We love Superheroes. But Dan Heath’s Upstream is about putting Superheroes out of business. It is about the mindset and efforts required to prevent problems; it’s about systems thinking and moving upstream - making interventions there - to attain massive long-term good.

1. Upstream
Dan Heath
Book Summary

2. When you spend years responding to problems, you can sometimes
overlook the fact that you could be preventing them.
Downstream actions react to problems once they’ve occurred. Upstream
efforts aim to prevent those from happening.

3. ‘When we create organizations, we’re doing it to give people focus. We’re
giving them a license to be myopic. We’re saying; this is your problem.
Define your mission and create your strategy and align your resources to
solve that problem. And you have the divine right to ignore all of the other
stuff that doesn’t align with that. “
Focus is both the strength and the weakness of organizations. The
specialization inherent in organizations creates great efficiencies. But it also
deters efforts to integrate in new, advantageous ways. In upstream ways.

4. We favor reaction because its more tangible. Downstream work is easier to
see and measure. But there is maddening ambiguity about upstream efforts.
Example of two police officers. One spends time at a street corner where
many accidents happen, her visible presence makes drivers more careful
and might prevent accidents. The second officer hides around corners and
fines prohibited-turn violations.

5. A tell-tale sign of upstream work is that it involves systems thinking. We can
intervene at many points along an almost limitless timeline.
But while upstream solutions are generally more desirable, they’re also more
complex and ambiguous. The efforts are broader, slower and hazier - but
when they work, they can accomplish massive and long-term lasting good.

6. The Three Barriers to upstream thinking; Problem Blindness, A Lack Of
Ownership and Tunneling.

7. “Problem Blindness” – a belief that negative outcomes are natural or
inevitable. Out of our control. When we don’t see a problem, we can’t solve
it. And that blindness can create passivity even in the face of enormous
harm.
Problem blindness is as much a political phenomenon as a scientific one.
We spend time in negotiations about what we will sanction as a ‘problem’ in
our lives and our world. These are important because once something is
coded as a ‘problem’ it demands a solution.

8. A lack of ownership means that the parties who are capable of addressing
the problem as saying, that’s not mine to fix.
That’s because upstream work is, despite the enormous stakes, is optional.

9. When people are juggling a lot of problems, they give up trying to solve
them all. they adopt tunnel vision. There is no long-term planning or strategic
prioritization of issues.
Tunneling confines us to short-term, reactive thinking.
If you can’t systemically solve problems, it dooms you to stay in an endless
cycle of reaction. Tunneling begets more tunneling.
Tunneling can also be emotionally rewarding – the kind of glory that comes
from stopping a big screw-up at the last second.

10. When your emphasis is always forward, forward, forward, you never stop
to ask whether you’re going in the right direction.

11. To escape the tunnel, you need slack.
Slack means a reserve of time or resources that can be spent on problem
solving.

12. Seven Questions for Upstream Leaders.
How will you unite the right people?
How will you change the system?
Where can you find the point of leverage?
How will you get early warning of the problem?
How will you know you are succeeding?
How will you avoid doing harm?
Who will pay for what does not happen?

13. Upstream interventions often require a new kind of integration amongst
splintered components. To succeed, you need to surround the problem –
attract people who can address all the key dimensions of the issue.

14. Upstream work is about reducing the probabilities that problems will
happen, and for that reason, the work must culminate in systems change.
Because systems are the source of those probabilities.
To change the system is to change the rules that govern us or the culture
that influences us.
Systems change starts with a spark of courage. A group of people unite
behind a common cause and they demand change. But a spark can’t last
forever.
The endgame is to eliminate the need for courage, to render it unnecessary,
because it has forced change within the system.

15. When we can foresee a problem, we have the maneuvering room to fix it.
With the rise of ioT, advance warning solutions will become more common,
but the best early-detection sensors are people. To anticipate problems, we
need eyes and ears in the environment.

16. Any upstream effort that makes use of short-term measures should devote
time to careful consideration of how the measures might be misused. Four
tests for measures; the ‘rising tide’ test, the misalignment test, the lazy
bureaucrat test and defiling-the-mission test.

17. Upstream interventions tinker with complex systems and we should expect
reactions and consequences beyond the immediate scope of work.
In ‘shaping the water’, we will create ripple effects.
We’ve got to look outside the lines of our work. Zoom out and pan from side
to side. Ask, what are the second order effects of our efforts.
While we can never anticipate everything, so we need to rely on
experimentation guided by feedback loops.

18. Preparing for a speculative future ones is, by definition, not urgent. As a
result, its hard to convene people. Its hard to get funds authorized. Its hard to
convince people to collaborate when hardship hasn’t forced them to.
Building a habit is one way to counteract this downstream bias.
Think emergency drills.

19. Upstream thinking is not just for organizations, its for individuals too. where
there’s a recurring problem occurring in your life, go upstream. And don’t let
the problem’s longevity deter you from acting.
‘the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second-best time is now’

20. Three suggestions for upstream efforts.
1. ‘Be impatient for actions but patient for outcomes’
2. Macro starts with micro. You cant understand a problem until
you’ve seen it up close.
3. Favor scoreboards over pills. Don’t obsess about formulating the
perfect solution before you begin your work; instead, take ownership
of the underlying problem and start slogging forward.