Reset- How to Change What's Not Working

Reset: How to Change What's Not Working

Dan Heath 2024

“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” Meaning that once you change your aspiration—when you set your sights on different results—the system you have is wrong, by definition. Because the system is designed, intentionally or not, to yield the results you got yesterday.” Dan Heath

Feeling stuck? Like you're pushing against an immovable object and getting nowhere? We all get into ruts such as this, and it's hard to remove yourself from the problem unless you seek out a different way of looking at it.

Reset is the latest book from Dan Heath, and it tackles the process of getting unstuck. Heath is a prolific writer of self-help books like Upstream, Decisive, and the Power of Moments (with his brother Chip Heath).

This is a fairly easy read with two basic strategies for getting unstuck.

A- Look for leverage points and weaknesses that could substantially move the blockage. Study the task at hand, including the bright spots and impossible spots, looking in-depth for the constraints that are holding you back.

B- Once you've found a leverage point, push like hell at that spot and see what changes. If nothing changes, find a better leverage point. This could include things like starting with a concerted burst of energy, moving resources from lower-priority tasks, get helpers, and strive for better and better feedback.

It sounds simple, but if it was, we'd all be just sailing along in life from one completed thing to the next. A lot of life is just about facing challenges and learning from them. Knocking that boulder over and clearing the pathway feels oh so good, doesn't it?

A few helpful tips I got from the book include:

1- Ask yourself the "miracle question". If something magically fixed my problem so that it was gone, what would that look like? Envisioning the desired outcome can work wonders in finding the leverage points to get there.

2- Don't give in to "time confetti," the splintered nature of time in our hectic days where attention is spread out thinly and little progress is made. To make progress, a devoted burst of time may be necessary to get things going.

3- Chick File A is a great example of a business that figured out its sticking points- the order process at the drive-through. They now have multiple clerks walking out to the cars to take the orders and payments, so that by the time you reach the window your meal is there.

4- Appreciative sticky notes can do a lot for motivation for both yourself and those around you.

5- Getting quality feedback is vital for businesses. While more and more surveys are being sent out via email and text, they often go unanswered. The Happy or Not terminal offers the chance for businesses to get immediate feedback in real time.

Dan Heath is one of my favorite self-help authors because he explores interesting topics and uses real-life examples to illustrate his points, along with online resources, a podcast, and a nice summary at the end of each chapter. Nothing too earth-shattering, but being able to Reset an ongoing problem and fix it sounds like a good idea to me.