Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster
Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working by Dan Heath
Published in January 2025
Reset is a book about organizational change. Would higher ed leaders looking to catalyze change at their institutions benefit from reading Reset? Sure—but with some cautions.
In Reset, Dan Heath tries to explain why most organizational change efforts fail—and how to do it right. His central observation is that change efforts are too often imposed from above rather than based on the goals, motivations and constraints of the people doing the work. Heath observes that employees are motivated by tangible progress, not by abstract goals. Change efforts, therefore, must start with both an understanding of the day-to-day work that people in organizations accomplish and a willingness to listen to the people doing that work.
The analysis in Reset as to why organizational change efforts often fail may help to explain why large-scale change at universities is so difficult. Universities, unlike companies, are built around goals and values such as shared decision-making, spheres of defined employee (faculty) autonomy and decentralized authority. Observing the work and incentivizing behaviors is challenging in a decentralized organization, and change leadership methods that might be effective in a corporate setting carry a high risk of unintended consequences within a university.
One piece of advice in Reset that I found potentially directly actionable in a university setting is the “genius swap” concept. This change hack may not work at an institutional level, but I think it is a fantastic idea for departments and units to try. At your next team meeting (which will probably be over Zoom, but maybe not), have everyone write down on a digital or physical sticky note the tasks that they love doing the most (that give the most energy and result in visible progress) and those tasks they abhor to such a degree that they’d pay someone else to do them. The goal is to share those digital/physical sticky notes, then look for matches. In a large enough team, the odds are pretty good that the very task that some team members hate will be the one that others love.
Another organizational change method, again more applicable to departments/units than entire institutions, is taken from the world of couples counseling. This method is called the “miracle question.” This exercise involves teams playing a mental game where they imagine waking up one morning to find that the biggest problem facing their unit/department has been miraculously solved while everyone was sleeping. The key to this exercise is that there is no announcement or communication that the big challenge or problem has been solved. Instead, the team must articulate what observable changes will be present to illuminate the existence of the “miracle.” This exercise forces teams to clearly identify and discuss big challenges and how they manifest in observable outcomes, providing a backward-design opportunity to focus on potential actions to drive toward those desirable results.
Where Reset might have been more useful as a guide to organizational change, both inside and out of higher education, is if the book had spent more time discussing how organizations have changed post-pandemic. While day-to-day work routines have not dramatically changed in every company (or university), few workplaces (and campuses) operate as they did pre-pandemic. For universities, it is an open question as to the extent to which flexible staff work arrangements and hybrid/remote roles will continue.
Across our postsecondary ecosystem, I’ve heard commitments to have staff on campus four days per week and declarations that office space limitations and geographically distributed talent mean that hybrid/remote work is here to stay. I would have liked to hear Heath’s thoughts on making organizational changes in a distributed work environment, where communication is primarily digitally mediated. I suspect that change efforts where a significant proportion of the organization (or unit) is remote/hybrid will require a different playbook than that of an all-in-person workplace (or campus).
What books have you found most helpful as aids to organizational change within a university context?
What are you reading?
