Houston Southard

Dan HEath - Upstream

Globally-renowned business writer Dan Heath delivers a tour de force probing what pushes us downstream and leaves us oblivious to serious public and personal problems, introducing us to the thinkers who've overcome these obstacles and scored victories by switching to an upstream mindset.

Pediatricians, not auto manufacturers, lobbied for child safety belts, saving an estimated 11k toddler lives. A travel company introduced automated password recovery to recoup a 10b/yr loss. Brazilian mothers banned the 85% rate physician-preferred c-sections without getting explicit consent to cut subsequent NICU visits in half.

CPS doubled their graduation rate by tailoring engagement to at-risk teens by adjusting their daily schedules. Cosmo's editor wrote a book which made workplace sexual harassment anathema during a time when it was the norm. The largest carpet manufacturer's CEO found a way to recycle its fossil-fuel made nylon fibers into reusable carpet-backing vinyl crumb to reduce its carbon footprint to 0.

People don't talk about who pays for what doesn't happen, because we the accountability we sometimes feel we don’t have strips our legitimacy to protest. Confronted with complexity, we perform invisible cognitive substitutions, trading hard questions for easy ones. The noisy measures we look for produce short-term solutions that can doom upstream progress. With isolated events, it’s hard to convince people to collaborate, especially when hardship hasn’t forced them to.

So often we get stuck in a cycle of response. We put out fires. We deal with emergencies. We stay downstream, never heading upstream to fix the systems that caused those problems. Covering problem blindness, psychological standing, scarcity tunneling, finding leverage, forward-deployment, and ghost victories, Dan's plea is for us to understand we can pay to fix problems once they happen, or we can pay in advance to prevent them. “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

The message: to bristle against the urge to be an immediate hero. How the real heroes are in the shadows, thankless, because they prevented problems requiring heroic action in the first place.