Keywords

Over the past 12 years, I have published around 70 short reflection pieces on leadership in a Norwegian business newspaper. In a part of this period, I had a dedicated colleague in the communications department at my school who provided input to the texts. When deadline approached, I sent him a first draft. He would read it and provide suggestions for improvements. The process was mostly digital. I sent an email with the draft, and when his work with it was finished, he sent a version with his comments and suggestions through the same channel.

Sometimes my colleague preferred to give the feedback face-to-face. I could see him coming down the corridor, heading for my door, and immediately understood that he had some serious issues to address. He had a principle of never using digital media when delivering particularly sharp and potentially hurtful criticism. If he wanted to tell me that this draft was weak and built on a dubious idea, for these concrete reasons, he would always deliver the message personally. He placed himself in a position where he could check out my responses and explain his criticism in further detail. Through this approach, he also gave me an opportunity to explain and defend the argumentation in the draft. Perhaps he had overlooked or misunderstood something. We could have a calm and friendly conversation about it.

What my colleague provided is a miniature example of friendly friction. It is a precious gift from one person to another. People often have their attention elsewhere and are too busy to deliver high-quality suggestions about an idea or a plan. My colleague was exceptional in this respect. He provided detailed and constructive input, time and again, not just to me but also to other colleagues. We were very fortunate to have a colleague whom we could trust to provide honest and specific feedback on our ideas. He was not part of the academic staff, so in terms of hierarchy in the organisation, he was of lower rank than the professors and other researchers he supervised in this manner. Hierarchies can weaken psychological safety and create hesitation about criticising people higher up. In this case, the fact he was a communication advisor and the recipients of his feedback were professors did not stop our colleague from challenging our ideas. He took our writing seriously, read it carefully, and gave it proper professional attention before responding with suggestions. Turning up at my door when his input was particularly critical indicated that both the friendliness and the friction were in place.

In other organisational contexts, friendly friction can be required to sharpen and improve plans and strategies, as well as to make initiatives more comprehensive. The context can be much more complex than giving and receiving input about a newspaper article. The pattern can still be the same. Colleagues can engage in a process of trying to understand the thoughts and ideas that have been set in motion, finding strengths and weaknesses in them, and conveying their observations back to the initiator in a friendly manner.

Friendly friction is the first of five qualities I will present as parts of a well-functioning communication climate. I will dedicate one chapter to each of these qualities:

  • Friendly friction

  • Tolerance for false alarms

  • Psychological safety

  • Scope for agency

  • Pushing plus buttons

These are overlapping qualities that support each other, rather than five separate and distinct aspects of a communication climate. I have noticed them as patterns in the visits I have made to various organisations over the last two decades, in the capacity as facilitator of workshops and participant in conversations about how people communicate and collaborate at work.

The five qualities taken together can serve as a foundation for coping with the communication challenges described in Part 1 of this book. We saw that (a) organisations can face critical quality moments, situations where the next thing to happen will determine the further development of a project or other activity that takes place within the organisation. Will anyone take the initiative to voice their concern about the current course of events? If no one speaks up, then the chance to correct or revise the development may be lost. Furthermore, (b) bystander effects can increase passivity and cause witnesses to remain silent, even when they have an opportunity to stop a negative causal sequence of events or create a positive one. We also noted that (c) inattentional blindness, or our inability to see phenomena that are straight in front of our eyes, might lead us to miss important aspects of the situations we are facing. We only see the aspects that we give active and deliberate attention to and can be blind to ethical and other important aspects of what others or we are doing. Finally, (d) the scope of action for seeking and providing help in work settings can be under threat from systems of holding back. In a group setting, individual members can mistakenly assume about each other that they are not interested in helping, and thus the positive dance of reciprocity never gets underway.

In my studies of how people communicate in organisations, I have looked for patterns in how they more or less consciously counter these obstacles to collaboration. I have been inspired by the tradition of Positive Organisational Scholarship (Cameron and Dutton 2003) which has initiated a broad range of studies of human strengths and flourishing in organisations. When exploring communication climates in organisations, I have tried to align my own approach with this emerging research tradition, and the ways in which it seeks to understand processes that mobilise individual and organisational resources, and create upward spirals in human systems (Cameron and Spreitzer 2012). In workshops and conversations within organisations, I have come equipped with the question “When is the communication climate in your organisation at its best?” and sought narratives and examples from participants. When people inquire about examples from my own organisation, I often share the story from the opening of this chapter. It helps them to search their own memories for incidents where they have experienced support and friendly friction at work. I have also learned from supervising executive students who have explored similar positive patterns in organisations.

Friendly friction is the first quality to dwell on here. The opening personal example illustrated what it can be. In other organisational contexts, the stakes can be higher. The need for attentive and concrete feedback delivered in a friendly manner can be more urgent. This may be a critical phase in the planning or execution of a major project. The decisions taken today will be crucial to the project’s success. If the criticism is voiced in a hostile and unfriendly tone, the receiver can be less inclined to listen and take it seriously. The other extreme is one where the tone is very friendly, but the content is superficial and hardly offers anything useful for improving an idea. This contribution offers no real friction.

The Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss has inspired the formulation of the concept of friendly friction. In his book Livsfilosofi (Philosophy of Life; (Næss 1999), he explored the roles of reason and emotion in human relations, claiming that the emotional aspects of being together are often undervalued at the expense of logic and reasoning. He invited people to reflect on the patterns of their lives, reconsider their habits, and contemplate alternative ways of prioritising and living. One sentence stands out as a pointer to friendly friction as an important quality in a communication climate:

  • In an atmosphere of friendliness, we can take lot from others.

I take this sentence to mean that we are particularly receptive to criticism when we sense that those who are delivering it are good willed and want to help us to realise the flaws in the idea we have put forward. We listen more attentively. The friendly atmosphere means that we can trust the critics and leave aside the worry that they might want to hurt us. Elster (2015) claimed that when we trust someone, we meet that person with our guard down. This is what happens in a friendly atmosphere. We can lower our guard, concentrate on the meaning of what people are saying to us, and try to put the friction to constructive use. We would have no need to spend resources on defence or control, as we would in the absence of trust.

The friction part of the concept is inspired by a definition of generative resistance, a quality Carlsen et al. (2012) identified as central to creativity and idea work. These researchers highlighted the importance of “acknowledging doubt, friction, and criticism, not as noise to be avoided, but as levers with which to question the given and enhance imagination in everyday work.” In physics, friction is defined as the resistance to motion between bodies in contact. When there is little or no friction, an object can move quickly down a slope. A similar development can occur when an idea or a proposal receives minimal friction. It can be difficult to stop once it has accelerated up to a certain speed. Friction means that we slow down, take a critical look at the idea at hand, and consider whether it is good enough already or whether it should be revised or even discarded.

Friendly friction is situated between two poles that are detrimental to a constructive communication climate. In processes of evaluating ideas and activities, organisations should avoid

  • unfriendly friction

  • friendliness without friction.

Unfriendly friction is rife in social media, and it can spill over into communication in the workplace. On platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, the tone is often harsh and aggressive when political and societal topics are under debate. Participants tend to attack each other with confrontational rhetoric. Exchanges about sensitive topics such as gender, racism, health, and climate seem to bring out the worst in people. Many are offended and hurt by the arguments from opponents, perhaps more due to the tone of voice than the content. In an atmosphere of unfriendliness, we can take very little from others.

A previous chapter brought attention to how behaviours and attitudes are contagious, as Wilson and Kelling (1982), Wilson (2011), Grant and Shandell (2022), and others have documented. Prosocial behaviour tends to grow and spread when people benefit from it or witness it. Social contagion is not limited to positive behaviours. Even undesirable ways of communicating and acting can spread when people are exposed to them. Social media behaviours may affect organisational life in general, and particularly the communication climate. Can unfriendly friction spill over from social media and into the workplace? Facebook and Twitter debates may take place outside working hours, but it is likely that the behaviours we engage in there can rub off on how we communicate at work. One study indicated that anyone can become a troll, in the sense that exposure to other people’s aggressive communication can shape the way we communicate and make us less considerate and respectful (Cheng et al. 2017). Research has also shown that social media use can trigger moral disengagement, leading to a lower threshold for engaging in bullying (Runions and Bak 2015).

Unfriendly friction would be an unwanted element in a communication climate. The same holds for the opposite state where there is friendliness but no friction. People do not listen attentively to each other’s ideas, and they half-heartedly agree with anything a colleague puts forward. We may even silently think to ourselves that something is not quite right about an idea but refrain from speaking up about it. There can be a range of reasons for the silence. For example, I may be too busy with other issues to engage fully with your ideas. Friendliness can be in place, and the lack of friction can stem from a misguided idea that if I start a critical discussion, then it will destroy the nice and friendly atmosphere we have established between us.

Friendliness, then, can be the source of a particular kind of silence mystery. You were present when a friend embarked on a dubious journey of exploration, based on a flawed assumption, and chose not to intervene. Why? One reason can be that you value the friendly atmosphere you have and you did not want to destroy it.

One executive student thesis that I supervised explored a work environment in a healthcare institution, guided by the question of whether friendliness impeded critical exchanges and friction. Three students interviewed their colleagues in the institution about this issue and invited them to share experiences and thoughts. The institution was in a small community, and the colleagues frequently spent time together outside work. The inquiry strengthened the hypothesis that the employees in this institution found it difficult to establish a reasonable balance between friendliness and friction. The interviewees described a tendency to hold back and choose a nonconfrontational approach to colleagues who were also friends outside work. They had developed a tolerance of bad habits and shortcuts at work because those who manifested them were friends. Voicing disagreement or criticism was seen as an initiative that would negatively affect the friendly atmosphere. These concrete findings led to a reorientation in the workplace. Introducing friendly friction among colleagues was identified as a common challenge and an achievable goal that would improve collaboration in the institution.

We have seen that social contagion can impede a communication climate by leading to a spread of unfriendly friction. It is likely that even friendliness without friction can gain further ground when people are exposed to it. We get more of the social behaviours that we observe around us. Therein we can also find encouragement for efforts to foster friendly friction in a group or organisation. That development can also gain speed through social contagion. When people are exposed to examples of how one can combine friendliness with criticism and disagreement, they can be inspired to make similar efforts themselves. These are processes where we are likely to encounter systems of holding back, as described by Hämäläinen and Saarinen (2006). Friendly friction cannot be established permanently and then be left alone. It needs constant care and maintenance to remain in place as a quality in how people share ideas and challenge each other during work processes. Negative spirals of holding back can make us prioritise uncommitted and bland friendliness at work over the more demanding relation that crucially includes friction.

It is likely that the bystander effect can weaken friendly friction. If I ask a group of friends for input about a specific idea or plan, and everyone in the group knows that I have made the same request to all of them, each of them can assume that they do not really need to get deeply involved. Others may have more time and energy now to give Øyvind the friendly friction he requires. I can avoid this effect by addressing everyone in the group separately and ask for friendly friction, without revealing that the others have received a similar request for help.

This chapter has presented the first of five qualities that characterises the communication climate in organisations when it is at its best. Friendly friction is situated between the poles of unfriendly friction and friendliness without friction. Decision-makers in organisations depend on friction and dissent when they contemplate alternative ways forward. If they sense that the feedback comes from someone who wants the best for them, and the delivery happens in a friendly atmosphere, they are more likely to listen attentively and learn from what they hear. The following chapters will introduce further qualities and will add colour to the understanding of what it means to have friendly friction between colleagues.