Podcast #1,053: How to Use Leverage Points to Get Unstuck in Work and Life

The Art of Manliness

When people get stuck in their job or personal life, the common response is to either work harder or shrug and accept that “that’s just the way things are.”

My guest today has a much better solution to getting moving and making progress again.

Dan Heath is a bestselling author whose latest book is Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working. Today on the show, Dan shares how to escape from ineffective systems and the inertia of continuing to do things the way they’ve always been done by pressing on leverage points — places where a little bit of effort yields disproportionate returns. Dan explains why you need “to go and see the work,” why meaningful change requires “restacking resources,” how short, focused “bursts” of effort often accomplish more than prolonged campaigns, how sometimes being inefficient can actually make us more effective, and more. Along the way, Dan shares plenty of stories and examples that illustrate how to implement these principles into your work, relationships, and family.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Dan’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #591 — Solve Problems Before They Become Problems
• AoM Article: You Need a Reset Day
• AoM Podcast #896: The Art and Science of Getting Unstuck
• YouTube video: Spotify Engineering Culture

Connect With Dan Heath

• Dan’s website

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When people get stuck in their job or personal life, the common response is to either work harder or shrug and accept that that’s just the way things are. My guest today has a much better solution to getting moving and making progress again. Dan Heath is a best selling author whose latest book is Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working. Today on the show, Dan shares how to escape from ineffective systems and the inertia of continuing to do things the way they’ve always been done by pressing on leverage points, places where a little bit of effort yields disproportionate returns. Dan explains why you need to go and see the work, why meaningful change requires restacking resources, how short focused bursts of effort often accomplish more than prolonged campaigns, how sometimes being inefficient can actually make us more effective and more. Along the way, Dan shares plenty of stories and examples that illustrate how to implement these principles into your work, relationships and family. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/leverage. All right, Dan Heath, welcome back to the show.

Dan Heath: Hey, thanks for having me back, Brett.

Brett McKay: So last time we had you on, we were talking about your book, Upstream. This was right at the start of the pandemic. You got a new book out called Reset, which is all about how to solve problems that seem like are unsolvable. And you start out the book talking about how just a regular old trip through a Chick-fil-A drive-thru inspired you, basically inspired you to write this book. So what happened in that Chick-fil-A drive-thru? Yeah.

Dan Heath: So let me take you back in time. It was, it was pandemic era. I had been sent out to fetch Chick-fil-A for the family. I’ve got two young girls and they eat about eight different foods and, and one of them is Chick-fil-A. So I log a lot of visits there. But this particular night, it was terrifying what I saw when I arrived because it was probably the longest line I’ve ever in my life seen at a drive-thru. I mean, a minimum of 50 cars, like spilling out onto the feeder road that approached the franchise. And oh, I was just… My soul was crushed because I hate long lines. And I started trying to make up lies to tell my wife or why I came back without nuggets and eventually put on my big boy pants, got in line and what happened next completely flipped my mindset because this line was just insanely operationally sophisticated. It just crept along steadily like one of those automatic car washes that you get pulled through. And by the time I finished, which took less than 15 minutes, I was totally captivated and I resolved to go and investigate this drive-thru later.

And a couple of days after that, I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about this drive-thru because the core mystery was we have this idea that in the business world, when one person’s better at something than somebody else, everybody else catches on and copies them and the advantage is eroded away. That’s competitive markets. And meanwhile, Chick-fil-A is doing the same thing that a dozen or more other national franchises are trying to do, but they consistently do it better for a long period of time. And why? Like, what is it that they’re so good at? And so that became kind of the founding question of this book is how do you run things better? And then we can get back to Chick-fil-A later and kind of geek out about the fast food. But as I got into the research and probably a year in, I realized it’s not so much how do you run things better that was appealing to me. It was more like, how do you get out of a bad equilibrium? Like, if you’re Arby’s and you don’t do majestic clockworks of drive-thrus and you aspire to that, how could you? How do you get out of a stuck place and start moving in a positive direction? And that’s when this book really took off.

Brett McKay: How is this book a continuation of your previous work in Upstream?

Dan Heath: So Upstream was about how do we get ahead of problems? How do we prevent problems before they happen? This book is more about, okay, you’re in a mediocre place. It’s not even an emergency. It’s just like, I don’t like where I am. I aspire to more, how do I get out of that rut? So they’re different in framing, but I’ll tell you one point that they have in common is a focus on leverage points. Leverage points being places where a little bit of effort yields a disproportionate return. And so in Upstream, we were looking for leverage points like, where can you poke in a complex system to try to prevent problems? In this book, leverage points is actually one of the most important concepts because it’s to say, when you’re stuck, you can’t change everything at once. You’ve got to kind of place your bet in wise places. And so literally half the book is about where do you go looking to find these magical leverage points where a little bit goes a long way.

Brett McKay: And we’re going to talk about some of those leverage points today, but kind of give us an idea of some of the problems that you encountered as you’re researching this book that people find themselves in or groups or organizations where it seems like, Man, this is a big problem. We can’t solve this. It’s always been this way. It’ll always be this way. What are some examples?

Dan Heath: The very first story is about the Northwestern Memorial Hospital receiving area. So this is the part of the hospital that takes in all the packages coming into the hospital and gets them to their ultimate destination. And several years ago, they were in a situation where it was taking them an average of three days to get packages delivered within the hospital, which just blew my mind, right? A medicine or some surgical gloves might get across the country via FedEx or UPS or whatever. And then to get from the basement of the hospital to the third floor might take another three days. But here’s what’s interesting about this. This equilibrium had persisted for so long. It’s like there were a bunch of people in the receiving area, been working there five, 10, 20 years, even 30 years, and that was just the norm. They came to work, they worked a hard day. None of these people were lazy. None of these people were ignorant. They came to work, they did their job, they went home, and it took three days. And so after a while, you just kind of shrug your shoulders and say, well, that’s just what it takes.

And that’s what I mean by being stuck. There’s a quote that has just stuck in my brain from this healthcare expert named Paul Batalden who said every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. And I think that is such a brilliant quote because it makes it obvious like if you’re in this receiving area, you’re not going to solve this by working a little harder, staying 20 minutes later, working more frantically during the day. This is a systemic problem. You have unwittingly designed a system that delivers packages in three days. And if you aspire to different and better results, you’ve got to start tinkering with the system.

Brett McKay: I’m sure everyone who’s listening to this probably think of something like that in their own work where it’s like, Man, this thing is terrible, but we just kind of shrug our shoulders. That’s the way it is. And we also talk about this doesn’t just happen in businesses or in bureaucracies. It can actually… This whole getting stuck can happen in a relationship, a marriage, or a family.

Dan Heath: Absolutely. And one of the examples I came across was from this couples therapist named Laura Heck. And I think this is a great symbol of stuckness. Just imagine her situation. So every day she looks at her calendar and it’s full of meetings with couples who are at the lowest ebb in their relationship. And there is so much that is out of your control as a therapist, right? I mean, essentially everything is out of your control. The history of the relationship, their current conflicts, their own childhoods, not to mention the fact that you might only have their attention for one hour out of the 168 hours every week. And so in a situation like that, your only hope is to look for a leverage point, some little thing that can have disproportionately positive consequences. So Laura Heck gave me this beautiful example of something that she says she does with her clients. She calls it sticky note appreciations. And the idea is that in the bathroom, she knows you’re going to brush your teeth twice a day. And so you put a Post it notepad right by your toothbrush holder. And while you’re brushing your teeth, you jot out some kind of compliment for your partner.

Just something quick. You write it out while you’re brushing your teeth, you put it on the mirror for your partner to find. So later they come in the bathroom to brush their teeth and they see, Thanks for taking the time to talk with John about college. He really admires you and appreciates your calmness or whatever. And so let’s just think about this on a couple of levels. So the first level is just who doesn’t like to get a compliment in life, right? So it’s fun to come in the bathroom and see something nice about yourself on the mirror on a Post it note. But Laura Heck told me that the real significance of this is actually broader. She said, what I’m trying to train these couples to do is to see their partner in a new way. You know, that by the time they come to me, they’re so used to just seeing the negative, what they don’t like, what annoys them, what makes them angry. And I need them to take off those glasses and put on a new set of glasses where you’re scanning for the positive. And so that just blew my mind when I heard it, because I thought, what a brilliant way to use just a little bit of time, a little bit of effort to do something that has importance beyond that effort, because if you can rewire the way you’re seeing your partner, like maybe that’s the first ray of hope that you can get your relationship back to the way it was.

Brett McKay: Right. It was a leverage point, right?

Dan Heath: Precisely.

Brett McKay: Little effort, but huge ROI. Let’s talk about some more of these leverage points that you discovered in the research of this book and helping people and groups get unstuck. One of them, the first one you talk about is the leverage point of go and see the work. What do you mean by that? ‘Cause I think a lot of people, if they’re in a system that’s stuck, they think, well, of course I know how the thing works. I’m in it every day. Why do I need to go and see the work?

Dan Heath: So this is a phrase, go and see the work that I took from Nelson Repenning, he’s an MIT professor. And the idea is a lot of times we are dealing with our work at some kind of remove. Like if you’re a leader maybe you’re managing by state… Financial statements or reports or memos. If you’re a principal, you might stay in your home office. And over time we can kind of lose touch with the ground reality of our work. So I’ll give you an example from Repenning and some colleagues. They told the story of this corrugated box factory. And the owner of the factory was concerned because paper losses had been higher during production than competitors in the industry, which of course costed him money. And so he, inspired by Repenning’s imperative to go and see the work, he goes out and he just starts walking the halls in the factory and kind of following through production. He notices that they have a main corrugator machine, sort of like the most expensive piece of capital equipment in the factory that was stopped every day around lunchtime. And he was puzzled by that because the startup time and the wind down time ended up wasting some paper.

And so he started asking some questions. It turns out the history was years prior there had been some instability in the power provided by the local utility. And so the manager at that time had kind of wisely started preemptively unplugging the corrugator machine at lunchtime, which was seemingly the time with the most unstable power. And the idea was, we’re going to preserve the lifespan of the machine because it’s not good for the machine to have this weird erratic power. Well, in the years since, the utility had long since fixed this problem, but it had become entrenched as a habit in the factory. Like people had long since forgotten the original intent of this. And it just became one of a hundred things that you have to do every day at the factory. It’s like you unlock the door doors, you come in, you flip on the lights, and at lunchtime, you shut down the corrugator machine. And that’s an example of the kind of thing that you see when you go and see the work.

And Repenning, he says you might hear a story like that and think, Well, that’s just dumb. Of course, if you are doing dumb stuff, you can find it and stamp it out. But his quote stuck with me. He said, if you aren’t embarrassed by what you find when you go and see the work, you probably aren’t looking closely enough. Like, all of us probably have some equivalent to that corrugator machine story in our work or in our life.

Brett McKay: Yeah, yeah. So go and see the work. So if you’re… You have a problem, you’re like, what is going on here? Like, why is this even a problem? Going back to that idea, the results we get are due to the system that we have. You have to actually go and see, Okay, what is causing? Like, there’s something in this… The way things are organized currently that’s spitting out this system that. It might not be obvious, but if I get down there on the front lines and talk to people who are in the front lines, I can actually figure out, Oh, this is why they’re doing it this way. Maybe if we make this small change, we can solve the problem.

Dan Heath: That’s right. I think this is a principle that really is most valuable when there’s some distance between you and the actual work product. Like in a relationship, it really doesn’t make sense. Like, how do I go and see the work with my wife? We’re in a relationship, we’re in it. But in the factory it’s easy to be the boss and stay in your boss’ office the whole day and kind of lose track of what’s going on on the factory floor. Or another example that I gave was from a vice principal who decided to shadow a 9th grader all day from when the 9th grader arrived at school to PE like, ate lunch with them in the cafeteria, did the assignments that he was doing sitting beside him in math class. And that’s something that’s uncommon, right? I mean, you might think, Well, how could a vice principal not know what’s going on at school? But that’s not quite fair. Because the stuff that gets to a vice principal’s desk is plenty to fill up their day. It’s discipline issues, it’s administrative issues, it’s teacher evaluations. And you could go years easily without ever sitting next to a student in class.

It took an unnatural act to make that possible. But that one day of just shadowing the student kind of unlocked all these ideas and inspirations for action.

Brett McKay: Well, going back to relationships, that’s one of the roles if therapists can play. You can add that distance. Maybe the therapist, in interacting with the couple can say, Oh, my gosh. You guys are doing this. You might not even know it. So if you want to see the work with your relationship, maybe go to a counselor or a therapist.

Dan Heath: Yeah, that’s interesting, actually, that to sort of go and see the work, you have to bring in someone else to see it, because it’s almost like you’ve lost perspective from the inside.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Another leverage point is consider the goal of the goal. What do you mean by that?

Dan Heath: So we’re so used to setting goals in organizations. I mean, goals are sort of like the language of organizations, that goals can actually take on a life of their own, and we can think we’re succeeding even though we’re actually failing. Let me give you an example. I met this guy named Ryan Davidson who told me about his experience buying a truck. He bought a ram truck. He’d been saving up for it. So he buys the truck. He decides to take the truck camping its first weekend away. And sort of a couple days after he buys this truck, the survey shakedown begins, where people from the dealership just start hounding him to fill out a survey. Probably we’ve all had this experience in some domain or another. And not only are they trying to get him to fill out the survey, they’re kind of like pestering to give them really good scores. We would really appreciate your positive scores, underlined, bolded, on the survey. And so probably five different people from the dealership reach out to him multiple times over a period of two weeks and in multiple media, on the phone, via text message, via email.

And so Ryan Davidson eventually realizes, like, I’m never going to be able to live a normal life until I fill out this survey. And so he takes the time, fills it out, and he says he gives them pretty much an A minus level rating. He was generally okay with the experience, but thought that some things could have been better. And he sends off the survey and clicks submit. Never hears from anyone again about the survey. After all the pestering, just the line goes dead. Except that his sales rep starts texting him, complaining about not having been given all 10 out of 10s on the survey. And so it’s just kind of this silly charade that’s taking place that, if you think about it, probably had a really good origin. Like, at some point, some of the leaders at Ram thought, Hey, we would like our customers, when they buy trucks from us, to have a good experience. Like, so far, so good. Okay, well, how are we going to know if we’re succeeding at that? Well, let’s give a survey after people buy a car. Let’s ask them some questions and see how they respond.

Okay, that’s even better. Now we have a way of diagnosing whether we’re succeeding or not. Okay, so you start collecting the survey. Well, then you start to get uncomfortable because some of your dealerships aren’t getting very good scores. And so you think, Well, gosh, we gotta boost those scores. And so it becomes a goal to boost the scores. You start layering on incentives and potential punishments if the scores don’t improve. And all of a sudden, the survey, which was supposed to be a diagnostic, becomes its own target. In other words, my contention is the people at this dealership that Davidson went to actually didn’t care at all what the experience was like. All that they cared about was that he bubbled in tens on this survey that they sent. That was what they cared about because that was what their incentives were yoked to. And so it becomes like this kind of perversion. And that’s what I mean by the goal of the goal is we can’t be content in setting and chasing goals. We have to ask, what’s the goal of the goal? Like, in this dealership example, why is it important that we get good scores on these customer surveys? Well, because we actually care ultimately about whether people had a good experience with us, would tell their friends, would come back and so forth.

Brett McKay: I think this can happen in groups, like churches. You see like a church. Maybe they want to start a program of some sort for fellowship or spiritual formation. But then the program becomes the focus, and there’s all this. It becomes a problem. It’s not implemented the right way. No one’s coming to the thing. There’s resentment that builds up because people aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do. And then you have to step back. It’s like, Wait, why are we doing this thing anyways? The original goal was maybe some fellowship enrich people’s lives. But here we are talking about just dumb Stuff for this dumb program. And so asking yourself… It’s actually Richard Rohr. He’s a monk. He’s a father. Richard Rohr. He has this phrase. He says to ask yourself, what are we really doing when we are doing what we are doing?

Dan Heath: Ooh, that’s good.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Dan Heath: Yeah, that’s very, very goal of the goal friendly.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think remembering or thinking about the goal of the goal can also keep you from goal lock. So you might figure out a better way to achieve your original aim doing something else. So, for example, let’s say you’re trying to make friends, but you’re finding that hosting dinner parties, it just stresses you out. All right, that’s fine. Maybe you could just have people over for dessert and games instead. There’s more than one way to skin a cat when you’re achieving your goals. Another leverage point is to focus on what’s working in a system or organization to find a leverage point. What does that look like?

Dan Heath: This is the notion of studying bright spots, which I think is a really powerful idea. It’s actually an idea that my brother Chip and I wrote about in a previous book called Switch, and it’s kind of getting its second wind in this book. So the idea is very simple. It’s to say so often in life, our attention is grabbed by what’s not working. And if you think about employee engagement, for instance, is something a lot of businesses and organizations are thinking about. How do you keep your employees happy? How do you keep them around? And so you imagine you get a survey back, a pulse survey from your employees. And of course, every survey ever commissioned has different results. Some people are unhappy, some people are in the middle, Some people are happy. And your attention immediately gravitates towards the employees who are unhappy. And what studying bright spots says is, why don’t you spend some time trying to understand the other side of the spectrum. For the employees who are really psyched to come to work every day, why? What are they so jazzed about? What’s keeping them happy? What’s giving them a sense of purpose? Because if you can understand that, it gives you the hope of reproducing that for everyone.

Could you boost everybody’s engagement by harvesting and kind of replicating the factors that are making your most satisfied employees that way? And that’s the spirit of studying bright spots is sometimes we can find leverage points by just understanding at a deeper level the things that we’re already doing that we’re succeeding at.

Brett McKay: I was thinking about how we can apply this to our family life. My kids like a lot of siblings. They bicker a lot and it’s annoying. [0:22:11.8] ____ always like, yeah, just leave your sister alone. Leave your brother. But every now and then they have moments where they don’t. It’s just awesome. It’s almost like a Norman Rockwell painting. It’s like, wow, this is great. So I think finding the bright spots would be like, okay, what’s going on? When they’re just like super kind and nice to each other and not bickering, like, what happened? And how can we get more of that?

Dan Heath: That is exactly the spirit. And in fact, this is actually kind of a methodology used in a branch of therapy called Solutions Focused Therapy. In traditional therapy, it’s very, very problem driven. Like, let’s get to the source of the problem, the root. And in Solutions Focused therapy, they basically don’t care about the problems. They want you to solve them, but they don’t want to kind of wallow in them. And so in the book, I shared this case from a therapist named John J. Murphy. He’s like a giant in the field. And he tells the story of this woman who comes. She’s been having a lot of behavioral issues with her daughter and she’s been diagnosed with ADHD. And there’s just a lot of tension. They’re reluctant to put her on medication. And so they end up talking about the morning, which seems to be like the crux of where things really can boil over sometimes. And this mother said sometimes I end up yelling and I feel terrible about myself. When I act out, it makes her act out. And so they start thinking about the bright spots.

And so Murphy, the counselor is like, Well, when does this not happen? And the mom starts thinking, she says sometimes when I have a little more time in the morning and I could just have a cup of coffee and be in my own brain, it’s like it kind of steals me in a way where I can absorb more and I don’t immediately react. And then when I don’t react, my daughter doesn’t react. And so it’s almost becomes this kind of self reinforcing positive system. And so Murphy kind of praised it and he said, well, despite all the things that are going on, despite all the stresses in your life, you’ve already figured out a way to manage this. Well, do you think we could figure out a way to replicate your own success? And so the woman kind of thinks about it she realizes, Hey, the days when I wake up earlier, the days when I don’t stay up late with my husband and maybe I don’t have too many drinks. And so she goes home and after one therapy session, it’s like she kind of cracks this system where she just gets up 15 or 20 minutes early, has a little bit of me time, and that prepares her for the day.

And I just love stories like that because it’s like the seeds of success were already there in her life and it just took someone to kind of point them out and say, even if you’re failing sometimes, even if you’re failing a lot of the time, you’re not always failing, you’re succeeding sometimes. And what explains your success and can you do more of it?

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Well, I want to talk about Chick-fil-A because like you, I’m always impressed every time I go through the drive-thru because it’s just so efficient. And use Chick-fil-A to talk about the leverage point of constraints. Tell us about that.

Dan Heath: So constraints are the things that are holding you back, the bottlenecks, the limiting factors. And so when we’re looking for leverage points we want to find somewhere where a little bit of work goes a long way. Looking at a constraint can be really enlightening because if you can kind of whittle down the number one thing that’s holding you back, that can be magical. And to me, the Chick-fil-A drive-thru is a kind of brilliant example of this, because the guy that ran the drive-thru I talked about earlier, a guy named Tony Fernandez, is just a genius at managing constraints. This drive-thru I’m talking about can process 400 cars in an hour. I mean, that’s a car every nine seconds.

Brett McKay: Wow.

Dan Heath: Which is just like Olympic level fast food drive-thru. And he thinks very explicitly about the constraints. He says one of the first things we realized was that the menu board the thing where you drive up and you look at the menu, is often a constraint. And virtually all fast food places have one menu board and some of the busy ones have two with two lanes. He said, we just thought, why do we need a menu board? I mean, Chick-fil-A menu, it’s like there’s nuggets and fries. How hard is it? And so they just literally eliminated the menu board and they pushed employees into the parking lot with iPads to take your order at your window. And the beautiful thing about that is where before you were constrained with one path to ordering, or maybe two with the two menu board system, now they can have five people in the parking lot at the same time. And when they’re not busy, they can scale it back to one person in the parking lot. And so now you have eliminated the constraint of the ordering. But notice, and this is an important theme is you always have a constraint.

It’s not like you just fix it and poof, it’s gone. No, what happens is when you eliminate one constraint, you’ve made the system better and the constraint hops somewhere else. So if you’ve got five people taking orders on iPads in the parking lot, like, orders are flooding into the kitchen, and then these poor people have to cook up massive batches of nuggets and fries. And so now the kitchen’s the bottleneck. And so you have to staff up in the kitchen and create better systems so they can keep up. Well, once they’re on par, then maybe the bottleneck pops to what they call meal assembly, which is the people that bag and box and pour your drinks and so forth. And so he just had a very disciplined approach to this fast food flow problem, which is to just chase one constraint at a time. And each time he eliminated one constraint, the system improved, and then it hopped to the next. And then he did it again and again and again.

Brett McKay: So those are some leverage points. There’s other ones you talk about in the book. After leverage points, you recommend people start doing what’s called restacking resources. What do you mean by that?

Dan Heath: Restacking resource just says leverage points is kind of about where do you aim? We’re trying to get unstuck. I’m saying you can’t fix everything at once. You got to aim. You got to find a place where a little bit goes a long way. Okay, now that you’ve done that, you’ve got to find some fuel. You’ve got to have a way to push on the leverage point. And so for that, you need resources. That’s what I mean by restacking resources. Like, a lot of times, especially in organizations, when people start talking about change, it’s like one more thing to add to the pile. It’s like we’re going to do everything we did yesterday and this new thing that the boss is excited about. But one of the themes in the book is that change is not about ‘and’ it’s ‘instead of’. So it’s like if something has become a priority, if we Want to push toward that new priority, we’ve got to give somewhere else. I mean, we’re constrained to what we have, probably. There’s not just like giant satchels of free cash in the supply cabinet that we can tap or there’s not an army of idle employees that we can bring to bear.

We’ve got to figure out how to reconfigure what we have to push in that new direction. That’s what I mean by restack resources.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. And the first way you recommend people restack resources to start improving things is to begin your action plan, or maybe the action plan on leveraging that leverage point with a burst. And you mentioned earlier, a lot of people, when they have a problem, one of their first instincts is just to work harder. If we just work harder, we’ll solve it. How is doing a burst, which you describe as a focused output of energy, different from the standard way of working hard?

Dan Heath: That’s a great question. So I think the notion of a burst is not necessarily work harder, it’s like work denser. What I mean is, if you’ve got some new priority, if you can work on it for 30 focused hours on that priority in one week, my contention is that’s probably going to be the equivalent of 100 hours that you scattered and fragmented across six months. So it’s like you want to push hard in a concentrated way, in a collaborative way, all at once maybe leaving other things on the wayside to focus on the new priority. It’s almost like if you’ve ever pushed up a stuck window, like the amount of effort to get the window moving at all, it’s pretty dramatic. And then once it starts moving, it becomes a lot easier to keep it moving. That’s the idea of the burst.

Brett McKay: And one thing it does, too. There’s a psychological impact, right? You actually start seeing some progress. You’re like, Oh, maybe this problem is actually solvable. So that initial burst creates sort of like a flywheel of motivation.

Dan Heath: Well said. And it reminds me, I met this guy, Greg McLawsen, who talked about how sometimes actually being inefficient can make us more effective. He gave an example of. He was working on a gardening project for his wife. I think I shouldn’t call it a project. They were just trying to add some irrigation to their family garden or whatever. And he was put in charge of the run to Home Depot. And he had this great line. He said, The immutable law of the universe is that no project can ever be completed with one trip to Home Depot. It’s like, even if you go in search of one 60 watt light bulb, when you get home, inevitably you discover, Oh, actually, it was supposed to be a 59 watt light bulb. And you have to go back. And so this proves true for him. He ends up with the wrong splitter part for the irrigation system or whatever. And he’s an attorney. And so he said in his mind the efficient thing to do would be wait for the next trip to Home Depot, which would be in a week or a couple of weeks or whatever, and just add it to the list rather than make a special trip for this $5 part.

And he was thinking in his mind it’s going to cost me $200 in billable hours and $6 in gas to go get this $5 part. Like, that’s crazy. But then he said. It’s not crazy, because the definition of success to his wife is, I can water the plants. And it doesn’t matter that we’re 90% there, absent one part, 100% is what matters. And so he got right back in his car, went to Home Depot, got the part, and worked to completion. And he said it may have been inefficient, but it was effective. And he said it made him realize that he was doing some similar things in his law firm, where in the guise of efficiency, maybe he would get a bunch of documents to 90%, but 90% doesn’t mean anything. You haven’t solved problems for clients. You haven’t been able to bill for it because it’s not done. And so he started trying to kind of reconceptualize his work with effectiveness as the goal instead of efficiency. And that’s your point about how this burst of effort can get us to completion. It’s like you want the burst to get the irrigation system done, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s efficient or not. What matters is, can you water the plants?

Brett McKay: Yeah. And in this chapter, you talk about scrum. And in scrum, they use sprints, which is basically a burst. And what you’re doing with these bursts or these sprints is like you’re not working hard all the time. You do some planning, and then you schedule an intense amount of activity. It’s dense. Then you take another break, recalibrate, see what needs to be done, and then you start up again so you have a clear goal which you’re trying to achieve. And then you work hard for a few hours and then you’re done. That’s it.

Dan Heath: And it’s an antidote to anybody who works in a large organization knows this problem of just how mind numbing it can be to get something changed because you’re working through meetings and then to align calendars, you can’t meet until two weeks from now. And then you start an email chain, and the email chain starts to spiral outward with more and more people on it. And then it’s like something that you all could have resolved if you’d been in the same room and just put your heads together and done the work. Not talked about it, but done the work for eight hours in the same room. Like all of a sudden it can take six months just because of asynchronous delays and so forth. And so I think that’s the power of a burst is it may be unnatural to try to clear your calendars and kind of get in the same room to work on the same problem, but boy, does it pay off down the road.

Brett McKay: Another way to restock resources is to recycle waste. And I think a lot of people understand what waste is in a factory setting. So you gave that example of the box factory. They had a lot of waste there. So if you have a lot of leftover material making a widget, that’s widget, that’s waste. But let’s talk about how does waste appear in organizations not creating widgets or even in families? What does that look like?

Dan Heath: So I want to share the kind of operational definition of waste I’m using in the book, which is taken from this guy named Taiichi Ono, who was one of the godfathers of the Toyota production system. So if you’ve ever intersected with people obsessed about operations, they all talk about the Toyota production system.

Brett McKay: Six Sigma Black Belt.

Dan Heath: Six Sigma. Yeah, exactly. So the definition, waste is any activity that doesn’t add value for the customer, which I think is a really interesting thing to try to wrap your brain around. Like that receiving area we’ve talked about a couple of times. Here’s a classic example. So nurses in the hospital would get frustrated. They ordered some medicine, hasn’t shown up. They would call the receiving area and there was a red phone in the receiving area. Somebody would have to pick up, deal with the nurse’s complaint. They’d have to go rushing around looking for the box, seeing if they had it, when was it going to be delivered. And so every one of those answered calls to the Red phone is waste. Even if the person handling the inquiry did it politely, even if they did it efficiently, it was waste because the nurse never wanted to have to call to check on the package. It did not add value for the customer. And when you start to think about it that way, you realize if you can change the way you work every time the nurse doesn’t have to call, that puts 15 minutes back in your pocket of the time you spent kind of noodling around looking for the package.

So, anyway, I kind of got into the waste literature, and, yes, there is such a thing. And it made me start thinking about family life, and I mentioned my girls. And so every morning getting ready for school is like a thing. It’s just like a mother load of waste. All the things that we do and the pestering. And one kind of recurring source of pain was just shoes and socks. You’d be able to find one shoe. Where’s the other shoe? Oh it’s by the front door. And, okay, we got the shoes, but now wear socks. You got to go back upstairs and get the socks. And. And so my wife has this kind of stroke of genius. We have this giant drawer by the back door where we go out to walk to school. And she just piled all of their shoes, every pair and all of their socks into this drawer. And so that’s where they live, and they never get beyond that room. So, number one, we always know where they are. And number two, it had these kind of unanticipated benefits of, well, now they take their shoes and socks off by the back door, and so they don’t track dirt through the house.

And I just had to smile at how with this kind of one idea, we’ve eliminated this whole source of nagging and fussing and rushing around the house. And now we can use our time like arguing about whether you can eat the brown spot on the waffle or not. So it’s been a real breakthrough for us.

Brett McKay: Right. Your wife’s got a Six Sigma Black Belt in home management.

Dan Heath: Exactly, exactly.

Brett McKay: I love it.

Dan Heath: By the way, I was remembering last time we talked, you had a great personal burst thing of the reset day.

Brett McKay: Oh, the reset. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.

Dan Heath: If you haven’t talked about that in a while, you should share that with your listeners, because that’s a really, really good example.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we wrote an article about that, and I’ll put it in the show notes. So a reset day is. It’s basically a day we set aside. We’re not working. The kids are at school, so they’re not in our business. And my wife and I will just get done all the life admin that’s been piling up. So paying bills, doing retirement stuff or estate planning, planning vacations. All that stuff that just kind of gets pushed back and back. So we’ll just dedicate a day and get all of it done. And then it feels great to be done with it.

Dan Heath: That’s so good. I had a reader that talked about using a life crap month. I think yours is even better because it’s more punchy and focused, but it was exactly the kind of stuff you’re talking about. It’s like updating the wills and making sure the address on your life insurance policy is updated and all the stuff that’s just like pulling teeth day to day. And they said by the end of the month, it’s just like they felt like they were on cloud nine. They just felt like such effective adults having checked all these boxes that had gone unchecked for so long.

Brett McKay: Yeah, no, I highly recommend it. Another thing you talk about is if you have a problem that seems intractable, look for ways you can do less, but you also have to do more at the same time. What do you mean by that?

Dan Heath: So this is back to the idea that change is not ‘and’ it’s ‘instead of’. And I had this very provocative conversation with this guy who’s a consultant. His name is David Philippi for the consultancy Strategex. And they’re kind of obsessed with the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule. 80% of your revenue might come from 20% of your customers. But one of the methodologies they use really stuck with me. So here’s what they do. They go into a client’s financials, and they try to isolate each client and figure out how profitable they were by client, which would seem obvious. I mean, you would like to know how profitable your different clients are, but it’s no trivial thing, because even if you know, like, well, I sent this many parts to this client and the parts cost this much. But you also have to balance in things like how much relationship time does this client eat up? Are they a needy client? Are they an easy client? Do they eat up a lot of support time? And so you kind of go through the ledger, try to come up with profitability by client, and then they force rank the clients from best to worst in terms of profitability.

And Philippi said that in virtually every case, when they’ve done this. What they find is that your very best clients are under coddled and your worst clients are over coddled. Here’s an example of what he meant by that. He said repeatedly, they have found that the on time delivery record. So he works with a lot of manufacturers that are like shipping stuff out. The on time delivery record was better for the worst clients than it was for the best. And that just seems like impossible. How could you ever treat your best clients that way? But he said, what happens is a lot of times the worst clients are the ones that are buying like little nickel and dime stuff. Maybe it’s just one part that you have to stick in a box and ship out. And so it’s easy, it’s quick. And if your shipping department is incentivized, for instance, on percentage of on time deliveries, well, you can just nail those like simple ones, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and look like a genius. You’ve got a 96% on time rate, but meanwhile the 4% might have been like your very best customers who had complicated assemblies that took some time and took some planning.

And so he kind of flips the lens and says, look, your best clients need to have a perfect on time rate every time, no matter what it means for the rest of the folks. So all that’s been about profitability so far, but let me kind of flip the script here. Imagine that same idea applied to almost anything in your life. It might be how you’re spending your time across projects. It might be relationships. Think about all the relationships you have in your life and imagine that you kind of ranked them according to the value and preciousness that they have for you. And so obviously probably your family’s at the very top of the list. And then if you zoom all the way to the bottom, it’s going to be maybe old friendships that have grown increasingly toxic or commitments that you made to some volunteer organization that just kind of gone sideways and feels like a waste of time or whatever. But we all have a ranking. We all have people who are more and less precious to us. And if you take this kind of logic and you think aren’t I probably under-coddling the people most precious to me with all this time and energy I’m expending on the people at the bottom of the ranking? And wouldn’t it be smarter to kind of steal from the over-coddled people at the bottom to give me more wherewithal, more availability to the people I care most about? What was really seductive about that logic to me is just to remind listeners where we are.

We’re thinking about when you’re trying to push in a new direction. Where do you get the fuel to push? And if you think about this kind of over-coddled, under-coddled logic, you realize that’s where you get the resources is you steal from the over-coddled and give to the under-coddled. If that makes sense.

Brett McKay: That makes perfect sense. So if someone’s feeling overwhelmed in their life, it’s usually because they have too many commitments, I think. Yeah, ranking things can be really useful and then focus more time. So you’re going to do less with the people that aren’t as important to you. So you can do more with the people that are important to you or do…

Dan Heath: That’s it.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I love that.

Dan Heath: Exactly.

Brett McKay: A lot of times when organizations or groups get stuck, the typical approach to solve the problem is there’ll be like a sort of top down command and control type dictating. So there’s a manager that says, Oh, here’s the problem. And then they tell individual employees, here’s what you’re going to do to solve the problem. But you argue that handing things off directly to individuals in the group and just letting them come up with solutions can actually speed up solutions to the problem. How so?

Dan Heath: This is a concept that I call let people drive. And the idea is if you’re looking for fuel to push in a new direction, one of the best sources of fuel is motivation. And one of the most evergreen sources of motivation is autonomy. Like letting people drive, giving people some reins to act. I mean, there’s basically no high performing team in the world that is micromanaged. Navy Seals, Green Berets, not micromanaged. Like you’ve got to loosen the reins. But this can be counterintuitive in organizations because when things aren’t going well, a lot of times our instinct, as you said, is to kind of clamp down.

I took inspiration from… There’s a great video. You can find this on YouTube. It’s from a consultant named Henrik Kniberg. And he talks about how Spotify organizes itself and he distinguishes autonomy from alignment. And he said you might start by thinking that these are kind of opposite ideas. Autonomy is like I can do what I want and alignment means I’m doing what everybody else is doing. But he says at Spotify they’re not in opposition. If you think about a two by two matrix, low autonomy and low alignment is the bad one. That’s like, it’s an ineffective culture. It’s like a call center. Everybody’s on their own. They’re not really collaborating, but they’re also being heavily micromanaged.

Where we really want to be is in the high autonomy, high alignment, square of the two by two, which means we know what the vision is. Like Kniberg in his video says, management says we need a way to get across the river. That’s the strategic priority. Figure it out. That’s the autonomy piece. So we’re aligned on vision, but we trust our employees to figure out the methodology. And I think that’s a really enlightened way to look at it. Autonomy doesn’t mean, like, everybody just gets to do what they want willy nilly. Autonomy means we trust people enough to kind of let them figure things out.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so it’s about giving people maybe some guardrails. Like here’s what we don’t want you to do. We definitely don’t want you doing this. But anything within those guardrails is free game. You can do it if it gets the job done.

Dan Heath: That’s it. That’s it. And I find myself making this mistake all the time as a parent. It’s like even little dumb stuff like teaching kids how to use knives and cut up their food at dinner, and it’s like a hundred times out of a hundred, you’re going to be better at that than them. You know what I mean? And so, if you’re in a hurry or whatever, it’s like, Oh, just let me just do it. Let me just cut up your steak or whatever. But that robs them of autonomy. And it also kind of dooms you to being in the same role forevermore. Every time that you take some task back from them is a time that they haven’t built any personal capacity.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s workshop this. Maybe you and I can figure this out. One thing I’ve been always getting on with my kids about is just keeping things tidy. They just kind of dump things off everywhere in the house. And you’re like, Hey, why is this here? And typically I actually just. I throw stuff away. If I see it on the floor for longer than 12 hours, I’m like, oh, it must be trash. It’s on the floor.

Dan Heath: I like that.

Brett McKay: I picked that up from my dad and my kids hate it. It’s not a good habit. But what can we do? How can we use this idea of giving maybe our kids autonomy to help us get the house tidy.

Dan Heath: I’ll tell you a story I remember from years and years and years ago. So this woman emailed my brother and I and said she was in exactly the situation you’re in. She had a kid, and it would never… He liked to play with trucks. He was probably, I don’t know, seven or eight years old, maybe younger, loved to play with trucks, did not like to clean up the trucks. And so it became a recurring source of tension. And then she said one day, I just kind of… I just realized motivation is the game here. It’s not about instruction. It’s about, I have to figure out a way for him to want to do this. And so she said, I took an old bookcase, I took all the books off of it, and then we painted parking stripes on it together. And then I let him assign a parking space to every one of his trucks. And so he had some autonomy. And it’s like, Well, this one’s going to go here, and this one’s the prime spot. So this is where my best truck’s going to go.

And then she said she never again mentioned the idea of cleaning up his room or cleaning up his truck. She said, have you parked your trucks yet? And it was like part of the play. And I think that’s kind of brilliant jiu jitsu is figuring out where’s the motivation here? Where does their motivation align with mine? And can I figure out a way to thread that needle so it’s not just my order and their compliance?

Brett McKay: Well, Dan, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Dan Heath: Well, I have a website at danheath.com that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the book or my podcast or anything else.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you do have a podcast. What’s your podcast about?

Dan Heath: The podcast is called What It’s Like To Be. And the conceit is in every episode, I talk to someone from a different profession. So I’ve talked recently to a Christmas tree farmer, an Olympic bobsledder, a London cabbie, Secret Service agent, and more.

Brett McKay: Sounds awesome. Well, Dan Heath, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Dan Heath: Hey, thanks a million, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Dan Heath. He’s the author of the book Reset. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, danheath.com also check out our shownotes at aom.is/leverage, where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this top.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net and as always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AoM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.