Shooting stars, SaaS and other friction

My alarm went off. Within a fraction of a second, I reached out, knocked my book off the bedside table and received a kick in the shin from my wife. My stealth mission was already in jeopardy.

Silently, I scooped up my clothes from the end of the bed, collected my toothbrush and was greeted by a sleepy child wondering where I was going to. At this point, my ninja skills were wasted, and so I had a sleepy hug on the landing, explained where I was off to, dispatched said child to go and have a cuddle with her mother and then disappeared off into the early morning gloom.

The next step was a drive to the station, a 10 minute walk from the carpark, then some loitering around on the station in the chilly morning, and then a train with woeful WiFi. Next followed a slightly unnerving and unfamiliar journey across London to where I was heading. Squeezed into this was a brief team call in a quiet but clearly not quiet enough corner of a busy place.

My journey home was the reverse with the addition of a delayed train and an almost entirely unsuccessful 1-2-1 Teams call due to the intermittent WiFi connection.

The purpose of me outlining all of this is not because I want sympathy (and please – do not feel sorry for me) but to show a tiny amount of the friction that was involved. The alternative would have been a lot easier. I could have done my talk online.

In a lot of our lives, we are exposed to offers of a frictionless existence. One platform that seamlessly integrates with everything else. A single App that does it all. 3 clicks often seems too many, so more often than that, we see the solutions to our problems is now only 2-clicks away.

Wouldn’t it be great if everything was just…easier?

Well, in many ways it would be.

But there is also another way of looking at it.

I could have not gone. I could have delivered my session online. But increasingly I feel that life is sometimes about the in-between bits. After my session, I went out into the foyer and saw someone I hadn’t seen for ages. We had a hug and a chat. And then I saw some more familiar faces. And then some more.

Compared to a lot of people, I am a new face and not a very pretty or important one in the Healthtech world, so me recognising people or in fact being recognised felt lovely. I chatted to someone about their kids, someone else about their new job, got introduced to some people doing some terrific work. I met someone who is doing some brilliant work in the design space. I met someone who has struggled with the same offhand comments from colleagues about developing a portfolio career. In the space of 20 minutes, I somehow had a richer experience than I had for some time.

And none of this would have been possible if I had joined from home. In fact, these casual interactions – chatting with real people about real things –was undoubtedly one of my highlights of the whole day. People talk about networking, the schmooze, the mingle. Personally, I find it quite tiring sometimes. But somewhere in the middle of these interactions are meaningful interactions and this is the filling the sandwich that I, for one, thrive on.

In the Trust, we recently had a conversation about whether our departmental QI/Education afternoons should be in person, hybrid or online. There is no perfect answer.

On one side of the fence are some great arguments. A colleague who is on maternity leave but wants to find out what is going on, wants the meetings to be online. A couple who on a Friday have to pick up their kids from school but both want to be included in the learning. I work remotely in one half of my life – remote works really well for me.

But at the risk of talking myself out of a remote-by-default job, in person is so much richer. To build up trust and rapport online is harder. Anyone who has asked about everyone’s weekends, the weather or people’s summer holiday plans during the awkward start of a Teams call will know what I mean.

If we hold an in-person Education afternoon, people turn up and engage. If it is hybrid, nobody turns up at all. If we hold it online, there is a sea of cameras turned off. It is always amusing to see how many people stay online at the end of the meeting when everyone else has gone – people who are either doing the same experiment as  me, or people who are clearly paying absolutely no attention whatsoever but duly logging this as valuable Continuing Professional Development (CPD).

There are ways around this – cameras on, microphones off being the best I have encountered. But it can be hard to enforce.

Which brings me, slightly circuitously back to friction.

Many years ago, I was lucky enough to work with Raleigh. For a while they were Raleigh International. I think they have since folded. They opened the eyes of a lot of people to experiences and places around the world, and one of their key principles was the idea of skin in the game. Everyone had to pay something to go on their trips. If you were from an affluent country, this fee would subsidise the costs for people coming from less affluent countries or backgrounds. It wasn’t means tested per se – but it kind of was. And personally, I think this is great. Would a multi-billionaire blink at the cost of a speeding fine? Probably not, but the boss of Ikea had the world’s biggest speeding fine and probably blinked at that.

One of my favourite books in recent times has been the Comfort Crisis. The central argument is that for a lot of us, our lives are devoid of much in the way of challenge and hardship. [As a side note, there are plenty of people whose lives are full of hardship and misery. This is not about them, and this is a much bigger problem and issue that shouldn’t be ignored – but is beyond the remit of my musings today.] The author Michael Easter argues that we should subject ourselves to boredom, hardship, and discomfort. And in doing so, we open up bits of ourselves that are too often neglected. It is this space where creativity and personal growth occurs.

If we live a life with nothing but friction, we get exhausted. If we suck it up every now and again, and make the effort, my experience is that we get rewarded. In this case, it was a richer and more meaningful connection with some great people.

There are a couple of quotes worth sharing. The first who from Lucius Annaeus Seneca who was a Stoic philosopher from the 1^st century BC, who I suspect is not currently on LinkedIn. Although shout out to Lucius Seneca for sharing a name with this great mind. 

“A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.”

The second is is so beautiful I just want to share it.

“Like matches, like an ice skate, like falling stars that light up when they scratch the air, we need friction in order for something to happen in our lives.”

Now, I am not pretending that this was a trial. Nor that I was falling in love as Yoav Blum was in fact writing about. But my point is, if we are devoid of friction, we sit on a comfy couch or even in bed, glued to our phones/laptops/neuralinks ingesting something that an algorithm thinks is right for us.

In fact, in the future generative AI era, we might find ourselves constantly ingesting a bespoke stream of content not just curated for us, but created for us that knows exactly how to hit our dopamine buttons better than any real experience. Which is wild!

There is also, the counterargument which as a true hypocrite I often argue in favour of. Sometimes you need to make it easier for people. In Healthtech and millions of other SaaS-flavoured things, features like Single Sign-On are no-brainers. People don’t want to be jumping between systems, looking on their phone for recently changed passwords. Day after day, people tell me their tales of frustration and “micropains” – different IT systems in their Trust or Hospital that they jump between with minimal irritation but irritation all the same. It is this problem, that in some people’s eyes make the mega-EPRs such a compelling solution. I’ll keep out of this argument. But when you are working hard, it is pretty darn annoying to have everything made a tincy bit harder.

But sometimes, you need to accept things that are harder are well worth it, and lean in to the friction, and as Yoav Blum says, be a shooting star. Or an ice skate. Your choice!

Thank you for reading. Please comment – good or bad. I love feedback, because if nothing else the algorithm likes it and that is all that matters. That’s a joke by the way.  

Written by me. Spell check but no other AI used in writing this.