Dan Heath’s Reset Strategy | How to Change What’s Not Working

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1:22Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

2:21wife and I are trying to put into our business lives is this idea of professionalism. How do we professionalize what we have? Now, obviously, Daily Stoic is successful. My career is going great. A lot's going well. The bookstore is doing awesome. But one of the things you can kind of do at a new year is look back at the year that just transpired or the years before that and go, what's working? What's not working? And use the new year as a kind of a reset. That's what we're How do we improve? How do we not just stay the same? Mark Shreus talks about these gladiators in the games who sort of beg to be carried on to fight another day, get torn to pieces all the same.

3:04And he's sort of saying that that's insanity. And I agree. So this year, here with our New Year's resolution, we're trying to do a little bit of a reset, which is the new book that my guest Today wrote, Reset, How to Change What's Not Working by the one and only Dan Heath. Now, my relationship with Dan and his writing go way, way back. I think one of the first business books I ever bought was Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. I remember not just a bunch of the ideas in the book, but I love books, products, things that prove themselves. So, So this is a book about how you make things that stick, that are indelible, stand out.

3:49Obviously, if the packaging doesn't do it, what does that say about your expertise? I thought a lot about this with, trust me, I'm lying. Not only did the marketing campaign have to prove that I was good at media manipulation and that I knew how the media system worked and that I could do it on command, but the packaging had to stand out. It had to be ominous and different. It had to scream like, this is telling you something that other books are not going to tell you. And I remember when I got Made to Stick, I probably would have read this in like 2006 or seven. I don't even know if I knew that business books were a thing.

4:30I don't remember how I first heard about this book. Maybe I heard about it from Seth Godin. I would have been in college or just leaving college. Yeah, it was a formative book for me. It still sells to this day. It's one of the more popular books in The Painted Porch. It's a business classic for a reason. But I didn't know, I read it, and I'd been vaguely familiar with Dan and Chip's other work, but they were kind of pre-social media in the sense that I didn't know that much about them. So I was really excited to get a chance to talk to Dan, who has a new book out called reset, how to change what's not working, which is obviously apropos here at the beginning of a new year.

5:12Our resolutions are not always about what we're trying to start, but often what we're trying to stop, bad habits we're trying to quit, things that we just spent a year or 20 years of our life doing that we know we want to stop. Dan and I talk about deciding when to reset or rebuild, what he calls the progress principle, how to solve problems upstream as opposed to downstream and a lot more. We really nerded out. I was telling my wife something we talked about in the conversation actually just the other day. We recorded this quite a bit ago, we're saving it now for its release date, which is the 21st, about how often we're solving problems way, way, way downstream.

5:55And when we try to solve them upstream, sometimes we create unintended consequences. just the things he was able to pull out in this interview were fascinating you can grab a copy of reset this week it just came out if you're looking for another dan heath book as i said made to stick we sell at the painted porch dan hosts an award-winning podcast called what it's like to be and in every episode he interviews someone from a totally different profession a mystery novelist a couples therapist a rancher and many more you can go to dan heath to check out more of his work enjoy this conversation

6:30I don't know about you, but like, it's funny as a writer, you're alone a lot, you're quiet a lot. And then there's just these certain periods where you go like, oh, I just talked like so much, so much more than I normally would. And my voice gives out from speaking and audio books and podcasts. It's just, they're very different styles of being a person. Mm hmm. Some of my some of my longer interviews for my podcast, you know, can be can be wearying. Yeah. No, it's not normal to just talk for two hours or whatever. I don't. That's just not what I do in the course of my of my regular life. Yeah.

7:09The amount I'm going to talk on this podcast is probably like about as much as I talk over a three day period in my normal life. It's not much. I'm not much of a talker. No, totally. I think it's funny because I think people tend to be drawn towards writing of the various arts through maybe not every writer is an introvert, but I think there is introversion associated with writing. And then it's funny that in this sort of modern day, we then expect a bunch of very extroverted traits from activities from a writer. That's right. You know, I enjoy, I am definitely a card-carrying introvert. I do enjoy speaking, but I think it's because I can think really carefully in advance about what I'm going to say.

7:53Like, I'm not one of these people, I just like to get on stage and let it rip. No, no, no. There's a lot of prep and a lot of thinking in advance. But then I, you know, after I'm off stage, I want to go back into my hole again. Totally. Like if you were an extrovert who really just wanted to be on stage in front of people, there's a lot of easier ways to do that that don't involve writing a 300 page book first. That's true. That's true. Yeah. It's kind of an unnecessary means to the end. Yeah. I'm so drained after I talk. I don't know about you, but when I do a talk, I'm like, the rest of the day is pretty much a waste for me.

8:29I can't like go back and write after or do a lot of thinking. Never. I find that as I get older, I start, I don't know if this is defeatist thinking, maybe you can stoicize me out of this, but I tend to think very consciously about like, where's my peak energy going to go today? If I've got to talk, like it has to be that, like I have to be building up toward that. And then like you said, after the talk is over, I have about 15 or 30 minutes of like a halo. Like I'm excited that I just did that. And then man, the crash is coming. I was talking to someone about that yesterday. We were that like, as you get older, you become, I'm like good for like one good thing a day now, you know, like, like I used to be able to just sort of through sheer will do whatever was on the list for the day.

9:18And now it's like, what's the important thing for the day? Let's do that early, especially if that task requires a lot of concentration or presence. Let's do that. And then let's understand that the rest of the day is a waste. Like I used to be able to, I felt like be pretty productive on airplanes. And now like if I give a talk in the morning and then I'm flying home, I can't even read on the plane. I'm just, I'm just like, this is some wasted time. Basically. I look back to when I was in college and in my twenties and it's like this, this stuff that we're talking about now was just nowhere in my consciousness.

9:53I feel like we don't, we don't do the next generation of service. We're always telling them all this stuff they have to pound into their heads and all these skills and this knowledge, but it's this meta stuff that I think really moves the needle, like understanding, Hey, your energy is finite and you've got to be really thoughtful about what you throw it at. And, uh, you've got to learn to kind of self detect and self assess in these ways. And I mean, it was a long time in my career before I really came to understand these very, very valuable things. No, I totally agree. I think it maybe it's because we think of a lot of things as binary.

10:31So you're like, I'm young, and then I'm old. But of course, it's a it's a slow transition from one to the other. And so to notice your sort of decline, or you're just like an athlete is realizing, okay, I can't do some things physically anymore. So I have to figure out other ways of, of getting, getting to what I need to get done. And yeah, just, just going like, okay, hey, I have to arrange my day like this, or I have to not agree to do things like that, or, hey, I just can't, I can't drink the way that I used to, or it costs me more of the next day. Just that kind of awareness of yourself in your own capacities is like, that self-awareness is really important.

11:14I find that the older I get, the more I employ the use of timers and alarms and notifications because I have virtually no trust in my own memory these days. So it's like, if I've got to do something for my daughter, if I have some important thing to get out or whatever, like, boom, the moment it's on my brain, like I'm plugging it into my phone to pop up on my calendar. Maybe this is the legacy. I'm sure you've interviewed David Allen or you know his work, but that's the most beautiful thing to me about his body of work. This is the guy who wrote Getting Things Done, one of the all-time business classics.

11:51And he has this beautiful vision of, if you get your system right, you can have mind like water. And the things that the world needs from you will appear when they need to appear. You will have the right amount of time to consider and adjudicate those things. And so it's all about kind of creating this system where right at the moment that I need to pay attention to signing that permission slip for my daughter or whatever, boom, the alarm pops up. I didn't have to worry about it. I didn't have to carry it around in my head. I had arranged my calendar such that it would claim my attention at the right time.

12:25I've always admired that. If you can get one good thing from a book, that's a lot, you know, and his idea of not touching paper twice. And so I think about it, it's like, okay, I've thought about this and I've made a plan. Now I have to get that codified somewhere as quickly as possible, ideally right then at that moment. So there is very little on me to have to remember. It's not just that you're getting older, but as you get older and your life gets more complex, the chances of you remembering are lower and the costs of you forgetting are higher. And so you have to build a system where you very quickly make a decision, process something and then put it into a process.

13:09So it's not incumbent on you to randomly remember to do the right thing at the right time. And then it's further complicated by the fact, like I love the research on what's called transactive memory, which is basically the idea that in a close partnership, you know, most often a marriage, but I assume it would apply to business partnerships too, probably. It's almost like you outsource parts of your memory to the other person. You know, I think probably anybody who's married listening to this knows exactly what I'm talking about. It's like my wife is the part of the couple that remembers where like obscure articles of clothing are, you know, and I'm the person who remembers where obscure financial documents are.

13:49And, you know, we sort of make these implicit barters and arrangements to broaden out the scale of what we can do together. No, totally. And also realizing that, hey, if you guys come up with a system, maybe you don't have to rely on either person to carry the emotional load or the cognitive load of whatever that thing is. My word for the year was systems, and I have tried to do better at setting up systems. So there is less just on me to try to just try to do with sheer energy or willpower. Well, hey, that feeds directly into my new book. It's all about systems. I know. Well, before I get into that, because you mentioned business classics, I went to my show.

14:32I can't believe I bought this book in 2007. That's why. Hey, you were part of the first generation. Is that when it came out? Did it come out in 2007? Yeah, January 2007. He's looking at Made to Stick. That was the first book I wrote with my brother, Chip. incredible book. One of the iconic, maybe one of the greatest business book covers of all time. Thank you. I love that book. There's a whole story there. I mean, I think the single easiest way my entire career could have been derailed is if we had gone with the covers that were first rolled out by the publisher at that time. People outside publishing don't know how this stuff works.

15:13We were first, Chip and I were first time authors, absolutely no power. I mean, just forget about it. And so what happens is, you know, there are artists that work within the publisher. And so they're cranking stuff out and you got to have empathy with these people. It's not like they can spend, you know, a month like cogitating great ideas. They're just, they're in a machine, you know, they've got like a bunch of titles. And so they don't have time most often to even read the books. They're like made to stick. Okay, what's sticky? And so we get some covers with, with scotch tape. And there was one cover with like a gecko, you know, cause their, their feet are sticky and about a million covers with post-it notes.

15:51And Chip and I were just pounding our head against the wall. We were like the whole point of a post-it note is it's not that sticky. That's what makes it valuable is that you can move it from place to place. And so we literally, we kind of went to the mat to the extent there even was a mat for us to go to as first time authors and say, it's gotta be duct tape. I mean, this is exactly what we're going for. Duct tape is strong, but it also has this kind of resonance of being able to fix anything and people, there's a kind of vaguely comic overtone to duct tape. Like this is what we're chasing. And our editor, Ben Lennon, God bless him, like went to bat for us and like, I think these guys are right.

16:28Let's do something with this. And then one of their designers came back with that cover and instantly we were like, yes, done. That's it. And I think that cover more than anything else is responsible for the success of the book. No, no, it's a, it's a very sticky cover. I would be curious. Did they stay like mine feels like duct tape? Did they, did they cheap out as they went on? Like, is the, no, I think they're still doing that. Yeah. It's funny. So I haven't seen a new copy in a while, but, uh, but I think they're still doing, I don't remember what you call that technology. It's like the thing on the cover where it kind of feels like duct tape in addition to looking like, No, I feel it's that to me, it's a whole package.

17:05We carry it in my bookstore. I should just go over and grab one. But I haven't touched it in a long time. But it was such an iconic cover because it's not just orange. It doesn't just have the duct tape on it, but you feel it. And it feels exactly like duct tape, how it gets the little kind of creases and wrinkles in it. And duct tape has those that like kind of netting inside of it. It stands out visually. And then the confirmation of the tactile to the visual, you're just like, oh, this isn't a normal book. And that's what makes things sticky. If it's not how you normally, it not just exceeds expectations, but it also has some element of surprise or differentiation to it.

17:48I saw somebody in a bookstore one time, like actually kind of clawing at the duct tape on the cover, like thinking they were going to pull it off. And I was like, okay, it worked. Yes. No, I think, cause I remember this with my, my first book has sort of an iconic cover. And if you looked at what they sent me at first, you'd be like, I'm not sure. Again, I'm not sure I would be here like you if I had gone with whatever the designers had sent it first. And my pet theory is that they have a bunch of pre-designed covers, like templates. The designer is like making a personal game of like, can I eliminate any of these?

18:25Like, can I re-gift any of these covers? I have direct proof of your conspiracy theory because one of the covers I was sent for my last book, Upstream, didn't work for us for that. And then I saw it show up on another author's book. I mean, the same thing with the title swapped out. So your artist bank of possible covers theory is correct. I suspect, yeah. And it's a tricky thing when you are, for people who are like, I'm not writing a book. What does this have to do with me? Anytime you are working with someone, you're getting kind of creative ideas back, but you're new at it. It's hard to know when to trust your instincts and when to defer to the professionals in the industry.

19:11If anyone should have had the right instincts, as to what makes a sticky, classic business cover. It shouldn't have been you and your brother. It should have been the people that do this for a living. And yet it was only your insistence that this wasn't right and you wanted to go with something different that unlocks this thing that everyone, I'm sure, subsequently takes credit for. But it's hard to know when to trust your own judgment and when to defer to the experts. That's the perennial problem of life, I feel like. Yeah, well said.

19:51Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Baskerville County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

20:37We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course. Because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you.

21:16Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

21:59My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for good inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It Over the Holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr.

22:36Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

22:56You know, in their defense, it's like all the covers we were getting, just to use this example as an instance of what you just said, they were good at signaling that this is a business book. You know, at that time, especially business books were white with red and black text. The text was prominent. If there were any images, they were something kind of trivial and office-ish like a pen or a stapler or a paperclip or, you know, things like that. And so it's like the books were signaling this is a business book and that's, that's a victory. Like if you write a thriller and it looks like a, you know, nonfiction historical piece, like that's a disaster.

23:33So I get that. But my brother Chip, at one point, we were sort of making our case to the powers that be. And he did this brilliant thing where he made this PowerPoint presentation with like the top 10 selling business books at that time. It was like good to great and a bunch of other stuff. And he put one of the covers that they had suggested in the mix. And then on the next slide, it was the same top 10 sellers, but he had swapped in like the duct tape cover. Yeah. The whole point was like, where do your eyes go? And it was just like so obvious. Once you saw it in context, you're like, of course, that's the cover that draws attention, you know?

24:14And he did it in a way where people could kind of discover it for themselves, you know? Yes. Yeah. You don't have a lot of power, so you actually do have to persuade, right? What you're attempting to persuade, it's not simply an aesthetic argument. what you're asking someone to do oftentimes, because you don't, you know that what they're suggesting is not right, but you maybe don't have the alternative yet. So you're having to argue for a reset, right? You're having to say, hey, we need to throw all of these out and start over. And bureaucracies, people who have sunk time and energy into something, that's like the last thing they want to do.

24:51They would rather keep iterating than reset. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious about your titles. I've always envied your titles. I think they're so good. Was that a hard process to lock on to the conventions that you did, or was it relatively intuitive? Well, it's funny. So my first book, which I had a big argument on the cover of, which I won, and I think that made me less, I had less both energy and capital to argue on the title. I wanted to just call my first book Confessions of a Media Manipulator. And they wanted to call it, trust me, I'm lying, confessions of a media manipulator. That trust me, I'm lying was very catchy.

25:30It also just had the effect of, you know, I've had to answer for being a liar, even, you know, for the next 15 years. So like, if I was doing that over, I think I would have dug in and fought a little bit more on that. The obstacle is the way it's, I was just looking, because I'm just doing the 10th anniversary edition of that book. And I found the proposal. And the original title was turning obstacles upside down. So sometimes you're in the ballpark, like you have some of the stuff, but like Twain said, the right word and the almost right word is lightning and lightning bug. And sometimes you're close.

26:12So that captured the spirit of what the book was about, but it didn't become quite like an epigram or aphorism until... And what's funny is it wasn't until I heard a Zen saying, the obstacle is the path that I unlocked the title of a very Western book. So sometimes, you know, right from the beginning, ego is the enemy. I figured out pretty early, right thing right now, which is my latest one. I think the cover was already designed when I was tweaking the title. So sometimes, you know, sometimes you don't know. The obstacle is the way that's just such, I mean, it just, it's sort of like the, the wordsmithing equivalent of the duct tape cover.

26:55You know what I mean? It's just, it's like a different kind of thing and it signals like there's something more here than what you're used to. Yeah. I think there's something powerful about when you get a title that can teach something, even if they don't read the book, right? Like if the lesson can be in the title. That's very powerful. That's good. That's good. I think the only one of my books that fits that test is Upstream. I was very conscious. Upstream is a book about solving problems before they happen. And I think that was, you know, if there is an inverted pyramid or something like, what do I want people to take away?

27:35That was the book that I think I've obsessed most about that. So like the title carries some meaning upstream, getting upstream of problems. The first paragraph in the book is this parable about upstream work that's very short. But I felt like if people just read the parable, for goodness sakes, like they've gotten a significant fraction of the message. So yeah, I like that. No, I think Made to Stick has that. It's like, no, no, we're designing this thing to resonate with people as opposed to what most of us do, which is just kind of hope that that happens. You know what's interesting about that is we had virtually no agency in that title.

28:13Your listeners are like, good Lord, can we get past the title? So our original title, the one that we sold the book on and that we, I mean, up until six months before launch, we were going with was What Sticks. So more of like a descriptive, observational frame. And then come to find out, this is like an author's worst nightmare. mirror, we learn there is another book coming out three months before ours called What Sticks. And we, you know, after we soil ourselves and kind of, you know, come back to real, we're like, okay, well, we need a new title then. And so we kind of reluctantly settled on Made to Stick.

28:52And I think in retrospect, it was a much better title for the reasons you said, because it involves the reader. And it's not like a naturalistic study of ideas. It's like, we want to help you communicate your ideas better. We want to help you make your ideas stick. And I don't know why it took that emergency to get us to see that. But that's kind of a little obstacle is the way type of thing, right? Like you thought you wanted it to be titled one thing. And if everything went well, that's how it would have been titled. And it's not until some competitor comes in and messes up your shit that you're able to come up with the title that it was sort of actually meant to have.

29:30Right, right. Yeah, it just makes you think like, you know, how many times you have to put yourself through this emergency cycle before you arrive at the optimal answer? The other piece of advice that I got as far as titles, which again, I think this has some just general marketing implications outside of just books. But Robert Green told me he was like, tell me the subtitles of some of your favorite books. And I'm like, I can't remember any of them. And he was like, exactly. He was like, you shouldn't need a subtitle. And none of his books have them. And so some of my books do, some of them don't.

30:06But I do try to think, you know, does the title has to do most of the heavy lifting? If the subtitle is giving you the context and explaining why any of this matters, you're already kind of admitting that you've created a headwind for yourself. I don't know what you think about that. Does the obstacle is the way, does that have a subtitle? It does. I didn't have enough juice to not have a subtitle, but it's the timeless art of turning trials into triumph. I think in the UK it's different, but ego is the enemy. No subtitle because the title is so, so clear. Yeah. You know, it doesn't need any explanation.

30:42Still, this is the key. Doesn't have one either. Yeah. I think that conceit works better for your titles than mine. because we're always doing these kind of cutesy one word titles, switch, reset, upstream. And so it's like, okay, well, I'm in the ballpark now, but what exactly is this? A lot of the exposition comes in the subtitle, like for the new book, it's how to change what's not working. But those are powerful words that you've picked that we know, you know what I mean? Like reset, switch, they're doing a lot of work. I mean, the subtitle of Made to Stick is above it, but I've never heard someone say the subtitle of Made to Stick.

31:19Right, right, right. It does most of the work there. When do you know you should reset versus when you should quit? What do you see the distinction there? When is it, hey, no, no, you start over as opposed to, no, I want to go back to the beginning? I think it depends on goals. And I should be clear, Reset, Just Truth in Advertising, is primarily a book about teams and organizations. You know, it's probably 80 % concerned with organizations, maybe 20 % individual. I do think there's a lot of lessons for individuals, but it's not primarily a book about that. And I think it's like the story that leads off the book is about this receiving area in a hospital where they have built a system that allows them to deliver.

32:05So, you know, packages are coming in from UPS and FedEx, surgical gloves, medications, whatever. And then the receiving area's job is to take those packages and get them deployed to the points in the hospital where they're needed. And it's taking them three days on average to do that. Sometimes one, sometimes five, average of three. And so it's just kind of this absurd equilibrium that they've reached where the consequences of this are people in the hospital are trying to go around them. They're trying to like, you know, convince the FedEx drivers to come straight up to the second floor to deliver.

32:37They're overbuying because they're afraid of running out because of this delay problem. You know, medications are spoiling in the box. And so I kind of use that as a departure point in the book where this is not a crisis. You know, everybody in the organizational world is good at responding to crises when they happen. This is not a crisis. This is just sort of like an underwhelming but steady example of performance. And so the question is, in a situation like that, like, what do you do? What do you do to get out of that when all of the evidence you have from the weeks and months before is this is what you're capable of, right?

33:14If you plot it on a chart, it's like every day that you can see shows that it's an average of three days to get packages delivered. And that's one of my favorite quotes in the book comes from Paul Bataldon, who said, every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. And so the book is basically about when you're in one of these situations where there's no emergency, there's no fire, but you're not where you want to be and you feel kind of stuck. How do you get out of that stuckness? I meant it in an individual or not in an individual context. It's like, when does a when does a sports team clean house and go into rebuilding?

33:52Or when do they say, actually, you know, I think we've got ingredients to be pretty good here, right? Or a political campaign that they use that word. No, this is a reset. They say that all the time. How do they know that they actually do have the capacity to do this thing? It's a systems problem versus a fundamentally unlikable problem or, you know, actually don't have the talent problem or need to go into a rebuilding phase. I just thought that that distinction about reset or rebuild is an interesting one. It is an interesting one. And I think part of it is gated by, you know, one of the big ideas in this book is the notion of leverage points in a system.

34:34When you're in a system like that receiving area, there's a bunch of variables. There's a bunch of people. You can't tackle everything at once. You don't have the resources. You don't have the wherewithal. So you need to aim. You need a point in the system where an investment yields a disproportionate return. And that's what I mean by leverage points. And so I think to get back to your question, I think the answer is what is both doable and worth doing in the current situation? Doable meaning it's tractable in the short term and worth doing meaning if you succeeded, it would amount to something.

35:11And depending on what your answer is to that, like what's doable and worth doing now, maybe that tips you towards reset versus rebuild from scratch. Yeah. It's like, yeah, do you renovate your house or do you build a new house or move? It's a question, too, of the raw ingredients. You have to have the ability to look at, hey, here are the people involved, here are the incentives involved, here are the constraints involved. And you have to be able to, I think one of the skills here has got to be recognizing in whether you have the ingredients or the pieces and they're just not operating effectively or efficiently, or if you are fundamentally lacking something, or what you're trying to do is fundamentally impossible with what you have.

36:01And the distinction there is essential because if you end up trying to do a reset and you actually have a personnel problem, you're gonna get back to some, you might get a different result, but it's still not gonna be the result you want because your constraint is you don't have the right people or you don't have the right resources, whatever. Yeah, I mean, you're definitely talking my language here because the second big part of the book, we talked about leverage points. The second big part is once you've found leverage points, you need resources to push on those leverage points, just simple prioritization.

36:33The problem is most people don't have satchels full of free cash in their supply cabinets, you know what I mean? Or they don't have like employees they can draft into duty. they're stuck with what they have. You've got what you've got. And so the question is, how do you summon new resources to push in a new direction when you're resource constrained? And that becomes the second part of the book, which is about how do you restack resources in a different way when that's often painful? You know, there's probably nobody on your team that thinks their work is pointless and thereby their work can be, you know, recycled in a new direction.

37:08And so how do you make those trade-offs in the least painful way possible? Well, and you have potentially, if things aren't working, a morale problem that you're dealing with. And you also may have a momentum problem that you're dealing with. So it's like things aren't working. So you can't go, hey, I need you to give us more marketing dollars. But if things were working, you could write your own ticket. And so that kind of chicken and the egg part of it is always a constraint there. And that's, you know, under this heading of where do you find resources to push in a new way? One of the arguments I make is that the most neglected resource is motivation.

37:49You know, especially in organizations, I think leaders do this thing where every leader always has a change conceit. You know, we are here, we want to be at this new location in three years. And so how do we get there? Well, let's use our analytical brains. We'll come up with plans. We'll get the shortest line between the two points and blah, blah, blah. And then it's like, that's part one. And then part two is to get buy in from their teams. You know, it's like, okay, plan first. And then we're going to kind of foist it upon our team members and try to persuade them to get on. And I argue that's kind of backwards that what you want to do is you want to find the intersection between what's required for change to be successful.

38:30If you imagine a Venn diagram, there's a bunch of stuff that's going to be required for change to succeed. And then overlap that with what's desired today. Like what do your team members want right now? Like without you having to get buy in or persuade or whatever else. And it's not going to be a perfect overlap. Right. But if it's any overlap, that's where you start. And it's almost like we're leaving one of the most precious fuels for change on the sidelines if we don't pay attention to that. Yeah, usually a turnaround or a reset takes so long, but people are already at some level of frustration or disappointment or disillusionment.

39:09How do you get wins and how do you get them excited that you're heading in the right direction? You need something kind of symbolic or maybe not symbolic, but significant to sort of like, hey, no, no, not only are we going to turn this around, but you're going to feel good about it as we're turning around, as opposed to the kind of double dip disappointment of, I know things are bad, but they're going to get worse before they get better. Well, that receiving area story I was talking about, the three days to get stuff delivered, it's telling that the guy who came in to lead this turnaround, Paul Suet, what he did first was he went to the team and he said, I want to change the way things work here.

39:51And I want you involved. And I want to promise you that the end of this is going to be, we're going to be more effective and the work is going to be easier. That's the payoff. And, and the first thing he asked them was, what are your pain points? Like what bugs you? What annoys you? Where are the obstacles? And, and often it was really practical stuff. Like, you know, when you carry packages around hospital, you have carts and the carts, some of them have those gummed up wheels, like you see on shopping carts in the grocery store sometimes. And so they complained about that. And he was like, done new cart wheels, new carts, whatever it takes, That's silly.

40:27You shouldn't have to deal with that. And it was like a symbol to your point. It's a symbol to them that he's listening, that this is not this is not a poisting situation. Right. This is a, you know, tell me what you need to go this new direction and I'm going to make it happen. There's a story in the Civil War. I don't know if I put it in my books, but I think about it all the time. So Grant comes in, he takes over the Army of the Potomac. And this is an army that's sort of cycled through all these different generals and none of them have worked. They all sort of get their ass handed to them, even though they have superior resources, even though, you know, they've got sort of right cause and all that.

41:07And so Grant, you know, takes over the army and immediately leads them into what's known as the Battle of the Wilderness, where he too gets his ass kicked. Like it's brutal. One of the most vicious, horrendous battles of the Civil War. So you'd think everyone, you know, the same thing's going to happen. And they start marching after the battle and they come to this point in the road. I don't have the specifics, but they come to this point in the road that the army has reached like many times. And it's this kind of fork in the road. And the army thinks that they're obviously going to be turning, you know, sort of back north to nurse their wounds, regroup, and Grant will probably be replaced and they'll just do this pattern over again.

41:47But then as they get to this fork in the road, this cheer starts to sort of build up and it suddenly, you know, sort of encapsulates the whole army because Grant has turned the army south. And so they realize, oh, it's different. We did get our asses kicked a little bit or we fought to a draw. But instead of that draw leading to a loss, Grant is continuing to advance because what Grant had understood was fundamentally that the North had all the resources that it needed. It had superior numbers. It had superior technology. It could win the war. They just weren't winning the war because the system wasn't working because every time they would fight to a draw, the North would retreat back to the North and then group and try to do the same thing.

42:32So Grant realizes that it really, the critical variable here is a general who's willing to fight it out. And he sends this telegram back to Lincoln. He says, I intend to fight it out along this line, even if it takes all summer. It actually takes nearly a year. But the point was, Grant was sending a message to the army that their suffering and their losses and even their defeats weren't in vain. They were going to take this thing to its conclusion. And that actually turns out to be the sort of pivotal moment of the Civil War where the tide turns. Well, and what's brilliant about that is the way it kind of redefines how you perceive what you're experiencing.

43:16You know, it's like what felt like a defeat becomes a necessary sacrifice in pursuit of victory. It reminds me of, I referenced these two psychologists, Teresa Amabile and Stephen Kramer, a beautiful idea there's called the progress principle. So they did this study of employees where they had people keep work diaries and kind of log how they felt about their work and what kind of work they did. And they came to this kind of startling conclusion that the number one motivator in employees and number one source of happiness in their day-to-day work was the feeling of progress on meaningful work.

43:52and then what I thought was brilliant they go back to managers and they present them with a list of common motivators stuff like recognition and incentives and and the feeling of progress and and they ask the managers which one of these are your your top motivators of people and they put progress dead last so it's kind of this this paradox that that what actually moves people you know whether it's whether it's an office environment whether it's the civil war I don't think people are impatient. I don't think people need a victory every day. I think what people need is the feeling that they're getting somewhere.

44:29No, I think about that even on my book projects. I don't know about you, but I break my books up into many smaller pieces so I can create the illusion of momentum, which it's not actually an illusion. It just makes the momentum measurable. So if you had this big, enormous thing, even like the turnaround of a company or the turnaround of an organization, if you're trying to go from, take your package example, packages currently take three days and we want to get that down to within an hour, well, that feels like insurmountable and maybe impossible. But if you said, hey, by the end of the month, we're getting this down to two days, then we're getting it down to one day.

45:11Now people feel like they're making progress and the later progress becomes easier by nature of the confidence that comes from the earlier progress. Amen. And in fact, I cite the research of this one psychologist who has a great phrase, like when you're doing something new, you first look backwards and then you look forwards. Meaning, let's say you have a weight loss goal. We've probably all been there. You want to lose 15 pounds. In the beginning, you just want to get on the scale. You want to see one pound gone, right? Because that's progress. That's the taste. I'm doing this right. And then it's two pounds.

45:45And then it's three pounds. And then at some point, you kind of flip, right? You start to say only three more pounds to go, only two more pounds to go. And I think that's a really insightful, like motivational methodology. First, you just want to celebrate any victory, any movement in a positive direction. And then eventually, as you near your destination, it becomes more and more motivating, perhaps, to get there. Yeah, I think about when I'm on a book, there's that, yeah, that first part, you're like, hey, how many words am I at? How many words have I gotten to? like the first time you print a chunk of it out and it exists.

46:18And then there's this moment where you, where you reach what is obviously the, the downhill part. And that's when you really start trucking along. You've got all the momentum of everything you've done behind you. And now you, you can sort of bring this thing home. And that's a really wonderful feeling. Yeah. When you're like, I'm almost done. I only have a little bit further to go. Yeah. That's the feeling that makes all the other sacrifice and, you know, dedication worth it when you get to that point. With this book, Reset, I tried, I was inspired by the agile methodology. Probably a lot of listeners may know this.

46:52It's basically ubiquitous in software. It's just the idea of working in iterations. So in the old days, you know, people would take three years to create an operating system revision or something. And these days you work in rounds or cycles or sprints of three weeks or two weeks or a month or, you know, something really short. And then you get some testing, get some feedback. So anyway, I was inspired by that. I decided to try it with this book before Chip and I or I solo, we would get maybe one or two rounds of feedback in a book cycle. And this time I got six. So it's very different. It was, it was a very different experience as an author.

47:30It was like, I was almost embarrassed, especially with that first round or two, because it's the stuff is so crude and underbaked. But if you want, if you want to honor the spirit of this, like you got to just show up with the ideas, whatever scraps of stories and principles you've got and just try it out. In fact, the first edition in quotes was actually just a set of videos where I was talking about stuff because I didn't even feel like it was polished enough to write up. And so I would get around a feedback and I go and think about it. And I sort of got addicted to that way of working. I thought it was, it kept me more in tune with what readers wanted and what they were resonating with and what questions they had.

48:11And I don't know if I'll do six rounds next time. That may be a bit much, but definitely more than one or two. Yeah. Getting less precious with it tends to be helpful because you get rid of the paralyzation that can come from needing it to be a certain way. Even though later you're not going to think what you thought was not ready was like, you're going to think it's shit in the future anyway. So you might as well just accept that it's shit and get it in front of people. That's right. That's right. It was just good discipline for me because I think I tend to just by nature, it's like I want something to be perfect before I unveil it.

48:51And I think just the discipline of having to have something to show, to present, probably sped things up and made the eventual work better just to be forced to solve for it every few months. Totally.

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49:45well I was going to ask you about Upstream because I'm working on this book now as I'm doing this series and the fourth one is about wisdom and I was thinking about doing a chapter that's kind of the opposite of Upstream maybe which is to me one of the things that I think is a mark of a particularly sort of wise or experienced person is their ability to anticipate downstream consequences. So they've done the thing so many times, they know how it's going to go, right? Which is also, I guess, the definition of going upstream. But to me, that's a special level of knowledge and intelligence that not a lot of people have, the ability to go like, Yeah, see, if you do this, here are the things that could happen or here are the things that will happen.

50:33Whereas a lot of us are operating on this level day to day that's kind of totally ignorant of what this is going to mean in the future. Give me an example of like a personal decision that might be influenced by that thinking. personal decision so much is like, hey, if you do this intervention here, it's going to have this unintended consequence down here. Or if you don't address this here, it's like, if you don't nip this thing in the bud with this person, you're going to have a real problem down the line. Or there are going to be things that your average person would be really worried about, but someone who's been on this ride many times knows that that's actually not a significant thing that that works itself out right or or that turns out to be not significant down the line so it's just that that kind of knowledge of like hey i've seen this movie before yeah boy you should write the parenting version of that book i would i would kill to because because i feel like so much of parenting is like you observe you know maybe some bad behavior and you're like is this the first sign of something that will bloom in horrible ways, you know, in years to come?

51:47Or is it just, you know, a fluke and it's idiosyncratic and it'll probably work itself out. And my experience so far has been, I tend to worry about the former and it usually ends up being the latter. It's, you know. My parenting version of downstream consequences is like, hey, if we don't do breakfast well, Disneyland's going to be a disaster around 3 p.m. You know, Like, you've just, it's like, oh, they skipped this nap. So we got to wrap up this trip to the park early so we can avoid the meltdown that is obligated to ensue. So that kind of interconnectedness between these inputs and variables.

52:24Yeah. I mean, to get back to Upstream and your original question, like, I think one of my big takeaways from Upstream was the headline for Upstream is I'm lobbying people that let's spend more of our energy trying to prevent problems rather than just react to them, which is what we always end up doing. But the subhead was, that's really freaking hard to do. And I'll give you one example to kind of illustrate this. At one point, I was researching plastic bag bans, you know, those kind of flimsy single use plastic bags. So there's a lot of cities and states that are considering or actively banning them.

52:58So this seems like the ultimate kind of no brainer, right? Plastic bags, they're a nuisance to the environment. They clog up waterways. I mean, what do you use them for? You use them to get stuff from the gas station or the grocery store to your trunk, and then you never use them again. So it's kind of a waste. OK, so we can all get behind this. And then you start studying what actually happens. It just gets very complicated. Like in Chicago, they banned single-use plastic bags defined by a certain thickness, certain millimeter. And so they put the ban in place. And then the retailers were like, huh, so we can't use the thin plastic bags.

53:32And then they immediately switch to thicker plastic bags and give those away. So it's like in the act of trying to reduce the incidence of plastic in the environment, they unwittingly increase the amount of plastic in the environment. So that's like part one of the story. In California, they learn from Chicago, which is good, right? We're kind of learning from each other as a society. And so they don't make the plastic thickness mistake again. And they trace really carefully what happens. And what happens is just that there's predictable stuff and unpredictable. So the predictable part is if you take something out of a system, even if it's something bad, you know, I think rookie's logic is ban bad thing inherently good.

54:14No, that is not correct. You could ban a bad thing and something worse could replace it. I mean, that's the Chicago story, thicker plastic bags. So in California, some of the predictable things that happen is people who use those quote unquote single use plastic bags to line their bathroom trash cans now start buying little hefty bags for that same purpose. OK, so there's like there's a partial rebound effect that comes to me. That's predictable, right? Yeah. You have to study what's the function of something in a system. And if you remove it, something's going to substitute for that. And so, you know, maybe the hefty bag purchases negated 30 percent of of the savings or whatever.

54:55But then you start getting these really weird edge cases like in San Diego. There was there was an outbreak of disease among the homeless population. come to find out it was because they had been using single-use plastic bags as receptacles for their waste, you know, just easy ways to kind of deal with that. And in the absence of that, it became a little less hygienic. And you just can't see that coming. That's exactly what I mean, that the ability to understand that one variable is connected to endless numbers of other variables. And the higher level you get at what you do, is understanding or seeing some of these through lines that are going to be invisible to most people.

55:42I just find that so fascinating. I do too. I do too. And it is really sobering, when you get into this, because you think, what hope do we have to deal with really messy global problems like climate change when you really squint at a plastic bag ban, like it just spirals out in a bunch of different ways. But the case that I make in the book is, yes, it's hard. Yes, it's painful. Yes, you're going to take five steps forward and four steps back. But this is the only recipe for leaving a better society to our kids and grandkids than we inherited. This is it. You need a certain intellectual humility, but then that humility can't also become like a cowardice.

56:25You have to go, hey, you accept that this thread you're pulling at may turn out to be connected to a lot of other threads. But you also know from history that sometimes things are just bad and you can pull them out. And when you pull them out, a whole bunch of stuff gets better. Yeah. I mean, to me, one of the most impressive facts is that something like 30 years has been added to the average human lifespan, you know, from the beginning of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st. And basically all of that is due to upstream work in public health, better, cleaner water supplies and antibiotics and vaccines and better maternal care at birth and so forth.

57:14And so when you think about what's so characteristic of upstream work is there's a lot less glory in it than than reaction. You know, it's like if you if you come in where a hurricane is blown through and you rescue a family from their rooftop like you are the hero, you're going to be on CNN. And if you create a clever evacuation plan that ensured there was no one on the roof to save, like nobody will ever know your name. Or if you just stopped erosion of the seashore hundreds of miles away, nobody even knows that those two things are connected to each other. But yeah, a person who understands upstream and downstream realizes that these things are connected and that's why they focus on them.

57:58And yeah, you have to accept the gloryless satisfaction that you connected to variables. And you don't get credit for most of the things you prevent. That's a sad reality of our world. 100 % right. And in fact, it's even more depressing than that. You know, it's like the prevention paradox is that the better a job you do at preventing something, the less evidence there is that it ever needed preventing. Yes. My favorite example of this is Y2K. Some of your older listeners may remember this whole thing. At the turn of the millennium, the idea was because of this bug that were built into systems, everything was going to go just haywire.

58:45Right. I mean, people were like renting log cabins to be away from civilization because they feared, you know, the mobs and the chaos and the financial system was going to go down. Fortunately, people saw this coming for years, at least three or four years before the millennium hit. There were teams working on this. Billions were spent. And and so, you know, turns January 1st, 2000 kind of comes and goes with the whimper, like a couple of systems go down here and there. but basically everybody shrugs. And then it wasn't but a couple of weeks before people were saying, you know, that whole millennium bug thing, what a scam that was.

59:19Look at that. That was just a bunch of nonsense and all the consultants trying to cash in. And, you know, it's like the very success of that work where billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours were invested and a calamity was avoided. The very success actually became evidence in favor of the skeptics. No, it's crazy. And it's crazy what can kick off some of that prevention. I think about this because sometimes it feels like what kind of impact is writing a book going to have or whatever. This guy, John M. Barry, writes a book in like 2000 about the great influenza. And George Bush reads it, a guy that we don't think of as a big reader.

59:59And he puts in place a pandemic awareness or prevention team. And that operates for the next 20 or so years until somebody trying to cut some budgets, you know, I'll leave the listener to guess who did it, eliminates a pandemic prevention squad. And then we get hit with the worst pandemic in exactly 100 years. Like, you know, you go upstream to try to eliminate things and then enormous downstream consequences because it doesn't seem like these two things are related. Well, like your pandemic story is perfect. And there's a story in upstream about this blew my mind. I had no idea this was true.

1:00:44So before Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Katrina was the most readily foreseeable catastrophe in modern history. Like everybody who had studied the geography of New Orleans knew like this, this is just a time bomb waiting to happen. And so to the federal government's credit, FEMA and a bunch of private organizations, I think it was maybe two years before Katrina. They had done exactly what you would want people that they had gotten all the local authorities together in New Orleans. They had the simulation, they called it Hurricane Pam. And they were basically going, okay, what would we do if there was a catastrophic hurricane?

1:01:21Like where are we going to get the equipment and who talks to who and how are we going to get people evacuated, which means you've got to like reverse the interstate highways instead of having two way. You've got to switch it all to one way. How do you do that? I mean, it's incredibly complicated. And so they're just starting to have these simulations. They had the first one of what was planned to be multiple over several years. The whole thing eventually gets just put on the shelf because of travel costs. No joke. I mean, we're talking like five figure travel costs, maybe twenty five, fifty thousand dollars or so.

1:01:51Well, you know, times are tough. And then, of course, Katrina hits. People die. Billions of dollars are spent all for the want of, you know, fifty thousand dollars in travel costs. For want of a nail, a kingdom is lost. Exactly. Yeah. So so I think we should we should buck up our listeners. This this stuff is no joke. You're not going to get any personal glory or not much. What could matter more in the long run than getting things like this right? I totally agree. Well, I think the new book is fascinating and hopefully it'll still be around 15 years from now. Hopefully it's that sticky. I think you got a shot.

1:02:27Hey, thanks, man. I appreciate it. This was awesome. Talk again soon. All right. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.

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