Matt Abrahams: From making ideas stick to magic moments to unsticking 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.
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.
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
he 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.
Dan Heath: Thank you, Matt.
It's a, it's an honor to be on the show.
I'm a follower.
Matt Abrahams: Thank you.
Shall we get started?
Dan Heath: Let's do it.
Matt Abrahams: I've enjoyed all of your books, but 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?
Dan Heath: 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.
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.
Matt Abrahams: Absolutely.
Storytelling is really powerful.
I want to hear about what you take away from Switch.
Dan Heath: 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 dropped.
Oh, no.
There's a crisis.
Like our, our attention immediately goes to the problems, but in that same
engagement data, there was a tale of employees on the positive end, 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, oh, okay, that's working, good.
'Cause 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.
Matt 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 wanna 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?
Dan Heath: 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, 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 'cause 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 Suett.
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, there are no celebrities.
It, it is the most boring imaginable domain.
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 gonna do?
There's, there's a detective story element.
What is he gonna do to untangle this mess?
Matt 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, a magnifier to what's coming.
So I, I appreciated that part.
Dan Heath: So Paul Suett comes in, he's our protagonist.
We talked about simulation and inspiration, right?
So now we're walking in Paul Suett 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 the wheels on the carts that we push around
are sometimes real stuck and jangly.
So Suett 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 into 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.
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 boop,
that'll be quote unquote efficient.
But what Suett 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 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 ah-ha 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, 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.
Matt 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.
'Cause 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 find Paul Suett?
Did you know him?
Did somebody point you to him?
Did you, were you in that hospital?
How did you find that story?
Dan Heath: 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 gonna 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 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, one of my colleagues actually flew to, uh, Evanston and met with Paul Suett
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.
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.
Matt 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.
Dan Heath: 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 and
complicated systems and seeing how things can change, actually surprisingly quickly,
if you find the right places to push.
Matt 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 wanna 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 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?
Dan Heath: 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 'cause I think it, it captures the leverage point idea.
It's a story about a couple's therapist named Laura Heck.
And so if you just put yourself in her shoes for a second, every day her
calendar is full of married couples or, 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 and as you brush your teeth, 'cause you're, you know, you're gonna
be doing that twice a day and you got nothing else to do while you're
brushing, you just pick up a pen, 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 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.
Matt 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.
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?
Dan Heath: 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 'cause 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.
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
uh, Taiichi Ohno, 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 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 gonna 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 made boss for the day, they'd all say, well, we're gonna do this.
We're gonna do this, we're gonna, 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.
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 gotta 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.
Matt Abrahams: That model, although quite simple, I have seen play out in my own
life, in my relationship with my kids.
'Cause 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.
Dan Heath: It, it just reminds me, something that literally happened this
weekend and I'd, I'd hadn't coded it that way, but I see that it is now.
I see that it's the Venn diagram in, 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, uh,
iced fireball from this coffee shop, that's a perfect distance for us to walk.
And so I was like, Hey, you want to 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 desired, that was the latent desire in the system, and
there was overlap and shame on me for not getting there immediately.
Matt 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.
Dan Heath: That's a great phrase for it.
It is potential energy and we spend so much time browbeating people with the
vision of change and get on board, and I'm trying to get you to buy in and, 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.
People start out skeptical of change 'cause they don't think it's gonna work.
They don't think it's gonna make their lives better.
They, they think it's just gonna 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.
Matt 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's 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?
Dan Heath: 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 Javaid, 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, 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.
So anyway, Moon Javaid has this epiphany when he is 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 hotdog stands, by concessions.
And so if they get like a certain density of red frowny faces in a certain period of
time, they know ah-ha, something's wrong.
There's a clogged toilet at A8, or the concession stand, they're, they're outta
hotdog 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 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 gonna put a happy or not terminal, right?
And then later it occurred to me I could 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, 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 into the publisher was version 6.
So I had 5 full rounds of reader feedback 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 would 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've
been a lot worse had I not gotten 5 rounds of reader feedback,
Matt 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 is minimally viable communication.
We take the same principles from 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, what are your thoughts about how they
communicate to the teams themselves or across the organization about what
they're doing, and help them 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?
Dan Heath: 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, the CEO one of the
world's biggest companies spent his Sunday writing individual thank you letters
to people on his team, not just in some generic atta boy, atta girl way, he would
highlight specific things that they did.
I heard about the way you dealt with that customer in, in North
Georgia, blah, blah, blah.
One of the things that stuck with me was he told this incredible story.
So one of his strategic missions was to improve customer service at Home Depot.
He's got over a hundred thousand 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 an 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 is on stage and he says, we had this cashier, who'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?
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 gotta do the 5 S's, smile and blah, blah, blah, and all
this kind of generic stuff that ends up in employee rule books, 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.
Matt 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?
Dan Heath: So for listeners, just quickly, the show, the conceit is
that in every episode I interview someone from a different profession.
A homicide detective or a daycare owner or an NBA referee.
And I just asked them a thousand nosy 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 Matt that I might be able to help a hundred 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 6 weeks in a row on the road, and their
lives are governed by 3 different clocks that prescribe their behavior
and they have to obsess about where they're gonna park, 'cause 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 out and deal with it.
And I find that there's no like direct application.
I just think that there is a lot of power and 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.
Matt 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, and I appreciate that.
Well, 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?
Dan Heath: I'm ready.
Let's do this.
Matt Abrahams: All right.
One of the books that you wrote that really also had a big impact
on me was The Power of Moments.
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?
Dan Heath: Absolutely.
The Power Moments is a book about the disproportionate power of specific
moments in our memories of experiences, the way that, if you think about a, 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, at the peaks.
And, 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 tried something with his kids.
He called it a perfect day exercise.
So he had young kids like I do.
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, 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, and events.
And I was just so captivated by that idea.
I immediately stole it for 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 wanna do crazy things.
They'd wanna spend a lot of money.
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 a movie, and she wanted to have a play date 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,
and if you just ask them, it turns out that's not what perfect means.
Perfect means something quite different.
And so I've really enjoyed that aspect of moment creation, just trusting
the people that you care about to articulate what perfect means.
Matt 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?
Dan Heath: 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 you carry 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 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.
Matt 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?
Dan Heath: 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 wanna
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 gonna be respectful of the audience and the way memories decay,
like if we wanna 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 uncommonsensical,
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
gonna ignore it because it in no way reshapes their view of the world or
their opinions or their perspectives.
So you've gotta 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 uncommonsensical,
that's wrapped up in a story.
That's my recipe.
How'd I do?
Matt 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.
Dan Heath: Hey, thanks so much, Matt.
It's been a pleasure.
Matt 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 Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams.
Our music is from Floyd Wonder.
With thanks to Podium Podcast Company.
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