PDF Summary:Reset, by Dan Heath

When you’re stuck in a situation that seems impossible to change, it’s natural to feel overwhelmed and discouraged. However, in Reset, Dan Heath argues that all it takes to get your organization (or yourself) out of a rut is to take a step back, rethink your approach, and refocus your efforts where they’ll make the biggest difference.

This guide will begin by exploring different ways to find those key areas where you can make the greatest improvements with the least effort. We’ll then discuss how you can kickstart major changes with a big push toward your new goals. To conclude, we’ll explain how you can drive organizational change more easily by harnessing your workers’ energy and motivation. Our commentary will compare Heath’s principles to those of other influential business writers and provide supporting evidence to explain why his methods can help you make big changes. We’ll also offer some actionable advice to help you start applying Heath’s practices.

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Finally, Heath argues that the biggest barrier to progress is sometimes just confusion about what you’re trying to achieve. In other words, you might be pursuing goals that sound reasonable but don’t actually serve your ultimate purpose. If that’s the case, you could achieve all of your goals and find you haven’t actually accomplished anything meaningful.

Avoiding this trap requires you to regularly examine not just your goals but also the reasons behind those goals. This deeper examination often reveals that there are multiple paths to your real objective, some of which might be far easier than your current approach. For example, if your goal is to earn a certain amount of money, consider what you plan to use that money for. Do you actually need that amount of money to achieve your end goal, or are there other ways to get what you want?

Process Goals Versus Outcome Goals

When Heath says to look for the reasons behind your goals, he’s urging you to set outcome goals. This means starting with your desired outcome, then working backwards to figure out how to reach that result. In contrast, process goals are those that you believe will get you closer to whatever outcome you really desire. Returning to the previous example, earning money is a process goal, while whatever you plan to use that money for—the thing you actually want—is the outcome goal.

While Heath stresses the importance of outcome goals, you can take advantage of both kinds of objectives. Some experts say the most effective way to set goals is to start with an overarching outcome goal, then set smaller process goals building up to that outcome. This strategy allows you to reap the benefits of concrete, achievable process goals while maintaining the “big picture” focus of outcome goals.

Start Strong With Focused Efforts

Another reason Heath gives for why people often fail to make changes is that improvements are too slow and distributed too widely—as a result, their progress gets lost among all the business of day-to-day life. This lack of visible progress saps people’s motivation and allows old habits to reassert themselves. So, to avoid this problem, the author suggests starting any attempt at major change with a brief but intense period of focused effort. You can accomplish this by temporarily putting aside some of your regular activities, thereby freeing up more time and energy for the changes you plan to make.

The Mechanics of Motivation

Heath’s strategy takes advantage of what Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F∗ck) calls the motivation loop. Manson says many people misunderstand how motivation works because they think motivation has to come first, and it leads to action. However, Manson argues that motivation and action are a cycle: Motivation does lead to action, but taking action also creates more motivation to keep going. This is why a big initial push like Heath suggests is such a powerful motivator to keep you working toward your goal.

In neurological terms, motivation—or the lack of it—comes from a chemical in your brain called dopamine. In The Molecule of More, Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long explain that dopamine motivates you to pursue the things you want. When you make progress toward a goal, your brain releases a large amount of dopamine, which creates intense feelings of pleasure. To recapture that dopamine high, you want to keep working toward your goal. However, if you can’t see the progress you’ve made, your brain won’t give you a dopamine “reward.” Without that reward, you’ll quickly lose your motivation to keep working toward your goal, and will instead revert to your old, comfortable habits.

In this section, we’ll discuss Heath’s two-step process for finding the time and energy you need to start major changes:

1. Get rid of activities that aren’t improving your life
2. Rebalance your remaining activities to prioritize only the most important ones, and devote less of your schedule to the others (without removing them completely).

Step #1: Eliminate Wasteful Activities

Heath says the easiest resources to overlook are the time and energy you spend on activities that don’t get you closer to your goals. Therefore, the easiest way to make rapid, visible progress is to remove those unproductive activities from your life and redirect your efforts toward whatever change you want to make.

Every organization is bound to have some wasteful activities: for instance, time-consuming workarounds for problems that no longer exist, policies and procedures that add complexity without significantly improving product quality, or unneeded oversight that bogs down workers and supervisors alike. To find opportunities to streamline your operations, Heath suggests looking at your work through your customers’ eyes. What do they actually want or expect from your company, and which activities really contribute to those outcomes? Conversely, what tasks don’t have much impact on your end product?

For example, suppose your company makes cars. It’s only natural that quality control would be one of your top priorities, so those activities should remain untouched—your customers will expect functional and safe cars. On the other hand, if you’re pulling workers into meetings over inconsequential mistakes, that’s most likely wasting everyone’s time and energy (including yours). Customers don’t expect or want your employees to be punished for human error; they just want the cars to get built.

Tip: Look for Dependencies in Your Organization

A lot of inefficiency within organizations is the result of dependencies: rules that prevent employees from handling tasks themselves and instead require them to wait for approval from another person or department. In The Unicorn Project, entrepreneur Gene Kim describes how these dependencies make even simple processes needlessly complex, time-consuming, and frustrating. Furthermore, every task that requires someone else’s approval is a tacit message to your employees that you don’t trust them, which can harm morale as much as the bureaucratic red tape itself.

Kim urges companies to instead adopt cultures of trust and simplicity. Like Heath, he suggests focusing on what customers need from your company, and making it as easy as possible for your workers to deliver on those needs. In many cases, this means dismantling the dependencies bogging down your organization—you’ll probably find that a lot of them are more about internal control over employees rather than genuine, significant concerns about quality control.

On a personal level, Heath says wasteful activities could be anything—for example, putting in extra time at an unfulfilling job, wasting hours scrolling through social media, or continuing a hobby you no longer enjoy out of habit. In short, anything that takes up your time, energy, or other resources without substantially improving your life is a good candidate for removal.

(Shortform note: Permanently removing something from your life—even something you’ve identified as unproductive—is often difficult because of what psychologists call loss aversion: the tendency for people to feel a loss more strongly than they’d feel an equivalent gain. For example, the happiness you get from a bartender handing you a drink is much less intense than the disappointment of spilling it. Due to loss aversion, giving up on an activity feels risky, and it won’t seem worth it unless the benefits obviously outweigh the loss of what you’re giving up. Remember that this is just a psychological quirk; there’s really very little risk involved in stopping an unproductive activity, and you can always resume it later if you want to.)

Step #2: Rebalance Your Schedule

If you’ve eliminated obvious waste but still need more resources to create the changes you want, Heath warns that you’ll face some harder decisions. That’s because finding those resources is now a matter of rebalancing the time and effort you’re putting toward each of your remaining activities, rather than cutting activities out entirely.

As always, the key is to be strategic. Heath cites the Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule), which is a common rule of thumb stating that 80% of what you achieve comes from just 20% of what you do. Therefore, identifying those few key activities will allow you to divert time and resources from less important areas, leading to greatly improved results.

For example, Microsoft discovered that approximately 80% of its software problems were caused by just 20% of its identified bugs. So, rather than trying to fix every single bug before release, they first focus on identifying and fixing that critical 20%. This means that, say, a memory leak affecting thousands of users would probably get immediate attention, while a minor display glitch that only affects a handful of users would be deferred to a later update.

Rebalance Your Schedule by Categorizing Your Activities

Heath notes that a few key activities can help you achieve your goals, while the rest divert time and resources. To determine which activities deserve more of your attention, you can use a simple tool that management consultant Stephen R. Covey describes in First Things First. Covey suggests creating a simple 2x2 table and using it to organize all of your activities based on two criteria: urgency and importance.

The first quadrant is for activities that are both important and urgent (or time-sensitive). These are tasks that must get done, and they must be done either as soon as possible or at a specific time. Therefore, first quadrant tasks should be your top priorities. Examples include doctors’ appointments and sudden emergencies.

The second quadrant is for activities that are important but not urgent. This is where you’ll most likely find the key activities that Heath discusses—those that help you achieve your goals—and where you should try to spend the majority of your time. Note that important activities also include things like rest, self-care, and fun—anything that’s necessary for your overall well-being belongs in this quadrant.

The third quadrant is for activities that are urgent but not important. Covey warns that this quadrant probably eats up more of your time than you realize because time-sensitive tasks can seem important even when they aren’t. Therefore, this is a good place to look for activities that you can devote less effort to, allowing you to focus on more impactful tasks from the second quadrant.

The fourth quadrant is for activities that are neither urgent nor important. These are tasks that you should have already removed from your schedule in Step #1: Eliminating Wasteful Activities. For example, binging a particular Netflix series isn’t something you need to do right now, and really isn’t something you need to do at all.

Harness Other People’s Energy for Change

So far, we’ve discussed how to identify areas of opportunity where you can make major changes with relatively little effort, and how to start strong by eliminating waste and focusing your efforts for a big initial push. In this final section, we’ll explore how you can harness people’s intrinsic motivations as a powerful source of energy for organizational changes. We’ll start by discussing the importance of understanding what your workers’ motivations are. We’ll then conclude by explaining why it’s often more effective to empower others to create change and solve problems, rather than trying to handle everything personally.

(Shortform note: If you’re not in a leadership role, it might seem like there’s no way for you to drive change by harnessing other people’s drives and energy. However, in The Effective Executive, management consultant Peter F. Drucker says you can still support your company (and yourself) by “managing up.” This means unobtrusively helping your boss do the best work they can, which in turn helps drive the organization’s success. To connect this concept to Heath’s principles of harnessing other people’s motivations, you could make an effort to learn what your supervisor, manager, or people even higher up in the company really value, then look for opportunities to present your desired changes as ways to support those values.)

Understand What Your Workers Want

Heath begins by saying that one of the most powerful yet underutilized resources is people’s intrinsic motivation (their drive to do work for its inherent satisfaction rather than an external reward). This means you can identify where your workers’ existing interests align with the changes you want to make, rather than trying to convince them to care about your priorities. By doing so, you’ll create sustainable energy for change—people will motivate themselves, rather than needing your constant attention to keep a project moving.

(Shortform note: Intrinsic motivation is generally considered more powerful and longer-lasting than extrinsic motivation (rewards like money and renown). This is because intrinsic motivation means the activity is rewarding in and of itself, so people are likely to keep doing that activity of their own volition—in this case, working to make positive changes to their workplace. In contrast, extrinsic motivation only lasts as long as the rewards do.)

To tap into your workers’ intrinsic motivation, you must help them see connections between their interests and organizational needs. Therefore, the first step is to make sure you understand what your people care about. For instance, what values are most important to them? Which aspects of their work do they find engaging, and what problems frequently frustrate them? Once you understand your workers, you can start thinking about how to leverage their individual skills and personalities.

(Shortform note: In Humanocracy, authors Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini agree that leveraging your employees’ individual interests helps them to stay engaged and do their best work. Therefore, this strategy is beneficial for an organization at all times, not just when you’re trying to make a specific change. Other factors that drive employee engagement are autonomy (the freedom to find their own ways of doing things), growth (the chance to expand their skills through interesting new challenges), a sense of connection with their coworkers, and a company mission that resonates with them.)

Empower Your Workers

Heath’s final piece of advice is to give your people personal ownership over identifying problems and developing solutions. He argues that this is both more effective and more efficient than trying to lead every change initiative yourself.

He says that the people who do the hands-on work (as opposed to supervisors, managers, or executives) often have the best ideas for improving an organization and its processes. Employees just need leadership’s permission, guidance, and support to implement their ideas. Therefore, Heath urges you to clearly communicate what needs to be done, but let your workers figure out how to do it. They’re likely to come up with possibilities and opportunities that you would never have found on your own.

Empowerment Requires Transparency and Accountability

Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings discusses employee empowerment in No Rules Rules. He explains that empowerment is a key part of Netflix’s business strategy, accompanied by transparency and accountability.

Transparency: Your workers probably don’t have access to all of the same information that you do. If that’s the case, their ideas might benefit their own department at others’ expense, or fail because of circumstances they couldn’t possibly have predicted. Therefore, Hastings urges you to make your company totally transparent to your employees: Give them access to financial data, explain why certain people got hired or fired, warn them if their own jobs could be at risk, and make sure to own up to your mistakes. The more information your staff has, the more effective their initiatives will be.

Accountability: Accountability means that your workers are free to make their own decisions and undertake pet projects, but they must also be ready to accept the consequences of their decisions. Good ideas that help the company should result in recognition and, perhaps, some form of reward. On the other hand, an employee whose initiative does more harm than good must be prepared to undo the damage as much as possible, learn from the experience, and explain how they’ll avoid similar mistakes in the future.