279. Rethinks: How to Leverage What People Already Want

How to turn latent motivation into fuel for change. If you want to be a changemaker, you’ll have to convince others to join your cause. But according to Dan Heath https://www.fastersmarter.io/guests/dan-heath/, persuading your audience isn’t about creating new motivation — it’s about leveraging the motivation that’s already there. “The most important fuel for any change effort is motivation,” says Heath, the number-one New York Times bestselling author of Reset: How to Change What's Not Working https://fastersmarter.io/reset. Instead of struggling to persuade people to want what you want, Heath suggests finding where your goals overlap with the things they already desire. "Before you even get to persuasion, if you can just tap and unleash the energy that's already there, you've already catapulted yourself toward success,” he says. In this Rethinks episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart https://www.fastersmarter.io/, Heath and host Matt Abrahams explore how to create more compelling communication using “leverage points,” or as Heath says, “where a little bit of effort yields a disproportionate return.” Whether getting buy-in from one teammate or achieving change across an entire organization, Heath shares practical tips for turning latent motivation into an engine for change. Episode Reference Links: Dan Heath https://www.fastersmarter.io/guests/dan-heath/Dan’s Books: Reset: How to Change What's Not Working https://fastersmarter.io/resetDan's Podcast: What It’s Like To Be https://www.whatitsliketobe.com/ Ep.190 Motivation Matters: How to Leverage What People Already Want https://www.fastersmarter.io/190-motivation-matters-how-to-leverage-what-people-already-want/Ep.49 Make Numbers Count: How to Communicate Data Effectively https://www.fastersmarter.io/49-make-numbers-count-how-to-communicate-data-effectively/ Connect: Premium Signup >>>> Think Fast Talk Smart Premium https://www.fastersmarter.io/premium/Email Questions & Feedback >>> [email protected] Transcripts >>>Think Fast Talk Smart Website https://www.fastersmarter.io/leverage-latent-motivation/Newsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>>FasterSmarter.io http://fastersmarter.io/Think Fast Talk Smart >>>LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/think-fast-talk-smart/,Instagram https://www.instagram.com/thinkfasttalksmart/, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6caGRBUYZCmgDGM2RK6mxKB9jG_ccmm3Matt Abrahams >>>LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/maabrahams/ Chapters: (00:00) - Introduction (01:46) - The Power of Storytelling (04:56) - Crafting Powerful Stories (09:55) - Finding Great Stories (13:14) - Leverage Points For Change (16:26) - Wasted Resources & Motivation (19:39) - Latent Desire in Systems (21:48) - The Role of Systems in Communication (25:37) - Communicating Progress (28:59) - Lessons from Hosting a Podcast (31:31) - The Final Three Questions (38:19) - Conclusion ******** Thank you to our sponsors. These partnerships support the ongoing production of the podcast, allowing us to bring it to you at no cost. Learn more about how Notion https://www.notion.com/?utm_source=podcasts&utm_medium=thinkfast can support your business at notion.com/thinkfast. https://www.notion.com/?utm_source=podcasts&utm_medium=thinkfast Join our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community and become the communicator you want to be. https://learning.fastersmarter.io/?redirect_from=podpage

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Matt Abrahams?

  In the moment, conflict is difficult for everyone. In our October newsletter, out now, you will learn ways to help yourself handle these challenges better. Not only do you get specific advice, we're also providing an infographic to help you remember. Find our newsletter on the Think Fast, Talk Smart LinkedIn page or at fastersmarter.io under Resources. From making ideas stick, to magic moments, to un-sticking processes, Dan Heath has helped me and people around the world to be more effective in their communication and lives. My name is Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

• 0:43Matt Abrahams?

  Welcome to this Rethinks episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. I'm excited to open up our vast vault of past episodes to highlight the insights and input of Dan Heath. Listen in as Dan helps us to be more persuasive and effective. When it comes to effectiveness and our communication, it can benefit us to take a step back and appreciate the systems that influence what we do, and to look for the leverage points to maximize the resources we bring to bear. My name is Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

• 1:24Matt Abrahams?

  Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. I am really looking forward to speaking with Dan Heath. Dan is a number one New York Times bestselling co-author and author of six books, including Power of Moments, Decisive, Switch, and Made to Stick. Several of his books, he co-wrote with his brother Chip, who we interviewed in episode 49. Dan also hosts the award-winning podcast, What It's Like to Be. Dan's latest book is Reset: How to Change What's Not Working. Welcome, Dan. I am a huge fan of your work. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you, Matt. It's an honor to be on the show. I'm a follower. Thank you. Shall we get started? Let's do it. I've enjoyed all of your books.

• 2:10Matt Abrahams?

  Made to Stick, which focuses on how to get ideas to stick in a world of so much information, and Switch, which is all about effective persuasion, continue to have a profound influence on my life and in my communication. I asked your brother Chip when he was on the same question I'd like to start with for you. Can you share with us one powerful takeaway from each of those books that still impact your life?

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Yes, and I guess we can compare answers. I'm not sure what he said, so we'll have to find out. Memory Lane, Made to Stick, here's one takeaway, and I doubt this will come as a surprise to any of your listeners, but the power of storytelling. And I think that's probably a familiar enough lesson that I need not harp on it. But what may be interesting is, in the book, we make the case that the reason stories are so powerful is they have these kind of extraordinary twin powers of simulation and inspiration. So in other words, you go to the movie to see a visual story, and when the protagonist is in trouble, your pulse quickens, right? Which is just a fundamentally weird thing. That's the power of simulation.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  You are, in a sense, experiencing what the protagonist of a story is experiencing. Same thing is true for more organizational forms, though. You tell a story of some customer who got an extraordinary service experience. As another employee hearing that story, you're able to simulate, what if it had been me doing that? And that brings us also to the second power of inspiration. You don't just live temporarily in that story, you naturally start to think, hey, if they can do that, what can I do? It's a spark for action. And I think that's one of the reasons why stories are such profound vehicles for communication.

• 3:51Matt Abrahams?

  Absolutely. Storytelling is really powerful. I want to hear about what you take away from Switch.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  I would say the number one thing that I still routinely talk about, and in fact, it's been prominent for me that I brought it back as a chapter in my new book, and that's the notion of studying bright spots. So this is a very simple idea, which is that psychology says that we tend to dwell on what's not working, the problems, the emergencies, the negative aspects of the data we're looking at. So we get employee engagement surveys back, and what do we look at first? What's wrong? Who's disengaged? What are the, oh, the scores are dropping? Oh, no, there's a crisis. Like, our, our attention immediately goes to the problems. But in that same engagement data, there was a tail of employees on the positive end.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  And no one ever says, hey, wait a second. What's going on there? Why are those employees so happy? Why are they so engaged? If we can get to the bottom of what makes them so satisfied, so purposeful, maybe we'll learn things that would help shift the curve for everyone. It's like we treat success with a kind of relief. We're like, okay, that's working. Good, because that frees me up to go spend more time where the problems are. And we make the case in switch. That's backwards, that there is so much that we can learn that is practical and hopeful simply by obsessing about what is working as much as we naturally obsess about what's not working.

• 5:18Matt Abrahams?

  It's interesting, right? I think there's a human tendency just to focus on the negative. And looking at that positive can be very insightful. You can look for patterns and trends that you can adopt and adapt to. I want to come back to storytelling, because one of the things that really impresses me in your work is not only do you talk about story and analyze story, but you're actually a really good storyteller. Can you give us a little insight into your process for, one, thinking about the stories that you tell in your books and when you speak on your podcast? But also the process about how to craft and deliver those stories? Because that's equally as powerful.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  It is the heart of what I do and what takes the most time out of everything I work on as a writer. So maybe what I should do, let me just tell a story from the book and then talk a little bit about, just gesticulate at it and tell, tell what my intentions were in using it. So the very first story in Reset is about the receiving area at the Northwestern Memorial Hospital. So this is the part of the hospital that takes in packages, gets them delivered to their ultimate destination. And at the point when the story starts, it takes them an average of three days to get packages delivered within the hospital. UPS might get some medicine across the country in a day or two. And then to get the package from the basement to like the third floor takes another three days. So it's just crazy.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  But it's been crazy as long as anyone can remember. It is something that everyone's adapted to. They're not dumb people. They're not lazy people. They have just always lived in a system where it takes three days to get these packages out. So this is expensive. They're having medications expire in the box. They're having people over order because they want to dodge this chaos of the receiving area. They have people trying to make side deals with FedEx drivers to come directly to the third floor and bypass the receiving area. So into this mess comes a new person named Paul Suet. And if we just freeze there for a second. So what is this story doing? Number one, just observe that there is nothing naturally compelling about this topic area. Right? There is not, there's no sex. There is no violence.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  There are no celebrities. It is the most boring imaginable domain. And yet there are universal themes here that kind of get us on the hook. Like, these were the pariahs of the hospital. All of a sudden implicitly, we're rooting for them. Right? And then this new guy comes in and you wonder, what is he going to do? There's a detective story element. What is he going to do to untangle this mess?

• 7:45Matt Abrahams?

  Yeah, you build that curiosity. But also, when you were describing the problem, you didn't just itemize the different things. You actually really reinforced it. I love the point where you said, hey, UPS can do it in a day or two. That really adds a magnifier to what's coming. So I appreciated that part.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  So Paul Suet comes in. He's our protagonist. We talked about simulation and inspiration. Right? So now we're walking in Paul Suet's shoes. First thing he does is he says, what problems can I solve for you? What's getting in your way? And so the team's giving him a laundry list of complaints and obstacles, some of them quite mundane, like, well, the wheels on the carts that we push around are sometimes real stuck and jangly. So Suet says instantly, we'll get you new carts, new wheels, whatever you need. He's trying to just show them that he's on their team. He's not the know it all coming in to quote unquote fix things. And he invites them into the detective work. So every day for an hour a day, 12 days in a row, they stop what they're doing and they just walk the line from where the packages come in through all the stations to the eventual destination.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  They're noticing things. What's delaying operations? What's blocking us? The number one thing that pops out of this process is they have unwittingly used batch processes where they are not needed. We all use batch process. Nobody runs a single sock in the washer and dryer and nobody runs a single spoon in the dishwasher. So we get the value of batch processes, but they were doing this to a fault. So the idea was let's wait until a bunch of packages build up on the receiving dock and then we'll do the scanning into inventory all at once. Like that'll be quote unquote efficient. But what Sue had helped them realize is that there was no natural, organic reason to have these delays, that as he said, the system should flow like a river

• 9:32Speaker 01

  and we should be able to take a package and have it flow along and we should be removing friction, removing obstacles from its way. And so it's like this aha experience. They set about completely changing the way they work. Within 12 weeks, they're delivering 90% of the packages in one day. Something nobody thought imaginable, much less practical. People start visiting the receiving area to learn what they've done. And so again, if you zoom out of the story for a second, there is zero of natural intrinsic value in any of these details. I mean, I said the phrase batch processes and you didn't immediately go to sleep, right? Which is, that's the power of story, right? Is once we see a protagonist and a challenge and some stakes that matter, like we're in it.

• 10:17Matt Abrahams?

  But with that batch processing, you did something I think which is very masterful is you didn't define it. You didn't say, here's what a batch process is because many people know what it is, but they don't know that term. But you just said, we don't wash one sock. We don't put one spoon in the dishwasher. That was a great way of explaining something without actually breaking it down and saying, now I'm explaining it. You do a great job of hooking us in and diagnosing and describing for us what you do. I'm curious, how do you find these stories? How did you? Did you find Paul Hewitt? Did you know him? Did somebody point you to him? Did you, were you in that hospital? How did you find that story?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  This is the most frustrating and rewarding aspect of the work is the majority of the way I spend my time as a writer is finding stories like that. I spend a lot of time figuring out what am I trying to say to the reader? How am I going to arm them with principles to make their life or their work better? That's part one. And then part two is, how can I hang those principles on stories that are more compelling than me just yammering on about systems and operations and so forth? And it is like panning for gold. I mean, you've probably experienced this too. There is no reliable process for finding great stories. It is just, you gotta go shake the trees every day and then the next day you wake up and you do it again. This particular story was written up in a business school case and there was a very

• 11:36Speaker 01

  heavy operation spin on it, but there was so much that was interesting in the details that my team and I, we decided to re-report the whole thing. So I, well, one of my colleagues actually flew to Evanston and met with Paul Seward and saw the operations and took pictures. And in that case, it was like taking a different spin on a story someone else had already spotted. And in a lot of other cases in the book, it was just a byproduct of you have 10 conversations to get down to that one story that really connects.

• 12:03Matt Abrahams?

  I like though, that you start with an idea, a goal of what you're trying to achieve. And the goal is to really help people and to clearly explain it and then find stories and other tools that can help get that across. And I think a lot of people skip that step and they just try to jump to the information without having a clear goal upfront.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, for me, stories are just like a vessel to get messages across in a reader-friendly way. So it's like what that Northwestern story did for me at the start of the book was it just, it brought to bear a bunch of themes that even people that are not in hospital receiving areas can recognize. What is it like to be part of a system that's stuck? And what is it like to endure subpar performance, but feel like you're powerless to affect it and you know, and have other people in the hospital judge you? You know, the pariahs of the hospital was a quote that came out. And what is it like to be able to undo that by finding leverage points in complicated systems and seeing how things can change actually surprisingly quickly if you find the right places to push?

• 13:04Matt Abrahams?

  So it really sets expectations for what's to come, not just in terms of what you'll be talking about in the book, but how the reader or listener will be engaged. And how we set our audience's expectations upfront can really make a big difference. One of the things that frustrates me so much is speakers or people who run meetings who start by saying, "I want this to be very engaging and get you all involved." And then they talk at you for 45 minutes. What you do in your books and in this example is you get us engaged from the get-go, and that brings us along with you. I want to explore some concepts in your new book. You talk about how we can break free from the inertia that keeps us doing the same things we've always done. In essence, you suggest we find leverage points

• 13:48Matt Abrahams?

  that help us break these patterns or habits, or just the way it's always been approach. Can you explain what leverage points are and provide some examples? And talk about how we can actually use them to affect the change we want?

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Leverage points are an absolute core theme of the book, and they are defined as places where a little bit of effort yields a disproportionate return. Because in complex systems, we can't fix everything at once. We can't fix most things. We have to place our bets. And so about half the book is dedicated to how do you find these elusive magical leverage points where a little bit goes a long way? I want to tell, most of the book is organizational. So let me just say that explicitly. I don't want to give people the wrong impression. But I want to tell a personal story because I think it captures the leverage point idea. It's a story about a couples therapist named Laura Heck. And so if you just put yourself in her shoes for a second,

• 14:45Speaker 01

  every day, her calendar is full of married couples or couples on the brink of divorce that are at the worst ebb of their relationship. Everything is wrong. They may hate each other. They may resent each other. There are a million things wrong. The history goes back for years. And you see them for one hour a week out of 168. Talk about not being able to change much of the equation, right? You have to find a leverage point. How else could you possibly affect something as fraught as a marriage on the cusp of divorce in one hour? So Laura Heck does this thing. She has this activity she calls sticky note appreciations. And the idea is you put a sticky note pad by your toothbrush holder in the bathroom.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  And as you brush your teeth, because you know you're going to be doing that twice a day and you've got nothing else to do while you're brushing, you just pick up a pen and you write down something that your partner did that you appreciated that day. It might be something quite small, like, "Thanks for making coffee this morning," or, "Thanks for talking to John about college. He really appreciates your perspective," whatever it is. And then you put it on the mirror for your partner to find. And she says, "The point of this activity is really not to give those little bursts of happiness that we all get when someone says something nice about us. That's great, but it's not the point. The point," as she said, "was to build a lens where you start to scan your partner's

• 16:11Speaker 01

  behavior for the positive things instead of what has become an instinctive negative approach, right? The reason you're in therapy is because now when you look at your partner, you see the conflict and you see the disappointments and you see the betrayals. And so this little silly sticky note activity is a way of saying, "Wait a second, there's positive there too, if we're alert for it, if we're conscious about it." And so with that one hour a week, back to the idea of leverage points, she is slowly transforming the way they see each other in a way that could open the door to bring the relationship back. And I just, I admire that approach so much.

• 16:48Matt Abrahams?

  So it's finding these key moments or opportunities that can really bring big change. So it's not that you're writing something on a sticky note while you're frothing at the mouth brushing your teeth. It's the fact that you're changing your perspective in that moment that might itself become a habit. And we can look for those points in both our personal and our professional lives. So this notion of leverage points is important. We'll be right back to finish our conversation. But first, we're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. Their support covers the cost of production so we can bring you this show for free.

• 17:22Matt Abrahams?

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• 18:04Matt Abrahams?

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• 18:48Matt Abrahams?

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• 19:15Matt Abrahams?

  Something else you talk about is the idea of wasted resources that happen in organizations. Can you share with us what you mean by wasted resources? And what are some ways that we can make those resources not wasted to really leverage how they can help us to use the other concept?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  So this is the second half of reset is the first half is devoted to what are the leverage points, which is really about aim, like where do you aim if you're trying to change things? And then the second half is about if you want to push in a new direction, you have to have fuel to do it, and that means resources. And then everybody freaks out because, well, we don't have extra resources. And so the departure point of the second half is what if you need resources to push in your new direction for change, but you can't just bring resources off the sidelines, right? You don't have just satchels of cash standing by for new projects. And so one of the places where you can quote unquote harvest resources is waste. Waste is usually talked about in the context of efficiency.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Like you want your factory to hum along at 99.9% utilization or whatever. In this context, I'm thinking of waste as if we can stop doing the things that don't add value for the customer, which is a classic definition of waste from Taichi Ono, then we can reuse that effort, that material in a new way. Now, to get away from waste for a second, I think the most important fuel for any change effort is motivation. Like the entire change war will be fought on the battlefield of motivation. And so in the book, I present this framework, and I think it may be the simplest change framework ever created, but I stand by it.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  And it's the idea that if you imagine a Venn diagram in your mind, and so one circle is what's required for us to succeed at change? The bundle of activities and goals that we're going to need to get to some new place, what's required? And then there's an intersecting circle of what's desired today. So in other words, all of the people that you work with, your colleagues, your direct reports, they have ideas about how to make things better. If they were Or made boss for the day, they'd all say, well, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this. In other words, there is latent motivation in the system that needs to be tapped. Wherever there is an intersection of what's required and what's desired, that's where you start the change effort.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  And I say it's the simplest thing ever recorded because a lot of times in change efforts, we fall into this trap of immediately going to persuasion. Like, I've got to get people to want what I want, or else change is gonna fail. But hang on a second, it's not that that's a bad idea. Of course persuasion is a good idea, but before you even get to persuasion, if you can just tap and unleash the energy that's already there, you've already catapulted yourself toward success.

• 22:04Matt Abrahams?

  That model, although quite simple, I have seen play out in my own life, in my relationship with my kids. Because a lot of what I find myself doing is trying to persuade them. When I've gotten lucky and really tapped into that latent desire and see their ideas and passion, that's when things have really gotten going.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  It just reminded me of something that literally happened this weekend, and I'd hadn't coded it that way, but I see that it is now. I see that it's the Venn diagram in my own mind. I was trying to get my young daughter to go with me on a walk. And I think to a child, like, going on a walk with dad is just like way down Maslow's hierarchy. And then I realized she likes to get this weird iced tea. It's called a iced fireball from this coffee shop. That's a perfect distance for us to walk. And so I was like, hey, you wanna go and get an iced fireball? And immediately she was like, oh, yeah, I'm in. And so it's okay, that's what was desire. That was the latent desire in the system. And there was overlap, and shame on me for not getting there immediately.

• 23:04Matt Abrahams?

  I love this idea of trying to find waste. In other words, where there's this potential. It's like potential energy, and you just have to tap into it.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  That's a great phrase, but it is potential energy. And we spend so much time browbeating people with the vision of change and get on board. I'm trying to get you to buy in. And we just never ask the basic question, what would you want today if it was your plan? And look, the obvious, I think, objection to the Venn diagram thing is, it's never gonna be a perfect overlap, right? It's never gonna be just a perfect coincidence where everything that you'll have to do for change corresponds perfectly to everything that people want today. But, and this is another key theme in the book, the engine of change is progress. And progress changes minds.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  People start out skeptical of change because they don't think it's going to work. They don't think it's going to make their lives better. They think it's just going to be a nuisance. And then when they start to see that boulder that's obstructed your path for so long, when they start to see it inch in a new direction, it makes them feel differently. And so then new motivation comes off the sidelines that was sparked by the progress that they could see as a result of that initial push.

• 24:13Matt Abrahams?

  I love how you have taken what is a very dry topic of systems and systems change and really found two key ideas, this notion of motivation and progress, very psychological concepts that we can apply to all the systems we find. We both write, we both do podcasting, but we do a whole bunch of other things, too. And there are systems that surround everything we choose to do in terms of the messages we craft, how we do it, when we do it, the choices we make. What advice do you have for exploring and maximizing the impact systems have or changing the systems to help us be more efficient? How do systems play out in what we do?

• 24:53Speaker 01

  So I had this weird moment when one of the stories I was chasing boomeranged back to my own life. I was researching a story about the San Francisco 49ers. And there's a guy named Moon Givade, one of the top executives that was in charge of the fan experience of people coming out to the games. And at one point, he and his boss start asking themselves, hey, we take these surveys of fans and then whatever they're complaining about, we fix it for the next game. We don't have that many games in a season, so it's slow. Like, could we ever imagine getting feedback within the game so we can fix things faster? And so that's a theme in the book, is this idea of accelerating learning, which is a way, in essence, of marshaling more resources to push in our change direction, back to that idea.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  So anyway, Moon Givade has this epiphany when he's in the airport one day and he sees people using those Happy or Not terminals where you punch a green smiley face or a red frowny face. And he's like, oh, my God, that could work for us. And so fast forward in the story, he becomes a pilot customer for Happy or Not. They put out 150 terminals, by bathrooms, by hot dogs. By concessions. And so if they get like a certain density of red frowny faces in a certain period of time, they know, aha, something's wrong. There's a clogged toilet at A8 or the concession stand, they're out of hot dog buns. And so they can rush within the game and fix the problems far faster. Now it takes minutes to fix a problem instead of a week. So it's this huge victory from

• 26:23Speaker 01

  accelerating learning. So I started to think about that story and I was like, how could I do that in my writing? Which seems weird, right? I mean, where am I going to put a happy or not terminal, right? And then later it occurred to me, I can learn from Agile, the discipline used by many software and design firms where you do something and you get some customer feedback and then you tweak it and iterate and get some more feedback. Rapid prototyping, that's it. And so I said, what would it look like if I wrote that way? And so I did this thing I'd never done before. This is my sixth book. This is the only book I've even close to use this process for. The version I turned in to the publisher was version six. So I had five full rounds of reader feedback

• 27:06Speaker 01

  in the meantime. The first was so crude, it wasn't even in writing. It was just me on video like pontificating about different topics and I was just curious what would resonate with people. And it was so different and so fun and it gave me such a richer flow of the readers thinking that I guess people will be the judge, but I really think it bore fruit in the final product. However good or bad reset is today, let me assure you it would have been a lot worse had I not gotten five rounds of reader feedback.

• 27:33Matt Abrahams?

  I really appreciate you sharing how you can explore the systems that you're part of and look to change them. What you just described is something I teach as minimally viable communication. We take the same principles for minimally viable product design, agile development and apply them. But rapid prototyping is critical, I think, to getting any message out in the world. And the meta-message of what you said is, look at the systems that you exist in and then see if there are ways that you can adjust and adapt them to help you. I'd like to take this notion of communication one step further. In these organizations, in these collectives where they leverage The tools that you teach and write about.

• 28:13Matt Abrahams?

  What are your thoughts about how they communicate to the teams themselves or across the organization about what they're doing and help then provide the motivation and demonstrate the progress that we talked about before? So it's one thing to do it, but I can imagine a big leverage point is the way you communicate what you've done to keep the momentum going. Any insights into what makes for effective communication about the progress you're making?

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Yes, and in fact, the message was so clear. This came out of a conversation I had with the former CEO of Home Depot named Frank Blake. It's so clear, you could put it on a bumper sticker. And Blake said, "You get what you celebrate." Full stop. You get what you celebrate. But Frank Blake lived that mantra. He would spend part of every Sunday afternoon, I mean, CEO, one of the world's biggest companies, spend his Sundays writing individual thank you letters to people on his team, not just in some generic, "Add a boy, add a girl" way. He would highlight specific things that they did. "I heard about the way you dealt with that customer in North Georgia, blah, blah, blah." One of the things that stuck with me was he told this incredible story.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  So one of his strategic missions was to improve customer service at Home Depot. He's got over 100,000 employees. How do you change that? And at one point, he had all the store managers together at a conference in Vegas, and he had opportunity to speak to them. And he chose to tell one story about one cashier that was from a store in Georgia. And so he's on stage and he says, "We had this cashier, he's been with us for years. And one day, she had an older gentleman come up with a cart full of lumber. And she asked him if he'd found everything he needed okay." And he said, "Yes, I did." And then she was just gonna make small talk to be nice. And she said, well, if you don't mind me asking, what's your project?

• 30:06Speaker 01

  What are you working on? And the old man stopped and paused. And he said, since you asked, my grandson passed away recently, and I've decided that I wanted to build his casket. And the cashier immediately said, sir, we're so sorry for your loss. And don't even think about pulling out your wallet. This one's on us. And so Frank Blake said, when he told that story, you could have heard a pin drop in the room. And what he was after with that story is, number one, it's obviously recognition for the particular cashier. But the significance more broadly than that was, he was reshaping their mental model of what good customer service is like. You hear a lot of, you've got to do the five S's,

• 30:51Speaker 01

  smile and blah, blah, blah, and all this kind of generic stuff that ends up in employee rulebooks. And he's saying, no, this woman not only just gave stuff away for free, which is mind blowing enough. She didn't even check with anybody. She didn't check with the supervisor to ask whether it was okay to break protocol. It was just instantly, she knew what the human thing to do would be. And that's what Frank Blake is signaling to people is, if we want to be better at customer service, we need more of that ethic. And so that's what he means by you get what you celebrate.

• 31:24Matt Abrahams?

  You've done a nice job of tying back to the power of story signal, not just an emotional experience that you connect with your audience, but it also shares what you aspire to be, right? And what can be without just itemizing and listing. We've talked a lot about your writing. I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about your podcasting, something I find very near and dear to my heart. You host the podcast, What It's Like To Be. You've done lots of interviews with lots of really interesting folk. I'm curious, is there one thing or two that you've taken away that has impacted your life? I certainly have learned a lot from my guests that has fundamentally changed some of the things I do. I'm curious, is there something that's impacted your life from somebody you've interviewed?

• 32:08Speaker 01

  So for listeners, just quickly, the show, the conceit is that in every episode, I interview someone from a different profession, an homicide detective, or a daycare owner, or an NBA referee. And I just ask them a thousand nosey questions about what it's like to do what they do, and what makes them happy, and what makes them mad, and who do they fight with. And so this was a departure for me, because as we've talked about, when I'm writing these books, my books are not poetry, they're not literature, they're intended to help people do specific things to make their lives or their work better. And so I have this very practical minded hat on. If I'm interviewing someone for a book, I'm listening for what can I learn from math that I might be able to

• 32:50Speaker 01

  help 100 other people with. On the podcast, though, I just kind of want to walk in their shoes. I talked to two married truck drivers who do long haul shifts together. I mean, they might be together for six weeks in a row on the road, and their lives are governed by three different clocks that prescribe their behavior, and they have to obsess about where they're going to park, because parking's a huge deal when you have a big rig. And I talked to a cattle rancher, and some of the things she has to worry about are poisonous weeds. The cows will eat the weeds and get sick, so she's fighting this nonstop battle against the weeds. And mountain lions will occasionally come in and try to eat her cattle, and so she has a mountain lion hunter that she can call, like on speed dial, to come

• 33:31Speaker 01

  out and deal with. And I find that there's no, like, direct application. I just think that there is a lot of power in empathy. Like, I think if we can understand our fellow humans better, and what they think about, and what brings them joy, and what gives them a sense of purpose, I think it helps us appreciate them more. And it seems like now is one of those times when we need that appreciation of difference.

• 33:56Matt Abrahams?

  It sounds to me like a lesson you've learned, or something that motivated you to do this, was this idea of empathy and curiosity. There's a really powerful concoction that gets made when you combine those two together. And what your podcast does is really helps us, through your curiosity and through your empathy, to learn a lot. And I appreciate that. Before we end, I like to ask three questions. One I create just for you and the other two are similar across everybody I interview. Are you up for these questions?

• 34:23Speaker 01

  I'm ready. Let's do this.

• 34:24Matt Abrahams?

  All right. One of the books that you wrote that really also had a big impact on me was The Power of Moments. And I'm curious, is there anything you do in your personal life to really spark some moments, maybe for your family, your kids, your friends? Is there something that you took from that work that you do that helps you and those you know and love?

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Absolutely. The Power of Moments is a book about the disproportionate power of specific moments in our memories of experiences. The way that, if you think about a family or a personal vacation from three or four years ago, you don't load up the video of that experience in your mind and play it end to end, right? A lot of it dissolves. And what you're left with are the most significant moments or in the parlance of the book and the peaks. And so the kind of big message of the book is we can be the authors of these peaks. Sometimes they just happen by happenstance, but we can be intentional about it. And so like a couple of things that I've learned from readers, actually. I had this one guy come up to me at a conference and say he'd read the book and he'd try something with his kids.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  He called it a perfect day exercise. So he had young kids like I do. And he said, I want you to draw up your perfect day on paper, like from when you wake up to when you go to bed. And if you don't fill it with fantastical things, like, oh, we're gonna fly to the moon for a picnic or something. If you keep it real, like your mom and I are really gonna try to make this happen. We're gonna bring your perfect day to life. But he made them draw it out. He wanted them to put some thought into it and they had to put together an agenda with times and events. And I was just so captivated by that idea. I immediately stole it from my own kids. And what happened with his kids was exactly what happened with mine, which is... You would think that kids would be grandiose and they'd want to do crazy things. They'd want to spend a lot of money.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  And instead, it was the most like heartwarming set of things. It was like my younger daughter wanted to get up and have eggs and bacon and cinnamon rolls, which is what we have every Sunday. It's not like that was a weird or unusual request. And then she wanted to take a bath in the morning. She wanted to take another bath at night. And then she wanted to watch such and such movie. And she wanted to have a playdate with such and such friend. And it was striking to me that I think sometimes as parents, we may overcomplicate things. If I think about how do I create a moment for my kids, maybe I'm thinking, oh, we need a bounce house, or I need to have a rent a pony come out. And if you just ask them, it turns out that's not what perfect means. Perfect means something quite different.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  And so I've really enjoyed that aspect of moment creation, just trusting the people that you care about to articulate what perfect means.

• 37:06Matt Abrahams?

  That's a really powerful lesson, and thank you. And how sweet to do that. And sometimes the most powerful moment could be one that somebody else suggests and not us. Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why?

• 37:21Speaker 01

  I would say the author David Foster Wallace. I'm a huge fan of his. And I think I might be the only person who's more a fan of his nonfiction than of his fiction. He's best known as a novelist and wrote the great book Infinite Jest, which is about 20 pounds if he carried around. But he also wrote these just amazing essays. Like one of his essay collections is called A Supposedly Fun Thing I'd Never Do Again about a cruise that he took. And he's, he's kind of an antisocial person. So it was just hilarious to hear him riff on what it was like to go on a cruise. And what I admire about his style is he just has this almost limitless curiosity about

• 38:00Speaker 01

  everything, about psychology, about business, about social norms and why they exist. And so he'll just follow these kind of spiraling wormholes of curiosity. I admire the way that, that he can get a point across and has complete control of language. He can throw out words you've never even seen in your life, and then the next sentence is just full of the most up to the moment slang. Like he just has, he has the full repertoire.

• 38:31Matt Abrahams?

  I appreciate that and I love that you respect somebody who has a way with words, but also storytelling. Final question, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Okay, the recipe, all right. Three steps, let's do this. Number one, know what the most important thing you need to leave the audience with is. What's the core message in made to stick terms? Know your core message and I think the reason why people don't do that, even though it sounds commonsensical, is because people, when you start putting the presentation together or the memo, it's like you kind of want to show off all the things you've learned and all these insights you have and you just get greedy with your ideas. But if we're going to be respectful of the audience and the way memories decay, like if you want to have one thing that endures in their head three weeks in the future after the point of communication, like what would that one thing be? Second is highlight the aspects of that one thing that are uncommon sensical.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Common sense does not stick. Common sense by definition is something that's already stuck. And if somebody hears something that sounds like common sense, they're just going to ignore it because it in no way reshapes their view of the world or their opinions or their perspectives. So you've got to figure out what about your message is uncommon sense and if the answer is it nothing, then you got the wrong core message, right? There's something that made you think that core message was important. What is it and how does it clash with the way your audience thinks right now? And then third, this will come as no surprise for anybody who's listened to this interview, is find a story to wrap that in. So do you want a core message that's uncommon sensical, that's wrapped up in a story? That's my recipe. How'd I do?

• 40:16Matt Abrahams?

  You did great, not just at sharing the three, but at summarizing the three at the end, which is what I often do and you've done a reset for me, so I don't have to do that. I appreciate, Dan, not only your time, but your stories and for role modeling exactly what it is that you teach, not just in your new book, Reset, but across all your books. Thank you for your time and thank you for your insights.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Hey, thanks so much, Matt. It's been a pleasure.

• 40:45Matt Abrahams?

  Thank you for joining us for another Rethinks episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more from Dan, tune into episode 49 with his brother Chip Heath. This episode was produced by Catherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok. You can learn more through our Think Fast, Talk Smart learning community. There you'll get offers such as our video lessons, learning

• 41:23Matt Abrahams?

  quests, AMA access, book talks, and my AI coach. Sign up at fastersmarter.io/learning. Before we wrap up, I just want to say thank you for listening. It really means a lot to hear how people all over the world are using these ideas in their own lives. It inspires me and the whole team that brings you this show. If you want more episodes and resources, feel free to follow, subscribe, and explore past conversations. We're grateful for your support of Think Fast, Talk Smart.