The best time for a full reset? It’s now.

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

DAN HEATH: Our attention is drawn and absorbed by what’s not working.

Imagine you’ve got a sales team. You’ve got 10 reps, and you’ve got two reps that are just killing it and two or three that are on the verge of being fired. If you really understand why your two or three best reps are delivering the results that they are, it gives you hope of elevating the entire team.

It never works the other way. You’re never going to learn things from the worst two reps that you can export to make the whole team better forever.

So in a way, it’s kind of sad that our attention is focused on the problem because there are more seeds of ongoing improvement in the bright spots.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Dan Heath, the co-author with his brother Chip of several New York Times bestselling business books, including Decisive, Switch, and Made to Stick. Dan’s latest book, a solo effort, is called Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working. As many of us enter 2025 with an eye toward new personal and professional goals, Reset offers lessons about reconstructing our systems and habits to get the most effective results. In today’s episode, Dan shares stories and case studies that illuminate the book’s counterintuitive teachings — like why leaders shouldn’t look to encourage “buy-in” from their employees. We explore how to embrace a new mindset around goals and incentives, through what Dan refers to as “leverage points.” Whether you’re looking to restructure an entire organization, or just stick to your New Year’s resolutions, Dan’s advice will help you to zoom out and think clearer, quicker, and smarter. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

SAFIAN: I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Dan Heath, bestselling author and host of the podcast, What It’s Like to Be. Dan, great to talk with you.

HEATH: Hey, Bob, it’s been a long time.

Copy LinkThe surprising inspiration behind Reset

SAFIAN: Dan, you have written some of my favorite business books, Made to Stick, Switch, Decisive, The Power of Moments — great lessons in them. I commend all of them to our listeners. You’ve now got a new book coming out this month called Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working.

And the theme is perfect for this moment, the season of New Year’s resolutions for us as individuals, for us as businesses, sort of the equivalent of New Year’s resolutions, goals for the year ahead.

What prompted you to take on this topic?

HEATH: It’s funny, weirdly enough, this topic was prompted by a trip to Chick-fil-A during the pandemic era. So I’d been sent out to fetch nuggets for the family, and I went out, and it was pandemic era when drive-thrus were kind of at their heyday. And so I get there, and I swear to you, there are no fewer than 50 cars in line.

And so I am just sweating. I hate lines. I’m trying to formulate some kind of lie I can tell my wife for why I came back with no nuggets.

Then what happens next just completely flips my emotions. This line is just steadily creeping forward. I mean, it is the weirdest thing. It’s almost like those automatic car washes that kind of pull you along. And so I just, in this experience, became totally fascinated because to get through 50 cars, there’s no way it took more than 10 minutes. And so I had to figure out why every fast-food chain in the world is trying to do this same thing — serve a lot of cars in a drive-thru. Why is it that Chick-fil-A, and certain Chick-fil-As in particular, seem to have kind of mastered this? And so that planted the seed. Originally, this book was intended to answer the question, how do you make things run better? And so that was the seed that was planted at Chick-fil-A: how can Chick-fil-A do something that’s so much better than what everybody else is trying to do?

We think competitive markets — you immediately see your advantage eroded away, and competition takes over, but let’s face it, folks. I mean, Arby’s does not look like that. This Chick-fil-A that I went to can process 400 cars in an hour. That’s a car every nine seconds.

So anyway, that was the original formulation of the mission. And as I went deeper and deeper, I started to realize that my interest was not purely on how do we run things better, you know, like any performance improvement, but it was more on situations where people had kind of settled into a subpar equilibrium. It’s like you kind of felt stuck. It wasn’t a crisis, there wasn’t an emergency, but maybe you had just gotten into a rhythm that had persisted for months or for years, and nobody really liked it. Nobody thought you were nailing it, but it was like you had sort of given up hope of seeing it improve. And so that’s when the book topic really clicked for me is: how can I get people unstuck and help them escape the gravity of how things have always worked?

Copy LinkOvercoming subpar equilibriums

SAFIAN: One of the things you emphasize in the book is the idea that every system is perfectly designed to get the result it gets, which is logical and yet counterintuitive at the same time. Like we do what we do because whether we’re conscious about it or not, that’s the way everything is set up, our plan and our habits.

HEATH: Exactly right. That quote, from a healthcare expert named Paul Batalden, is one of my favorites in the book: every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. And that captures the situation that I’m trying to help people with.

In fact, the very first story in the book is about this. The receiving area at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. And the situation in this receiving area is that for as long as anybody can remember, it’s taken them three days to get packages from the receiving area to their ultimate destination in the hospital. Same building. It’s not a maze or anything.

It’s just that there’s a sufficient amount of backlogs and delays that people have come to accept this. And the consequences are pretty severe because what happens is sometimes medications just expire in the box. They’re supposed to have been refrigerated, but they weren’t refrigerated in time.

Sometimes the staffers are trying to work around them and over order to outsmart them because they’re worried they won’t get them in time. And so this new guy comes in, a man named Paul Seward, determined to turn this around. What I love about that moment is you’re saying to yourself for years, for as long as anyone can remember, we’ve come to work, we’ve put in a hard day’s work. These people were not dumb. They were not lazy. They were just stuck in a system that had taken root, that had become entrenched so much so that nobody could even imagine how it could change.

Copy LinkIdentifying leverage points for change

SAFIAN: That feeling is familiar for a lot of us, in a work sense, in a personal sense, and you look at this challenge of changing out of that through the lens of leverage points. So what is a leverage point?

HEATH: A leverage point is very simply a place where a little bit of effort yields a disproportionate return. So in that Northwestern Memorial receiving area example, one of the things they figured out very quickly was that “Hey, we’re using a lot of batch processes.” A batch process is like laundry, where you wait to have a load full before you start it, or a dishwasher where nobody washes one spoon at a time. They had this idea that that was going to make things more efficient — the packages come in, and maybe you wait for a pile of packages to build up and then do it all at once.

SAFIAN: Sounds like it makes sense, yeah.

HEATH: And in reality, what had happened was none of this stuff needed to be batched. A dishwasher is batched because it has a certain capacity, but there weren’t those traits in the system.

Fast forward six weeks later, they cut the delays in half. Six more weeks later — so 12 weeks in total — 90% of the places in this hospital were getting daily deliveries. To me, that’s a perfect example of what a leverage point looks like. It’s a place you can push, and you get a lot of results, a lot of bang for the buck.

Copy LinkDan Heath breaks down “the progress principle”

SAFIAN: You talk in the book about moving the boulder that you’re trying to move, and it’s very persuasive about the power of momentum. You talk about the progress principle, that any movement helps generate the next movement.

HEATH: That’s right. The progress principle is something I cite in the book and come back to a lot. It’s from Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. They wrote a book with that title, The Progress Principle. The idea is that what sustains change — because often you can get a flurry of initial change like the New Year’s resolution effect, right? You really mean it for like two weeks, and then it slides — but what sustains change is the feeling of progress. In fact, what Kramer and Amabile found, they studied employee diaries, thousands and thousands of diary entries where people were writing about their experiences at work, and they found that the single biggest motivator of people was not money. It was not recognition. It was not promotions. It was the feeling of progress on meaningful work. That’s the kind of flywheel we’re aiming for. Can we get the boulder rolling just enough to show people that the boulder can be moved, that we are capable of moving it? Then it becomes kind of self-fulfilling.

SAFIAN: It sounds like that’s one of the things that gets in the way with New Year’s resolutions. Like, I’m going to do this every day and feel great. In the beginning, you feel lousy.

HEATH: It’s just in the beginning. All you really feel is the work. It’s like you don’t see the result. There’s a story in the book about a woman from Australia. I was actually running a survey to follow people as they set and tried to implement New Year’s resolutions. This woman was struggling with a lot of health challenges. She was recovering from breast cancer. She had long haul COVID, just in a terrible state physically. Initially, she articulated her resolution as to get healthier. It’s kind of classic resolution stuff, exercise more, get healthier.

Then the survey basically asked, what’s the goal of that goal? Like, why is it that you want to exercise more? And she responded, “Well, I want to be a better mom, a more active mom.”

She had two young boys. She was thinking the chain of logic is: “I got to exercise first to get healthy enough to do these things that I aspire to do.”

But then she was prompted to think, okay, if that’s the goal of your goal, are there any other ways that you could do that without going through that intermediate goal, basically? And immediately she just starts popping out all these ideas. Well, music has disappeared from our life, and wouldn’t it be great to start playing music again? She comes up with this idea to get the Harry Potter Lego set one module at a time, and we’ll put these together. She starts playing board games in the evening because she said the great thing about board games is even if I have to lay on the couch, I can still participate and have them spin the spinner for me.

I thought that was such a beautiful example of how a lot of times we lock down too early on a goal. Especially in the corporate world on a measure of a goal, we start loading incentives and everything behind this goal. We never ask ourselves, “Hey, what’s the goal of the goal? And might there be a better way to get to that ultimate mission than the one we’re choosing?”

Copy LinkReevaluating goals and motivations

SAFIAN: It sounds like certainly in this example, but for businesses overall, we pick the wrong goals. We look in the wrong places. It’s not actually the leverage point that we want to get to.

HEATH: Amen. One of my favorite stories in the book actually illustrates that. It’s about this guy, Ryan Davidson, who goes to buy a truck. It’s a long story. I won’t tell the whole story, but basically, he buys the truck, and then they start just assaulting him for positive survey responses.

I mean, probably a dozen different people, two dozen different times over a couple of weeks, just hectoring him — fill out the survey, fill out the survey, positive responses are appreciated. What could we have done better? How’s the truck? And Ryan Davidson, the guy who bought the truck, is in customer experience himself.

So he fills out the survey, gives them what he told me was like an A-minus rating — generally happy but annoyed by some things — never hears from them again. After all the pestering, it goes quiet, except for his salesperson, who starts texting him complaining about the fact that the salesperson didn’t get all 10 out of 10s and that his bonus was contingent on that.

That’s the perfect example, right? Because if you rewind the tape, at some point, some smart people thought, hey, we genuinely want to make this better for customers.

Well, let’s measure people’s satisfaction on a survey. But then what happens is, over time, you kind of forget about the aspiration, and you just start trying to squeeze out those tens on the survey. You start telling customers explicitly what you want them to answer. They literally had a laminated survey in this dealership that they would show customers — here’s what you’re going to get, and here is the right answer. “The right answer is 10. Yes, I was satisfied.” Of course, that’s just a total charade.

SAFIAN: And the whole system is entrenched in a way that no one’s stopping and saying, why are we doing this?

HEATH: Reminds me of Goodhart’s Law. You’ve probably heard this: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. As soon as you start layering on incentives, carrots, and sticks to hit these specific numbers, what used to be a diagnostic — like the origin of the survey is to be a diagnostic — are we getting better at delivering a customer experience? But as soon as that becomes the end and not a means to the end, everything gets real squirrely.

SAFIAN: Yeah. And you’re not moving that boulder,

HEATH: Right, right.

SAFIAN: Not happening.

SAFIAN: Dan offers such clarity about what makes change possible, but he also wraps it in compelling, accessible real-world stories that bring the insights to life. That storytelling approach is a valuable lesson of its own and worth emulating for any leader. Dan’s got plenty more stories too, about learning from bright spots, recycling waste, and what it takes to be a successful professional Santa. We’ll hear about all that after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, we heard bestselling business author Dan Heath talk about how you identify leverage points to reset your patterns and change what’s not working. Now he offers insights on how to generate momentum behind change, why trying to get “buy-in” can be a mistake, and how the genius trap can set us on the wrong career path. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkHarnessing the bright spots

Another method you talk about, a way to find a leverage point, is to study the bright spots. This is something you and your brother Chip have written about before about bright spots, and it’s always stayed with me as a powerful lesson because I feel like businesses tend to say, “Oh, what’s that problem? Solve that problem.” And what you’re saying is maybe look at it the other way.

HEATH: I swear, I wish I had put a chapter on this topic in every book I’ve ever written. I think it may be the most useful and the most important idea that Chip and I ever formulated because of its very simplicity.

So the idea, this is not going to blow your mind — here it is: Look at the stuff you’re doing that’s working really well and study it, in hopes that once you understand it better, you can replicate it. That’s the whole idea. Study the bright spots. Now, let me tell you why humanity does not do that very simple and powerful idea most of the time. It’s because our attention is drawn and absorbed every time by what’s not working — by the problems, by the emergencies. We’re sucked in, and it’s not that we are not aware that we’re succeeding. It’s not that we’re uninterested in the fact that some people are happy.

It’s just that we never bother to analyze that with the same tenacity and intensity that we instinctively analyze what’s not working. The contention in the book is remember we’re hunting for leverage points. We’ve got this giant boulder in our way. We’re hoping to move it. We have to find a place where a little bit goes a long way. A little bit that goes a long way can be directly harvested by us looking at, “Hey, when are we succeeding today? Can we take it apart? Can we reverse engineer it in hopes that we can do more of that?”

SAFIAN: I often ask CEOs, particularly at big organizations, I’ll say you get so much data coming to you every day about your business. There’s always good news, and there’s always bad news. How do you know what to pay attention to and where sort of the focus is? And so often, it’s not about the volume of the data, it’s about their choice about what their philosophy is on how they run the organization.

HEATH: It is a choice to spend your time wallowing in the problems. I’m not anti-problem solving. Of course, if there’s an emergency, you have to deal with it. But the point is, we divide our attention maybe 95 to 5%. There are lessons buried in the bright spots that offer us hope.

Imagine you’ve got a sales team. You’ve got 10 reps, and two reps are just killing it, and two or three are on the verge of being fired. Your attention is naturally drawn to the problem area, of course, but if you really understand why your two or three best reps are delivering the results that they are, it gives you hope of elevating the entire team.

It never works the other way. You’re never going to learn things from the worst two reps that you can export to make the whole team better forever.

In a way, it’s kind of sad that our attention is focused on the problem because there are more seeds of ongoing improvement in the bright spots.

Copy LinkRestacking resources for momentum

SAFIAN: The second half of the book focuses not as much on identifying a leverage point but on how to make it move. There’s something you call restacking resources. It’s basically the idea that even if you have identified a leverage point, you’re not going to suddenly have a new flood of money, time, or people to make it move. There are trade-offs involved.

HEATH: The heart of the book is this two-part framework that just says, to change a stuck system, you have to find leverage points. That’s like a direction or a priority — Where do you push? And then the second part is: where are you going to get the oomph to push in that new direction? The oomph is resources. You immediately hit a wall there because people say, “Well, I don’t have any extra resources.” That becomes the motivation for the second half of the book — if you want to push in a new direction, you’re going to need fuel. Where do you get the fuel? You don’t have any extra fuel, so you have to take it from somewhere in what you’re already doing.

That’s super painful because probably none of your colleagues think they’re doing something that’s totally pointless and can be shut down and recycled as the fuel for your mission. What I do is I go through a number of different strategies for finding that fuel to push in a new direction. An example of that would be waste. The notion of waste is often employed with an eye toward efficiency — it’s like you want to really crank the methodology on reducing waste in a factory to get your efficiency rates up. In the book, though, I’m taking a slightly different tack on it, which is that if you can identify waste — which was defined by the great Toyota production system godfather Taiichi Ohno as any activity that does not add value in the eyes of the customer, a kind of expansive notion of waste — if you find areas of waste, you can immediately harvest that and use it to provide some of that fuel to push on your leverage points.

SAFIAN: In terms of organizational change, you say in the book that getting buy-in is the wrong way to think about change, which is the opposite of what a lot of people say. Can you explain what you mean by that?

HEATH: What happens is the leaders go in the smoky room and hatch an idea for change, and then they come out of the smoky room and then they have to get quote-unquote buy-in, which means, I’m going to try to get my people to want what I want rather than what they want. That’s the basic premise of buy-in. And what I’m suggesting in the book is there’s a much simpler way to start change. Imagine a Venn diagram where one circle is what’s required to succeed at change — it’s a bundle of activities, actions, and goals — and the intersecting circle is what’s desired today. Your people have ideas for how to improve things. They have ideas that if they were czar for a day, there are 12 different things that they would push. So the question is, is there any intersection between what is required and what is desired? I bet there almost always will be. That’s where you start. That is what I call in the book tapping motivation, which is honoring what people want today, what they’re chomping at the bit to do, and you’re unleashing them.

SAFIAN: It’s like they’re following through on their own ideas as opposed to you having to sell them on yours.

HEATH: Amen. I don’t think that Venn diagram is ever 100% overlap. So the obvious question is, well, okay, maybe you start in the overlap, but there’s a whole lot left to do — what then? I think the ‘what then’ is mostly accounted for by the progress idea we’ve talked about a couple of times. Progress is the spark that makes believers of skeptics.

If you can kind of channel people’s natural energy, what do they want to do that gets you in the right strategic direction, get yourself in motion, start to budge the boulder? That becomes the visible evidence that this is worth doing. This isn’t as painful or onerous as maybe some people might have concluded. You get more and more people jumping on the bandwagon.

Copy LinkAvoiding the genius trap in career paths

SAFIAN: So, I wanted to ask you about your podcast.

It’s about people who love their work in a range of jobs.

I had lunch recently with a colleague who acknowledged to me that “the work I do — I found something that I’m good at, and that I make enough money on, but I’ve never really loved it.” I think there are a lot of people who have that experience, who are successful or successful enough, but their work is not fulfilling for them in that way.

Your podcast is inspiring, but I can imagine for some of those people, it can also be frustrating — why can’t I feel this way?

HEATH: Yeah, no, I completely grant that premise. One of the things that the podcast has sparked for me is it is so inspiring to hear these people who love what they do talk about it that it just makes you regret how many people aren’t in that spot.

One of my friends, Becky Margiotta, talks about this thing called the genius trap, which is, yeah, in our lives, what happens is when we’re good at something, people say, “Oh, Bob, you’re good at that thing.”

And here’s some more of that. You like to be told you’re good. Your employer, your coach, or whatever likes that you’re good because they can shovel more of the stuff that you’re good at towards you and get some more work done for the team or the organization. It’s sort of like you’re on this self-reinforcing path, and you’re chugging along. You get better with practice. Then 20 years later, you kind of wake up and say, “Well, I was always good at that, but I never loved it. I never got a sense of purpose or satisfaction from it.” That’s thus the name, the genius trap. Often we can be kind of confined, inadvertently or unconsciously, to the things we excelled at without regard for whether that was really the direction we wanted to go.

SAFIAN: Listening to you, I am thinking of my own children, my sons, and how to help them find or allow them to have the freedom to look for work that they really find satisfying.

HEATH: One of the things that has dawned on me over the course of the show is I think a lot of our advice to young people can be so one-dimensional. It’s sort of like the first layer is I have a niece who, in high school, just adored animals. She was volunteering at this horse camp.

Every time an adult would learn about her interest, the first response would be, “Oh, you should be a veterinarian.” We do this kind of dumb pattern matching. We don’t have to put a cash register on everything everybody loves. You know what I mean? She could be an accountant and be thrilled and still love animals. We don’t have to. It’s not a one-issue vote. I think some of the stuff that’s giving people value is almost structural stuff.

I’m a big introvert. I think if I had kind of realized and internalized that earlier, it would have eliminated about 60% of the world’s possible career paths. I talked to a guy who’s a professional Santa Claus, and his job is to make kids fall in love in seconds. That job is not one I’m going to excel at, but I think it would be fallacious to think, oh, well, this guy’s inevitable career path was to be a professional Santa Claus. No, it’s like, it’s what’s underneath that. Really get to those kind of foundational type layers.

SAFIAN: Well, Dan, this has been great. Thanks so much for doing it.

HEATH: Man, thank you for having me on, Bob. Great to see you.

SAFIAN: Talking with Dan, I always find myself nodding in agreement — everything he shares seems so logical and simple. Yet I also come away with my brain buzzing with new ideas and new approaches.

As we head into 2025, I’ve been reflecting on how I can streamline the work I’m a part of, to reexamine the goals and make sure they’re the ones that matter most.

As you look at your goals and resolutions for 2025, I hope you can find both meaning and impact in the year ahead.

In our next episodes, we’ll be digging into the next frontiers of AI, a crisis in the luxury fashion world, and more.

I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.