190. Motivation Matters: How to Leverage What People Already Want

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: 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 we interviewed in episode 49. Dan also hosts the award winning podcast, What It's Like To Be. Dan's latest book is Reset: How to Change What's Not Working. 

[00:01:00] Welcome Dan. I am a huge fan of your work. Thanks so much for being here. 

[00:01:05] Dan Heath: Thank you, Matt. It's a, it's an honor to be on the show. I'm a follower. 

[00:01:08] Matt Abrahams: Thank you. Should we get started? 

[00:01:10] Dan Heath: Let's do it.

[00:01:11] 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? 

[00:01:35] 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. 

[00:02:15] 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. 

[00:02:55] Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. Storytelling is really powerful. I want to hear about what you take away from Switch. 

[00:02:59] 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 dropping.

[00:03:32] Oh no, there's a crisis. Like, 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, okay, that's working good because that frees me up to go spend more time where the problems are. And if we make the case and 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.

[00:04:21] 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 want to explore some concepts in your new book. You talk about how we can break free from the inertia that keeps us doing the same things we've always done. In essence, you suggest we find leverage points 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? 

[00:04:59] 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 because I think it captures the leverage point idea. It's a story about a couples therapist named Laura Heck. And so if you just put yourself in her shoes for a second, every day her calendar is full of married couples or couples on the brink of divorce.

[00:05:48] 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 a hundred and sixty-eight. 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 know you're going to be doing that twice a day.

[00:06:29] And you got nothing else to do while you're brushing. You just pick up a pen. And you write down something that your partner did that you appreciated that day. It might be something quite small, like, thanks for making coffee this morning, or thanks for talking to John about college. He really appreciates your perspective. Whatever it is. And then you put it on the mirror for your partner to find. And she says, the point of this activity is really not to give those little burst of happiness that we all get when someone says something nice about us. That's great, but it's not the point. 

[00:06:59] 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. 

[00:07:44] 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? 

[00:08:23] 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 because, well, we don't have extra resources. And so the departure point of the second half is what if you need resources to push in your new direction for change, but you can't just bring resources off the sidelines, right?

[00:08:53] 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 ninety-nine point nine percent 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 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. The entire change war will be fought on the battlefield of motivation.

[00:09:40] 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 going to need to get to some new place, what's required. And then there's an intersecting circle of what's desired today. So in other words, all of the people that you work with, your colleagues, your direct reports, they have ideas about how to make things better. If they were made boss for the day, they'd all say, well, we're going to do this. We're going to do this.

[00:10:19] We're going to, 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 got to get people to want what I want or else change is going to 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.

[00:10:57] Matt Abrahams: That model, although quite simple, I have seen play out in my own life, in my relationship with my kids, because a lot of what I find myself doing is trying to persuade them. When I've gotten lucky and really tapped into that latent desire and see their ideas and passion, that's when things have really gotten going. 

[00:11:13] Dan Heath: It just reminded me, something that literally happened this weekend, and I'd hadn't coded it that way but I see that it is now. I see that it's the Venn diagram in my own mind. I was trying to get my young daughter to go with me on a walk and I think to a child like going on a walk with dad is just like way down Maslow's hierarchy. And then I realized she likes to get this weird iced tea, it's called a iced fireball from this coffee shop that's a perfect distance for us to walk. And so I was like, hey you want to go and get an ice 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. 

[00:11:56] 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.

[00:12:05] 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. I'm trying to get you to buy in. And we just never ask the basic question, what would you want today if it was your plan? And look, the obvious, I think, objection to the Venn diagram thing is, it's never going to be a perfect overlap, right?

[00:12:25] It's never going to 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 because they don't think it's going to work.

[00:12:45] They don't think it's going to make their lives better. They think it's just going to be a nuisance. And then when they start to see that boulder that's obstructed your path for so long, when they start to see it inch in a new direction, it makes them feel differently. And so then new motivation comes off the sidelines that was sparked by the progress that they could see as a result of that initial push. 

[00:13:05] 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. 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? 

[00:13:59] 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 can put it on a bumper sticker and Blake said, You get what you celebrate. Full stop. You get what you celebrate, but Frank Blake lived that mantra. He would spend part of every Sunday afternoon, I mean, CEO, one of the world's biggest companies, spend his 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.

[00:14:32] I heard about the way you dealt with that customer in North Georgia, blah, blah, blah. One of the things that stuck with me was he told this incredible story. So one of his strategic missions was to improve customer service at Home Depot, but 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's on stage and he says, we had this cashier, has 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.

[00:15:19] And, 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.

[00:16:06] You hear a lot of, you've got to do the five 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. 

[00:16:42] 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. 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?

[00:17:06] Dan Heath: I'm ready. Let's do this.

[00:17:07] 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. And I'm curious, is there anything you do in your personal life to really spark some moments, maybe for your family, your kids, your friends, is there something that you took from that work you do that helps you and those you know and love? 

[00:17:29] Dan Heath: Absolutely. The Power of Moments is a book about the disproportionate power of specific moments in our memories of experiences. The way that, if you think about a family or a personal vacation from three or four years ago, you don't load up the video of that experience in your mind and play it end to end, right? A lot of it dissolves. And what you're left with are the most significant moments, or in the parlance of the book, at the peaks. And so the kind of big message of the book is we can be the authors of these peaks. Sometimes they just happen by happenstance. But we can be intentional about it. And so, like, a couple of things that I've learned from readers, actually. I had this one guy come up to me at a conference and say he'd read the book and he'd try something with his kids.

[00:18:14] He called it a perfect day exercise. So he had young kids like I do, and he said, I want you to draw up your perfect day on paper, like, from when you wake up to when you go to bed. And if you don't fill it with fantastical things, like, oh, we're gonna fly to the moon for a picnic or something, if you keep it real, like, your mom and I are really gonna try to make this happen. We're going to bring your perfect day to life. But he made them draw it out. He wanted them to put some thought into it. And they had to put together an agenda with times and events. And I was just so captivated by that idea. I immediately stole it from my own kids. And what happened with his kids was exactly what happened with mine, which is you would think that kids would be grandiose and they'd want to do crazy things.

[00:18:56] They'd want to 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 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 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. 

[00:19:50] 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? 

[00:20:05] 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 non fiction than of his fiction. He's best known as a novelist and wrote the great book Infinite Jest, which is about twenty pounds if you carry it 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. 

[00:21:15] 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? 

[00:21:30] Dan Heath: Okay, the recipe. Alright, three steps. Let's do this. Number one, know what the most important thing you need to leave the audience with is. What's the core message, in Made to Stick terms. Know your core message. And I think the reason why people don't do that, even though it sounds commonsensical, is because people, when you start putting the presentation together or the memo, it's like you kind of want to show off all the things you've learned and all these insights you have, and you just get greedy with your ideas. But if we're going to be respectful of the audience and the way memories decay, like, if we want to have one thing that endures in their head three weeks in the future after the point of communication, like, what would that one thing be? Second is, highlight the aspects of that one thing that are uncommonsensical.

[00:22:15] Common sense does not stick. Common sense, by definition, is something that's already stuck. And if somebody hears something that sounds like common sense, they're just going to ignore it because it in no way reshapes their view of the world or their opinions or their perspectives. So you've got to figure out what about your message is uncommonsense and if the answer is 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 you want a core message, that's uncommonsensical, that's wrapped up in a story. That's my recipe. How'd I do? 

[00:23:00] Matt Abrahams: You did great. Not just at sharing the three, but it's 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. 

[00:23:24] Dan Heath: Hey, thanks so much, Matt, it's been a pleasure.

[00:23:25] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about motivation and persuasion, please listen to Robert Cialdini in episode 164 and to hear more from Dan's brother, Chip Heath, please check out episode 49. This episode was produced by Ryan Campos and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. And check out FasterSmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, Ask Matt Anythings, and much more at FasterSmarter.io/premium.