When it comes to making change in the workplace, we often fixate on what's going wrong. But according to Dan Heath in his latest listen, Reset: How to Change What's Not Working, one of the keys to unlocking transformative progress might lie in studying what's already working. In this enlightening interview, Heath discusses his innovative "bright spots" approach and shares valuable insights into how managers and employees can drive meaningful change by analyzing and replicating successes. Plus, find out why being "inefficient" can be the best way to make progress.

Rachael Xerri: Why can it feel so overwhelming to make changes at work? What’s the best way to take that first step?

Dan Heath: It’s hard to make change because we’re stifled by the gravity of the way things have always worked. Paul Batalden, the health care expert, says, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” Meaning, if you aspire to different and better results, you’ve got to change the system, by definition.

And that sounds paralyzing: How do you change “the system”? It’s complex and multivariate. Where do you start? That’s why my book is devoted to the idea of finding “leverage points,” which are interventions where a little bit of effort can yield a lot of movement.

What are the biggest mistakes managers are making when it comes to their attempts at leading change?

I think we spend too much time agonizing about problems and not enough time analyzing successes. Back to the idea of leverage points: One strategy for finding them is to study our “bright spots,” which are the most positive results we’re currently capable of. If you’re trying to boost employee engagement, for instance, your attention is probably drawn to the negative side of the ledger. Who’s disengaged? Who’s threatening to leave? But we rarely obsess about the positive data on the other side of the spectrum! Who are your most engaged employees, and why? If you can reverse-engineer what made success possible in certain circumstances, you can fight to replicate those circumstances.

I’ve used this same strategy as a writer. I’m highly prone to procrastination, and rather than wallowing in my own weakness, I asked myself: What are my bright spots? When I’ve resisted procrastination and done good work, what were the circumstances? And from that very simple question came a lot of practical answers for me: working in the morning, shutting off the internet, not scheduling calls or meetings for a long block of time, keeping the coffee flowing, and so forth.

In Reset, you talk about how inefficiencies can sometimes lead to progress. As a Type A person, this is mind-boggling to me. Help me and others like me make sense of this apparent contradiction?

Efficiency has been oversold. “Efficiency” is oddly value-neutral as a concept—it just means tasks can be accomplished with minimal resources. But it says nothing about the worth of those tasks. Years ago, I wrote about a company that was fielding 20 million calls per year from customers who had questions about their travel reservations. Those calls were being handled quickly and politely. Efficiently! But it turned out that virtually all of those calls could be prevented with some simple process tweaks. So in that sense, you can get so addicted to efficiency that you blind yourself to a better approach.

Think about when you’re going to host friends or family, and you’re scrambling to get ready. You might make a last-minute run to the grocery store for, like, some oregano or coffee filters. That’s heinously inefficient! In an ideal world, you’d have just added that item to your next grocery trip a few days later. But what you wanted was to be ready for company. And being efficient was less important than being ready.

And that’s what I’m saying in the book: When we want to reset the way we work, we need to make adjustments that may be inefficient in the moment but are far better for us in the long term.

Any advice for employees who want to propose an operational change? How do we convince the higher-ups? Is this even the best way to go about it?

This is not a new idea, but I think it is effective: Make it easy for the boss to say “Yes.” If you come to the higher-ups with a concern/complaint/dissatisfaction, then ultimately, you’ve added to their to-do list. Now, in addition to all the other stresses and obligations they face, you’re hoping they’ll ponder and act on your issue. That’s a recipe for delay or inaction.

By contrast, imagine if you come with a story more like this: “I noticed this problem we were having, and my idea for handling it is to do X, and I’ve done the legwork to investigate how to make it happen, and I’m willing to own the effort. I just need your approval to try it.” You are dramatically more likely to get a thumbs-up on the second approach.

Now, obviously, if you want to change some kind of company-wide policy, then you can’t very well “own” that in the same way. But the quest still holds: The easier you can make it for someone to say “yes,” the better your odds.

If you could give just one piece of advice to managers on how to best motivate their teams, what would it be?

Tap motivation. That’s different from “getting buy-in,” which is what the management literature usually tells us. Here’s a slightly cynical take: Getting buy-in is, in essence, trying to convince people to want what you want instead of what they want. What I propose is a simpler approach. Imagine a Venn diagram with two circles: “What’s required” (that is, the activities/actions you must undertake to succeed in your change effort) and “What’s desired” (i.e., what your team would be excited to do, immediately, if they were in charge).

The intersection of those two circles is where you start your change effort! This is such a simple idea, but we rarely see it in practice, because we tend to treat change efforts as intellectual pursuits. We want to get from point A to point B, so we use our analytical skills to compute the shortest route. But if that route ignores motivation, then we’ve left the single most important factor out of the equation! Change is fueled by motivation.

Reset, written and read by Dan Heath, is available now.