If you’ve ever tried to change things at work, you know the headwinds you face. Teams and processes are often trapped in longstanding, ineffective patterns that are hard to budge. Dan Heath, senior fellow at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, explains proven techniques to reset. Those include making the problem visible, jolting incremental progress to start gaining traction, and motivating teams into a new direction. He shares real-life examples of how leaders and teams broke through seemingly intractable work situations. Heath is the author of the new book Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working.
CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.
Here are some phrases you might here in an organization. “We tried that before, but it didn’t work. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Well, that’s the way we’ve always done things around here.” Now sometimes those reactions to a new idea or suggestion are based on good experience, and they’re uttered by well-intentioned people. Other times, those phrases can be a tell. A tell that you’re at an organization with too much inertia, too much decision paralysis, too many people stuck in their ways and processes.
To change that, you have to do more than just run a couple of experiments. It takes a reset, according to today’s guest. Dan Heath is a Senior Fellow at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. His new book is Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working. Dan, thanks for joining us.
DAN HEATH: Thanks so much, Curt.
CURT NICKISCH: I think the idea of being stuck is something that almost everyone can relate to, whether it’s in your own career or your own behavior patterns. Or just, as we’re going to talk about today, being mired in dysfunctional and inefficient work systems. How does it come about that people get to that point of, “Well, that’s just how things are and I can’t change them?”
DAN HEATH: I think there are a few reasons. I remember Michael Jordan had a great quote: “Practice doesn’t make perfect,” which is what you hear a lot of times. “Practice makes permanent.” If you have practiced every day shooting a jump shot the wrong way, you’re just going to get really good at shooting the wrong form of jump shot. Routines lock in.
One reason we get stuck is that every day, we come to work and we practice the way things worked yesterday. And every day is providing new data that suggests yesterday’s performance is what we’re capable of. That’s part of what we have to react to to get unstuck, is to set our sights anew and to realize that we can escape the gravity of the way things have always worked.
CURT NICKISCH: And is that why so many change attempts fail?
DAN HEATH: Yeah. If you think about the practice metaphor again, if you’ve been shooting the wrong kind of jump shot and you’ve had thousands of reps with that form, of course it’s going to be difficult to change. In fact, I use the metaphor in the book of a boulder that’s in your way. If you picture somebody on a road and there’s a boulder between them and where they’re trying to get to. A lot of times, what we try to put our shoulder into the boulder. We think maybe if we work a little bit harder, if we just try a little bit more, we’re going to move that boulder. It just doesn’t work when it comes to systems.
One of my favorite quotes in the book is from a healthcare expert named Paul Batalden who said, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” That quote has stuck with me so much because what is says is if we are mired, then that is not like a transitional state. That’s not something that’s going to go away like a cold, or it’s not something you just hustle your way out of. It’s a function of the system we’re operating in. To change that, we’ve got to change the system.
In the book, I’m proposing a two-part framework to get people and teams out of situations like that. The first part is to find leverage points which are interventions or actions that have disproportionate return. If you do a little bit of work, you get a lot back. In the boulder metaphor, if you picture a fulcrum and a lever being inserted into the picture, where all of a sudden it’s not just a person shoving the boulder, but it’s the potential to use amplified force to move the boulder. That’s part one.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. Even if you don’t move it, you’re like, “Hey, we just wiggled it, the seemingly immovable thing.”
DAN HEATH: Exactly right. Progress is really what turns change into a flywheel, what sustains change. Then if you visualize the lever and the fulcrum and the boulder, in order for the boulder to move, you’ve got to push on the other end of that lever. And that means resources.
And this is the second big pickle in the book. The first is how do you find a place where a little bit of action goes a long way. And the second is if you need resources to push in a new direction, and you’re not just swimming in extra cash and employees, that means you’re going to have to somehow reshuffle the way you’re using the people, and the systems, and the technology, and the money you have today to get different results. And so the second part is about re-stacking resources to push in a new direction.
CURT NICKISCH: Let’s start with a first step, the first step to change what isn’t working. That’s to actually identify the issue. That’s a common problem-solving technique that we’ve often heard. First, identify the problem before you start to go out and try to solve it, and that people often jump over that. What do you recommend for that?
DAN HEATH: “Go and see the work.” That’s a phrase I stole from a management professor named Nelson Repenning who’s at MIT. In fact, the very first story in the book is about a receiving area at a hospital, they’re taking in packages and getting them delivered to the appropriate places within the hospital. At the point when the work began, they had had an average performance of three days to get packages delivered within the hospital. A nurse orders some medicine, FedEx or UPS get it across the country in a day or two. Then to get from the basement of the hospital to the third or fourth floor, whatever, it took another three days, which is just crazy. But it didn’t feel crazy to the people in the receiving area.
Back to the notion of, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” It had been that way for years. The system had been baked to execute that level of performance. A new manager came in, a guy named Paul Suett. He had a background in lean manufacturing, so he immediately spotted some things that were askew. But he also was wise enough to realize, “It’s not enough for me to come in and know the right answer. I’ve got to get my team to see the situation the way I do, and to be motivated to do something.” He drafted them into the cause.
Back to the notion of going and seeing the work, they spent an hour a day for 12 days in a row, they just paused their work, and they all walked the flow from where the packages came in on the delivery dock, through the inventory scanning, through the sorting, ultimately to the destinations in the hospital. The signature thing that they found that was causing unnecessary delays was that they had employed batch processes in a lot of places where they didn’t need to be inserted.
Of course, batch processes are where you wait to do something in the spirit of efficiency. We all wait to do our laundry until we’ve got a load, or a dishwasher. Nobody just washes one spoon at a time, you wait to get a proper load. That was the way they had been thinking about this. If you’ve got to scan packages into inventory for instance, it makes sense, wait until you’ve got 10, or 15, or whatever. Then you can go zap, zap, zap, zap, zap. Intuitively, it seems like it would be more efficient. But what Paul Suett saw is our metaphor should be to let the river flow.
Meaning a package should be able to travel unencumbered from the delivery dock to its destination, and our job should be to remove friction. So they all do this walk of the process together and it doesn’t take long once you realize where the sticky points are. It took them six weeks to cut delays in half. In six weeks, they go from three days to a day-and-a-half. Then in another six weeks, 90% of the destinations in the hospital were receiving daily deliveries.
That’s what I think is so powerful about this approach is that, number one, you’ve got to change the system. Which sounds really hard, “Oh, gosh, how would we ever change the system?” It sounds bigger than just shoving on the boulder. But when you figure out the things that can improve the system, often the results can happen very, very quickly and lock in.
CURT NICKISCH: Tell me just a little bit more about the leadership that was shown there. What did Paul Suett say in that situation to not just have this be, “Okay, we’re changing how this one thing is done this way,” to becoming a system where people said, “Oh, well that’s working better. What if we did this now?”
DAN HEATH: He signaled to them he was going to be listening not just talking. The first thing he did, actually even before they began this hour a day thing, was ask them about their complaints. What can I do to help make your day day-to-day life easier? They were saying things like, “Well, some of these carts that we use to push the packages around have those gummed-up, jangly wheels,” like you get in the supermarket sometimes. Paul just instantly said, “You shouldn’t have to deal with that. I’m going to get you new wheels or new carts, or whatever you need. Let’s remove that source of friction.”
CURT NICKISCH: Even though he knew that that wasn’t the thing that’s actually causing an extra two days of delays?
DAN HEATH: Exactly right. When you’re talking about change, motivation is the game. What Suett is doing is he’s saying, “I’ve got to have this team aligned with me. They’ve got to want to do this.”
CURT NICKISCH: You also write about defining the goal of the goal to help people in this process. How does that relate?
DAN HEATH: So in organizations, we are obsessed with goals. We want to reduce this number by 15%, we want to double this, reduce share in such-and-such, whatever. It’s helpful to have a second layer process where we can continually ask ourselves, “What’s the goal of the goal?”
I’ll give you an example. I write about this guy who bought a Ram truck. He takes the truck off the lot, and then he starts getting hounded to fill out a survey. I think we’ve probably all had this experience in a variety of domains. But he hears from maybe a half-dozen people at least a dozen times within about a week. “Hey, Ryan, could you fill out this survey for us? We’d really appreciate positive responses. Hey, really looking forward to getting the results. We want to improve,” blah, blah, blah. “What could we have done better?”
Ryan Davidson himself, he works in customer experience in healthcare. He threw them a bone and sat down, wrote up a proper survey. He said it was an A-minus. He was generally happy, but some things really bugged him. He sends it back over the transom. Then he never hears from anyone again, except for his sales rep who starts texting him the day he submits the survey, complaining that the sales rep wasn’t given all 10 out of 10s.
That is just a charade of customer data. And if you rewind the tape, you can imagine what must have happened. In the beginning, there was surely good intentions here. Some leader said, “We genuinely want to provide a good experience for our customers because we want them to come back and buy more trucks in the future. How do we start getting closer to that goal? Well, let’s gather some data. Let’s get a survey at the end of every transaction and let’s see how we’re doing. If we’re not doing so good, we can change things. If we are doing good, we’ll keep doing what we’re doing.” All that’s great.
It’s exactly what you should do. You should be trying to learn, you should be listening. But then the translation that occurs is … There’s a famous law called Goodhart’s Law which is, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, what must have happened at this dealership is they started layering on incentives, it may be sticks, it may be carrots and sticks in t