Who’s Never Needed a Reset Button?

I’m happy (and honestly relieved) to report that Dan Heath’s RESET: How to Change What’s Not Working was a fantastic and helpful read. The book was indeed about what the title implied it would be about, and nobody called Alanis Morisette a knowledge worker. Admittedly, the bar has been set pretty low at this point, but RESET is worth your time.

Heath’s book helps us figure out where to start when we look around and realize, This is not working. His examples span from CEOs taking over large organizations to couples looking at their rocky marriages. The beauty of the book is that you don’t have to know what the problem even is yet. RESET provides ideas for figuring out where to start, identifying the real problems, and leveraging the resources you have to make the largest impact. (I’d like to note that I think the word “leverage” has become jargony and overused, but Heath uses a recurring image of an actual lever throughout his book, so it’s not jargon—it’s physics.)

WHAT DOES A BIKE EVEN LOOK LIKE?

The first half of RESET is about how to find leverage points, or interventions you can make, with minimal effort but that yield high returns. The first thing Heath suggests in order to determine your leverage points is to “go and see the work.” Do you run an inefficient factory? Go to the factory floor. Are you losing new hires? Shadow a new employee throughout the onboarding program. You have to see, with your own eyeballs, how things are (or are not) working.

Often, when there’s a problem, we brainstorm where we think the issue might be and make changes to those things. But those are guesses. They are based on conjecture and not experience. Heath quotes Tom Chi, a co-founder of an R&D lab at Google, who says, “Smart people will always come up with smart reasons for their guesses…But that does not mean that their guesses are not guesses.”

Part of the problem is a cognitive bias called “the illusion of explanatory depth.” We all think we understand things in greater detail than we truly understand them. Do you know how a bike works? Of course you do. But when given a diagram of a bike with just the wheels, seat, and handlebars, can you add the chain and pedals in the right place? I couldn’t. I was so frustrated that I had to stop reading and look up what a bike looks like—and I once biked around half of Nova Scotia. Apparently I never looked down.

Heath writes about turnaround consultants (the people you bring in to save your company from financial or operational distress), and how the first thing they have to do is go and see the work. He quotes consultant Paul Fioravanti, who says, “If you really want to know what’s going on in an organization, you always ask the people closest to the customer and closest to the core activity, whether it’s providing a service or making something.”

Who isn’t closest to the customer or the activity? Sales and marketing teams. They are right in the buffered middle between core activity and customer. That’s why when Maestro starts training your team, we want your product engineers and customer success team there as well—the people closest to the customers and the action.

I’D DO ANYTHING FOR LOVE (BUT I WON’T DO THAT, FELIX)

Let’s say your net promoter score (NPS) is low. That means your current customers would not recommend your product or service to others. So, your goal is to raise your NPS score. But is that really your goal? I once bought a razor, and the company would send you a $10 Amazon gift card if you gave them a written review. I gave an honest one, which apparently was not what they wanted. You only got the gift card if you gave a good review. I did not get a gift card.

Good reviews are supposed to mean you have a good product; that’s the true target. But the target for the razor company had become the measure itself. According to Heath, this is Goodhart’s Law in action. “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Look at the goal of your goal. The goal of a good NPS score is giving the customer a great experience.

But even when you’ve identified the goal, how do you know where to begin? Heath shared a story of a therapist who uses the “Miracle Question” to help couples figure out where to start repairing their relationship. “Imagine that in the middle of the night tonight, as you are sleeping, a miracle happens…the problem you are stressed about has been solved…What are the first things you notice, as you start your day, that reveal to you that the miracle happened?” This question helps hone your view of success and identify some productive starting points.

In the book, we follow a couple’s experience as they were asked the Miracle Question—Elaine and Felix. What would they notice if their marital problems had miraculously been solved? Elaine said she and her husband would do more dancing, hiking, and talking. (Felix didn’t even know she wanted to do those things—of course he could do that.) Felix said they would share responsibility for the kids more equally. (Elaine thought that was a fair idea.) Elaine wanted to sit down and plan things with her husband like they used to. (Felix thought that sounded reasonable.) Felix wanted Elaine to look up from her book when he came home. RECORD SCRATCH.

Wait a minute. Am I supposed to be looking up from my book when my husband comes home? That can’t be right. What if it’s a really good book, Felix? What if she’s at a critical point in the story, FELIX?! Nobody should be making these kinds of unrealistic demands on their spouse. Run, Elaine. He’s not worth it!

TAKE OFF YOUR JACKASS-COLORED GLASSES

What I like most about RESET is that it provides strategies for finding the leverage points and identifying first steps. The entire second half is about how to “restack your resources” to make the most out of what you have to work with.

Heath suggests looking at the bright spots in what you’re already doing, which I think is something we all tend to forget about when it feels like things are falling apart. Look for the things that are going well. You know they’re possible because you’ve done them before. Finding bright spots can be hard when you’re in the midst of failure. Whether it’s business operations or a marriage, we tend to wear the opposite of rose-colored glasses when things have been bad for a long time. We wear what Heath calls “jackass-colored glasses” instead.

Once you’ve got those glasses on, it can help to bring someone in to help you find the bright spots, whether that be a turnaround consultant or a marriage counselor. Heath shares the story of a new pet shelter director—someone who had been hired from a different city department and so new little about how shelters were run. He found a solution to an extreme overcrowding problem because he proposed something counter to the way things had always been done in every shelter everywhere. He “didn’t know enough to know that he shouldn’t be suggesting something.” Or, as Heath points out at the beginning of the book, “The curse of a bad set of habits is that all the unnecessary things you’re doing come to be seen as necessary.”

Who among us hasn’t needed to hit the reset button? There’s a lot more to learn from RESET. I highly recommend it. And do not look up while you’re reading it for anyone!

Accelerate your sales with DRIVE! Maestro’s information-gathering lessons are available online for FREE. Go to this link and click the “Enroll Free” button.