{"id":7709,"date":"2025-07-29T01:00:29","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T07:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/?p=7709"},"modified":"2026-02-18T13:46:05","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T20:46:05","slug":"become-a-friction-fixer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/become-a-friction-fixer\/","title":{"rendered":"Become a Friction Fixer"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>You don&#8217;t always need to do a big Lean Six Sigma project. Maybe it&#8217;s enough to make things faster and easier, but in some cases, slower and harder. Here&#8217;s why:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/1077289989?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"720\" height=\"405\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>&#8220;Hi, I&#8217;m Jay Arthur, author of \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Lean-Six-Sigma-Hospitals-Improving\/dp\/1259641082\/\">Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals<\/a>\u201d and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/demo\/\">QI Macros [software]<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;A friend of mine recommended this book called \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/bobsutton.net\/book\/the-friction-project\/\">The Friction Project<\/a>,\u201d and they talk about how in companies\u2026 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/arthurs-law-of-process-improvement\/\">Arthur&#8217;s Law [applies]: \u2018The unexamined process gets even slower, [more] sluggish, more error-prone with time.\u2019<\/a> They talk about the idea of becoming a friction fixer.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Now, this isn&#8217;t like the deep nested stuff that we would think about in Lean Six Sigma, but it&#8217;s how we think about every day; every day when we&#8217;re working with someone. The idea here is two things: You want to find ways to make things faster and easier, so let&#8217;s get rid of the friction. But then there are [situations] where people can easily make mistakes and we want to make that harder and slower.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;What?! We want to make some things harder and slower? Yeah. Right, because we don&#8217;t want people just rushing in and blowing by the whole idea. I thought that was an interesting thing.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;And he talks about the \u2018addition sickness\u2019 where people have a tendency to add rather than subtract when you&#8217;re changing a process. That&#8217;s kind of silly. Then you have to decide that you&#8217;re accountable for friction fixing. We don&#8217;t always need full-on Lean projects or Six Sigma projects, maybe we can just simplify and streamline something just a little bit.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;You know, I think this is the option for us to start to think about [how] it&#8217;s a craft, and we can start to just learn, practice and develop. I think Quality Improvement people are always having that thought: how can I make this faster, better, cheaper, more easy for people, but I also like this other idea, which is we have to make [situations] where people can rush in and make mistakes\u2026 we have to make that a little bit harder and slower. Right? When you start your car, you have to step on the brake to make it start: that&#8217;s slowing you down, making you think.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;So that&#8217;s my Improvement Insight. Let&#8217;s go out and improve something this week. Let&#8217;s make it faster and easier\u2026 or maybe let&#8217;s make it a little harder, a little slower, to prevent those mistakes.&#8221;<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You don&rsquo;t always need to do a big Lean Six Sigma project. Maybe it&rsquo;s enough to make things faster and easier, but in some cases, slower and harder. Here&rsquo;s why: &#65279; &ldquo;Hi, I&rsquo;m Jay Arthur, author of &ldquo;Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals&rdquo; and QI Macros [software]. &ldquo;A friend of mine recommended this book called &ldquo;The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7789,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[290],"tags":[627,629,140],"class_list":["post-7709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-improvement-insights","tag-friction-fixer","tag-qimacros","tag-quality-improvement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7709"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7798,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7709\/revisions\/7798"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}