left wondering why we’re exhausted at the end of our work days. Logistically, the fix is easy. The main thing preventing us from scheduling breaks in-between our remote meetings is culture, and culture is powerful. But at the end of the day, we still have a choice. We, in all of our imperfect human goodness, have a choice. We can look to eliminate friction just because we can (have you been in a remote meeting where the AI note-takers outnumbered actual people?), or we can be thoughtful about what will most augment us flesh-and-blood human beings. What are you going to choose? Photo above by Laszlo Ilyes. CC BY 2.0.