Dan Heath > Quotes

“Don't think outside the box. Go box shopping. Keep trying on one after another until you find the one that catalyzes your thinking. A good box is like a lane marker on the highway. It's a constraint that liberates.”
― Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“leaders should be wary of common sense, which can be a poor substitute for evidence.)”
― Dan Heath, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

“When people’s well-being depends on hitting certain numbers, they get very interested in tilting the odds in their favor.”
― Dan Heath, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

“The postmortem for a problem can be the preamble to a solution.”
― Dan Heath, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

“The first thing to realize is that if you have a large organization filled with a relatively homogenous population of employees, then that composition did not happen by chance.”
― Dan Heath, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

“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, Reset: How to Change What's Not Working

“Averages are great for monitoring but terrible for diagnosis.”
― Dan Heath, Reset: How to Change What's Not Working

“The curse of a bad set of habits is that all the unnecessary things you’re doing actually come to seem necessary.”
― Dan Heath, Reset: How to Change What's Not Working

“Change is not AND, it's INSTEAD OF.”
― Dan Heath, Reset: How to Change What's Not Working

“You and a friend are having a picnic by the side of a river. Suddenly you hear a shout from the direction of the water—a child is drowning. Without thinking, you both dive in, grab the child, and swim to shore. Before you can recover, you hear another child cry for help. You and your friend jump back in the river to rescue her as well. Then another struggling child drifts into sight… and another… and another. The two of you can barely keep up. Suddenly, you see your friend wading out of the water, seeming to leave you alone. “Where are you going?” you demand. Your friend answers, “I’m going upstream to tackle the guy who’s throwing all these kids in the water.” —A public health parable (adapted from the original, which is commonly attributed to Irving Zola)”
― Dan Heath, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

“There is also a third kind of ghost victory that’s essentially a special case of the second. It occurs when measures become the mission. This is the most destructive form of ghost victory, because it’s possible to ace your measures while undermining your mission.”
― Dan Heath, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

“The world avoided” is an evocative phrase. In some ways it’s the goal of every upstream effort: To avoid a world where certain kinds of harm, injustice, disease, or hardship persist. The path to “the world avoided” is a difficult one because of the barriers we’ve seen: problem blindness (I don’t see the problem), lack of ownership (That problem is not mine to fix), and tunneling (I can’t deal with that right now).”
― Dan Heath, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

“All of this is probably intuitive: We would expect big problems in life to crowd out little problems. We don’t have the bandwidth to fix everything. But this issue of “bandwidth” is actually more insidious than that: Researchers have found that when people experience scarcity—of money or time or mental bandwidth—the harm is not that the big problems crowd out the little ones. The harm is that the little ones crowd out the big ones. Imagine a single mother who can barely pay the bills each month and who has maxed out her credit card.”
― Dan Heath, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

“Type 1 decisions, in his terminology, “are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible—one-way doors—and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before.” Type 2 decisions, though, are reversible. Two-way streets. If you make a decision and you don’t like the results, you just undo it. “Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups,” wrote Bezos.”
― Dan Heath, Reset: How to Change What's Not Working

“What if you told the story of your relationship problems as if you were the only one responsible?”
― Dan Heath, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

“In 1962, the San Francisco Giants were preparing to host the LA Dodgers for a crucial three-game series, late in the season. The Dodgers, led by master base stealer Maury Wills, were five and a half games ahead of the Giants. Before the series began, the Giants manager approached Matty Schwab, the team’s head groundskeeper, and asked if anything could be done—wink wink—to slow down Wills. “Dad and I were out at Candlestick before dawn the day the series was to begin,” said Jerry Schwab, Matty’s son, as quoted by Noel Hynd in Sports Illustrated. “We were installing a speed trap.” Hynd continues: Working by torchlight, the Schwabs dug up and removed the topsoil where Wills would take his lead off first base. Down in its place went a squishy swamp of sand, peat moss and water. Then they covered their chicanery with an inch of normal infield soil, making the 5- by 15-foot quagmire visually indistinguishable from the rest of the base path. The Dodgers were not fooled. When the team began batting practice, the players and coaches noticed the quicksand, and so did the umpire, who ordered it removed. Schwab and the grounds crew came out with wheelbarrows, shoveled up the mixture, and returned soon after with reloaded wheelbarrows. It was the same bog. They’d just mixed in some new dirt, which made it even looser. Somehow the umpires were satisfied. Then Matty Schwab ordered his son to water the infield. Generously. By the time the game started, there was basically a swamp between first and second base. (“They found two abalone under second base,” wrote an irritated Los Angeles sports columnist.) Maury Wills, en route to an MVP season, stole no bases, and neither did his teammates, and the Giants won, 11–2. Pleased, the Schwab father-son team continued to conjure more marshy conditions, and the Giants swept the Dodgers—and went on to leapfrog them to win the National League pennant. There’s something admirably mischievous about this story. I mean, it’s cheating, let’s be clear, but it’s cheeky cheating. It’s fun to think that the father-son groundskeeping team pulled one over on the National League’s MVP. The underdogs won one—they tilted the odds in favor of their home team.”
― Dan Heath, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

“what often prevents people from protesting is not a lack of motivation to protest, but rather their feeling that they lack the legitimacy to do so.”
― Dan Heath, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

“Stop reacting to problems and start preventing them.”
― Dan Heath, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

“They will skew. They will skim. They will downgrade. In the mindless pursuit of “hitting the numbers,” people will do anything that’s legal without the slightest remorse—even if it grossly violates the spirit of the mission—and they will find ways to look more favorably upon what’s illegal. All of us won’t stoop to this behavior all the time. But most of us will some of the time.”
― Dan Heath, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen