Reset

1. Unstick Your Work by Finding Leverage Points

Leverage Points are interventions where a little bit of effort yields disproportionate returns.

Strategic intervention. When facing seemingly insurmountable obstacles, the key is to identify leverage points – areas where small, well-aimed efforts can produce significant results. This approach avoids the trap of simply "shoving harder," which is often ineffective and exhausting. Instead, it emphasizes strategic thinking and targeted action.

Leverage and resources. A leverage point acts as a fulcrum, amplifying the impact of your resources. However, identifying the leverage point is only half the battle. You must also restack your resources, aligning them to push on that point with maximum force. This requires a shift in mindset from simply doing more to doing the right things more effectively.

Framework for change. The core framework involves two steps: finding leverage points and restacking resources. This simple yet powerful approach can transform seemingly intractable situations into opportunities for meaningful progress. The following takeaways will provide the tools and strategies to implement this framework effectively.

2. Go See the Work to Uncover Hidden Problems

When you go see the work, if you aren’t embarrassed by what you find, you probably aren’t looking closely enough.

Direct observation. To truly understand a system, you must directly observe the work being done, rather than relying on assumptions or reports. This involves shadowing employees, walking the production line, or mapping the flow of activities. The goal is to uncover hidden problems and inefficiencies that are not apparent from a distance.

Challenge assumptions. Glaring problems are sometimes the legacy of past solutions, improvisations, and workarounds that have become ingrained habits. By going and seeing the work, you can begin to detect and ultimately erode that accretion. You’ll spot places where you and your team have acclimated to problems—instead of fixing them.

Substitute experience for conjecture. Tom Chi, a co-founder of X, the ambitious R & D lab at Google, said that most corporate decisions are made using “guess-a-thons.” When we go and see the work, we stop debating ideas and start discovering them. This shift from conjecture to direct experience is crucial for identifying leverage points and driving meaningful change.

3. Consider the Goal of the Goal to Avoid Misdirected Efforts

You should embrace the same discipline in your own change efforts: Before you strain yourself to budge a boulder, it’s worth asking: Are you targeting the right boulder?

Mission alignment. It's crucial to ensure that your goals are aligned with your overall mission. Avoid the trap of relentlessly chasing a goal and triumphantly making progress on your measures, only to discover that it was all misdirected energy. This misalignment can lead to wasted effort and even counterproductive outcomes.

Miracle question. To avoid this misalignment, ask "What's the goal of the goal?" This question helps you identify the true intent behind your objectives and explore alternate pathways that might be better and easier. Another tool for exploring the “goal of the goal” is a technique that comes from the discipline of solutions-focused therapy. It’s called the “Miracle Question.”

Broaden and narrow. "What's the goal of the goal?" helps you see the destination and why it's important. (A Leverage Point must be something worth doing.) The Miracle Question helps you identify the first productive steps toward that destination. (A Leverage Point must be something doable.)

4. Study Bright Spots to Replicate Success

Bright spots make great Leverage Points because you know they’re possible.

Unearth successes. Instead of focusing solely on problems, identify and analyze your own best work – the "bright spots." These are instances where you or your team have achieved exceptional results. By understanding the circumstances that allowed you to succeed, you can replicate those conditions and scale your success.

Disaggregate averages. Averages are great for monitoring but terrible for diagnosis. To Find a Leverage Point, we must push beyond averages. Disaggregate our rolled-up numbers. Disentangle the individual people and products and customers that together compose our organizations.

Replicate circumstances. The key is to identify the specific circumstances that allowed the bright spots to flourish. This might involve studying the behaviors of high-performing employees, analyzing the processes used in successful projects, or examining the factors that contributed to positive outcomes. Once you understand these circumstances, you can replicate them in other areas.

5. Target the Constraint to Maximize Impact

It’s the #1 force that is holding you back from doing your work better or on a greater scale.

Identify the bottleneck. The constraint is the limiting factor that prevents you from achieving your goals. It's the #1 force that is holding you back from doing your work better or on a greater scale. By targeting the constraint, you can unlock significant improvements in overall performance.

Continuous improvement. What’s counterintuitive about constraints is that even smart-seeming investments can be worthless at improving the operations of a system if they don’t address the constraint. As one area gets better, the constraint shifts elsewhere.

Goal-oriented constraints. Constraints are contingent on a goal. If you were to ask, “What’s the constraint at my kid’s school?” that question doesn’t compute. Constraint on what? The constraint on smaller class sizes might be a lack of teachers. Or classroom space. The constraint on improving the student experience might be the lack of interactive lessons in classrooms.

6. Map the System to Spot Hidden Levers

There was a hidden lever: reducing methane emissions—and doing it quickly and dramatically.

Holistic perspective. To find leverage points, you need to zoom out and see the big picture. Study how all the pieces fit together. This involves mapping the system, understanding the relationships between different components, and identifying the "hidden levers" that can unlock significant change.

Transcend silos. The key move in mapping the system is to ascend above the silos: the individual units or departments within a larger organization (or across multiple organizations in the same field). Silos are the inevitable but regrettable consequence of a mission that’s too big to conquer holistically.

Challenge assumptions. As you come to understand how the different parts of a system interact, you’ll need to start asking incisive questions: Why do we do it that way? Is there a better way? The biggest challenge you have in thinking about systems is becoming aware of your assumptions, because the assumptions almost always drive how you view the system.

7. Restack Resources by Starting with a Burst

The 10 LLC formation documents that you have 90% completed are currently worthless to you and to your client.

Focused effort. To overcome inertia and achieve meaningful progress, begin with an intense and focused period of work. This "burst" of activity can generate momentum and create a sense of accomplishment. It's like opening a window that's stuck—the force you need to get it moving at all can be dramatically higher than the force you need to keep it moving up.

Combat time confetti. A burst is not about compelling people to work harder. It’s not saying, “Hustle and work an extra 10 hours this week because we’re in a burst!” It’s saying, “Let’s do this critical 40-hour project in one intact, focused week, because if we let it sprawl across six weeks, the 40-hour project will turn into a 115-hour project.” It’s about focus.

Rowing in sync. When people can row in the same boat, it solves a lot of collaboration challenges: It lets us communicate effortlessly. We all see each other’s efforts. We share an obvious destination and can easily perceive progress. By contrast, when we can’t be in the same room/boat together, the consequence is delays and misalignments and conflict.

8. Recycle Waste to Free Up Resources

Waste is anything that doesn’t add value to your work in the customer’s eyes.

Eliminate inefficiencies. Identify and eliminate activities that don't add value to your work in the customer's eyes. This "waste" can take many forms, from unnecessary steps in a process to underutilized talent. By recycling these resources, you can free up time, money, and energy to focus on more impactful activities.

DOWNTIME framework. Many organizations use the acronym DOWNTIME—inspired by the Toyota Production System, which for operations researchers is sort of like the Holy of Holies—to capture eight possible categories of waste: Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Nonutilized talent, Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Excess processing.

Shift right. When you clear lower-value activities from people’s schedules to free them up for higher-value ones, let’s call that “shifting right.” That’s a term I learned from Gary Kaplan, the president of AXA XL’s construction-insurance business. The point is to ensure that customers are paying for the resources they’re consuming.

9. Do Less AND More by Shifting Effort Strategically

Change is not AND, it’s INSTEAD OF.

Strategic reallocation. To make meaningful progress, you need to shift resources from lower-value work to higher-value activities. This involves making tough choices about what to stop doing in order to invest more in what truly matters. It’s about both cutting and investing.

Pareto principle. David Philippi’s firm, Strategex, grounds its work in the Pareto principle, the idea that 80% of the outputs/consequences come from 20% of the inputs/causes. Philippi’s job is to help clients distinguish the 20% from the 80%, and then to change their operations based on those insights.

Force ranking. Philippi and his team use a force-ranking process with business clients that we might adapt for our personal lives as well. They’ll rank-order the client’s customers from best to worst and then group them into quartiles. As we’ve seen, the bottom quartile of customers is almost always unprofitable.

10. Tap Motivation by Aligning Tasks with Desires

You can’t rearrange the furniture unless you’re invited into the house.

Harness intrinsic drive. To motivate people, we’ve got to pay attention to their desires. Their interests. Their hopes. And that requires empathy. Instead of trying to force change, tap into existing motivation by aligning tasks with people's interests and values. This creates a sense of ownership and increases engagement.

Genius swap. There’s an idea called the “genius swap” that I learned from my friends Christine and Becky Margiotta. On each note, she said, write down one task that’s on your plate today that you would pay someone to take over for you. Then, part 2: On different sticky notes, write down one task you’d be so excited to do that you’d pay for the privilege.

Find the intersection. Tapping motivation is about finding the intersection of “what’s required” and “what’s desired.” The starred area in the Venn diagram is your first move. Then again, the starred area is only a subset of the changes you need to make.

11. Let People Drive by Granting Autonomy

The least utilized resource in medicine is the patient.

Empowerment. Give your team the autonomy to own the change effort. This involves delegating decision-making authority, providing resources, and trusting them to find the best solutions. When people feel empowered, they are more likely to take initiative and drive progress.

Bounded autonomy. Autonomy is not always better—it’s possible to go too far. People do want to drive. But they also want guardrails and a safety net if something goes wrong. So ultimately, it seems, the desire is for bounded autonomy.

Spotify model. With low autonomy and low alignment, as shown above, it’s a micromanagement culture. Just be quiet and do what I say. With high autonomy but low alignment, teams do whatever they want and basically all run in different directions. Leaders are helpless and our product becomes a Frankenstein.

12. Accelerate Learning by Shrinking Feedback Loops

The right information in the right moment is the ultimate navigational aid.

Real-time data. Implement systems for gathering and analyzing feedback quickly. This allows you to identify problems, spot opportunities, and make adjustments in real time. The faster you can learn, the faster you can adapt and improve.

Testing is a replacement for guessing, not a replacement for judgment. You want to start with the best seeds from the best growers, and use the best soil and fertilizer, and then let nature take its course.

Iterative approach. The book’s framework—Finding Leverage Points and Restacking Resources—is usually iterative. You identify a priority and then you push on it. If it doesn’t go the way you hoped, you learn from the experience. Maybe there’s a better direction to push.

Last updated: March 3, 2025