192. Quick Thinks: How to Supersize Your Stories

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: Good stories provide opportunities for both simulation and inspiration. I'm Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to this bonus Quick Thinks episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. During my recent interview with Dan Heath, he offered a masterclass in what makes for a great story by not only telling a great story, but helping me analyze it.

[00:00:33] I want to come back to storytelling because one of the things that really impresses me in your work is, not only do you talk about story and analyze story, but you're actually a really good storyteller. Can you give us a little insight into your process for one, thinking about the stories that you tell in your books and when you speak on your podcast, but also the process about how to craft and deliver those stories, because that's equally as powerful?

[00:00:58] 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. The 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, it takes another three days.

[00:01:42] 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 because they want to dodge this chaos of the receiving area. They have people trying to make side deals with FedEx drivers to come directly to the third floor and bypass the receiving area. So into this mess comes a new person named Paul Suett. And if we just freeze there for a second, so what is this story doing?

[00:02:18] Number one, just observe that there is nothing naturally compelling about this topic area, right? There's not, there's no sex, there is no violence, there are no celebrities. It is the most boring imaginable domain and yet there are universal themes here that kind of get us on the hook like, these were the pariahs of the .Hospital all the sudden implicitly were 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? 

[00:02:50] 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 magnifier to what's coming. So I appreciated that part. 

[00:03:09] 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's shoes. First thing he does is he says, what problems can I solve for you? What's getting in your way? And so the team's giving him a laundry list of complaints and obstacles, some of them quite mundane, like, well, the wheels on the carts that we push around are sometimes real stuck and jangly, so 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.

[00:03:37] He's not the know it all coming in to quote unquote fix things. And he invites them into the detective work. So every day for an hour, a day, twelve 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.

[00:04:13] So we get the value of batch processes, but they were doing this to a fault. So the idea was let's wait until a bunch of packages build up on the receiving dock, and then we'll do the scanning into inventory all at once. Like that'll be quote unquote. efficient. But what 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.

[00:04:44] And so it's like this aha experience. They set about completely changing the way they work. Within twelve weeks, they're delivering ninety percent of the packages in one day. Something nobody thought imaginable, much less practical. People start visiting the receiving area to learn what they've done. And so again, if you zoom out of the story for a second, there is zero of natural intrinsic value in any of these details. I mean, I said the phrase batch processes and you didn't immediately go to sleep, right? Which is, that's the power of story, right? Is once we see a protagonist and a challenge and some stakes that matter, like, we're in it. 

[00:05:22] 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, because many people know what it is, but they don't know that term. But you just said, we don't wash one sock. We don't put one spoon in the dishwasher. That was a great way of explaining something without actually breaking it down and saying, now I'm explaining it. You do a great job of hooking us in and diagnosing and describing for us what you do. I'm curious, how do you find these stories? How did you 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? 

[00:05:58] 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 going to arm them with principles to make their life or their work better? That's part one. And then part two is, how can I hang those principles on stories that are more compelling than me just yammering on about systems and operations and so forth?

[00:06:24] 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 got to 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.

[00:06:49] So I, one of my colleagues actually flew to 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. And in a lot of other cases in the book, it was just a byproduct of you have ten conversations to get down to that one story that really connects.

[00:07:08] 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 up front.

[00:07:26] 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 in complicated systems and seeing how things can change actually surprisingly quickly if you find the right places to push.

[00:08:09] 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 audiences expectations up front 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 forty-five 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.

[00:08:41] Thank you for joining us for a Quick Thinks episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about storytelling, please listen to our non traditional storytellers miniseries in episodes 170 and 171. This episode was produced by Ryan Campos and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to the 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.