On July 5, 2024 I blogged about the Drawbacks of jargon monoxide (hollow and impenetrable babble). In that post I discussed Chapter 7 from the 2024 book by Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao titled The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder. They describe how leaders can add grease to reduce friction and make it easier for desirable things to happen (as shown above). Leaders also can add gunk (sand) to increase friction and make it harder for other, undesirable things to happen.
There is a nine-page ChangeThis manifesto on January 31, 2024 adapted from the book, titled The Wisdom of Slowing Down. There also is an article (interview) with Robert Sutton at strategy+business on April 8, 2024 titled Jargon monoxide, friction fixers, and the meeting that could have been an email.
On page 243 of the book there is a table comparing how differently Grease People and Gunk People handle rules, risks, and monitoring. On page 244 there is a discussion of another article by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate on June 8, 2012 titled Chaos Theory: A Unified Theory of Muppet Types. She says people either are Chaos Muppets (corresponding to Grease People) or Order Muppets (corresponding to Gunk People). In the science fiction television series Babylon 5, there are two ancient races (First Ones) called Shadows (lords of chaos) and Vorlons (lords of order). They ask different questions when they meet people. I have modified that table as shown above.
The grease gun and sand bucket were adapted from images at Wikimedia Commons.
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