The Art of Manliness - #591： Solve Problems Before They Become Problems

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast so often in life

00:00:11.560 we get stuck in a cycle of reaction tackle the most urgent task we deal with emergencies we put

00:00:16.220 out fires we intuitively know we'd be better off we figured out a way to be more proactive rather

00:00:20.660 than reactive thereby preventing fires from starting in the first place but we can't seem

00:00:24.480 to switch our approach my guest day explores why that is what we can do to start solving the

00:00:28.820 problems of business life and society before they become problems his name is Dan Heath today we

00:00:33.340 talk about his latest book upstream the quest to solve problems before they happen we begin our

00:00:37.520 conversation discussing the issues that keep us from nipping problems in the bud including problem

00:00:41.480 blindness lack of ownership and tunneling along the way Dan shares insights on how to overcome these

00:00:46.140 roadblocks we then shift gears and explore how to find the best upstream solutions to problems which

00:00:50.780 requires getting as close as possible to the problem while also being able to survey the system it's

00:00:54.860 embedded in from a bird's eye view Dan explains the principles at play with plenty of real life

00:00:59.040 examples of how these tactics were used to effectively tackle big seemingly intractable social problems lots

00:01:04.500 of great insights that you can apply to solving problems in your personal life business and

00:01:07.680 community after the show's over check out our show notes at aom.is slash upstream

00:01:12.160 all right Dan Heath welcome to the show hey thanks Brett glad to be here so I've been following your

00:01:27.700 work for a long time since made to stick and you got a new book out upstream the quest to solve

00:01:33.080 problems before they happen curious how does this book a continuation of the work you've done with

00:01:38.360 your brother chip on your other books well this one was a slow burn to be honest the first time

00:01:44.440 I opened a file called upstream notes was 2009 so this has been in the back of my brain for over a

00:01:51.800 decade and there were two things that happened right about the same time that got me interested in

00:01:57.500 this topic the first was I heard a parable somewhere I can't even remember where but the parable goes like

00:02:03.660 this you and a friend are having a picnic on the side of of a river and uh just as you've kind of

00:02:11.520 laid out your picnic blanket you're ready to get started you hear a scream you look behind you there's

00:02:16.340 a child in the river apparently drowning splashing around and so you and your friend just instinctively

00:02:21.940 jump in grab the kid bring him to shore and just as your adrenaline from the save starts to die down a

00:02:29.400 bit you hear another scream you look back there's a little girl in the river drowning so back in you go

00:02:35.200 you fish her out and no sooner have you brought her to shore that you look back there's two more kids

00:02:40.080 drowning in the river and you begin this kind of revolving door of rescue in and out and just as

00:02:45.540 you're starting to get really fatigued from this work you notice your friend is wading over to the

00:02:50.320 shore and steps out as if to leave you alone and you say hey where are you going I can't do this by

00:02:56.040 myself there's all these kids drowning and your friend says I'm going upstream to tackle the guy

00:03:01.920 who's throwing all these kids in the river and that story really stuck with me and then it feels

00:03:08.880 like maybe a month later I was having a conversation with an assistant police chief in a Canadian city and

00:03:15.020 he told me a story that that just resonated with that parable and and what he told me was was was a kind

00:03:22.120 of thought experiment where he said imagine you got two police officers and one of them goes downtown

00:03:29.440 in the morning to an intersection that is kind of notoriously chaotic and and just by stationing

00:03:35.860 herself there visibly she gets the drivers to be a bit more cautious to be more careful and her presence

00:03:42.300 deters accidents from happening and then the second officer goes to a different part of downtown where

00:03:48.760 there's a prohibited right turn sign and she hides around the corner and waits for people to break that

00:03:54.900 rule and then she nabs them and gives them a ticket and his question was which of these officers is doing

00:03:59.860 more for public safety and he said indisputably it's the first that's preventing accidents from happening

00:04:06.140 but he said guess who gets promoted in the department guess who gets rewarded guess who gets raised

00:04:12.240 it's the second officer because she comes back with this stack full of tickets that's the evidence of her work

00:04:19.000 and something about those two things together just got me thinking in depth about this issue of

00:04:25.920 why are we so often drawn to reactive elements of life like the cop who's reacting to people who make this

00:04:33.120 illegal turn when it theoretically at least would be desirable to do a better job preventing

00:04:39.980 problems going upstream and tackling the guy who's throwing the kids in the river rather than

00:04:44.180 perpetually saving the kids downstream so that was the birth of this well yeah as you said it's fun i

00:04:50.080 mean it's i mean it's not fun but it is kind of fun to react to problems because you feel important

00:04:53.980 you feel like you're doing something then as opposed to you know thinking about well how can we make this

00:04:59.340 thing not happen at all yeah i mean there's a kind of heroism that comes from downstream response i mean

00:05:06.360 in some of the obvious ways you know a firefighter putting out flames or

00:05:10.200 a lifeguard jumping in to to save someone who's drowning there's genuine heroism there

00:05:14.660 we even have forms of it in in white collar jobs you know the the person who

00:05:19.740 stays up all night to meet the critical deadline and gets a lot of praise around the office and

00:05:25.300 and i suspect we all know some people who almost seem to live for those moments in fact i've gotten some

00:05:32.200 some emails from some people who said they suspect that their colleagues almost want the flames to

00:05:37.360 break out so they can be the firefighter and i think while certainly we should be glad there are

00:05:42.660 people around to save the day i mean my point of view is the need for heroics is usually pretty good

00:05:49.460 evidence that there's a systems problem right it's it's great that the lifeguard saves the kids in the

00:05:54.760 ymca pool but if things have been properly configured if you didn't have kids in the pool who are weak

00:06:00.480 swimmers if the lifeguard chair had been put exactly where it's supposed to be so there are no blind

00:06:04.960 spots for the lifeguard if the lifeguard had been taught better scanning techniques maybe there never

00:06:09.520 would have been a drowning incident in the first place and so that that riff on heroism like is a

00:06:15.340 hero the person who saves the day or is a hero the person who keeps the day from needing to be saved

00:06:20.900 that really got in my head so let's talk about so i mean i think we all agree we'd rather like

00:06:26.760 prevent the problems then you have to deal with them when they do happen but as you start off in

00:06:31.740 the book you talk about how it's really hard to first solve downstream problems because we can't

00:06:36.960 even oftentimes can't even see that the problem exists and you call this problem blindness and in

00:06:42.120 your research you say there's a lot of things going on psychologically sociologically that causes

00:06:46.960 this problem blindness what's going on there yeah problem blindness says oftentimes we can't see

00:06:54.660 the problems around us or or even if we can see them we code them as if they're just inevitable

00:07:01.680 like let me give you an example there was a guy named marcus elliott who was a medical doctor that

00:07:07.340 was interested in sports and back in 1999 he was hired by the patriots the football team

00:07:12.860 to join their staff they've been plagued by hamstring injuries especially from some of their skill

00:07:18.500 players a lot of wide receivers out it had 22 major hamstring injuries the season before and it was just

00:07:23.880 really wreaking havoc with their performance so marcus elliott comes in and in the mental model at

00:07:29.920 that time in pro sports especially football was you know look this is the dangerous game it's a violent

00:07:36.420 game people are going to get hurt that's just the way it is of course but marcus elliott had a very

00:07:42.260 different philosophy his point of view was most of the injuries that happen in pro football are actually

00:07:47.760 the result of subpar training inadequate training and so he started this this brand new regime at

00:07:53.800 the patriots where before it was like a one-size-fits-all program it's like people that were in radically

00:08:01.200 different positions you know nose tackle and wide receiver were getting generically speaking the same

00:08:07.060 kind of training they're trying to get stronger they're lifting weights and so marcus elliott starts

00:08:11.760 doing this this individualized training where first he assesses them on a variety of things and

00:08:16.720 and he's looking in particular for muscle imbalances because what often creates an injury is is when for

00:08:22.500 instance your right hamstring is significantly stronger than your left and that can show up in

00:08:26.840 ways that that end in injury and so he starts doing these kind of one-off training programs to make sure

00:08:32.140 there was balance among muscle groups that they were preparing for the kinds of of skilled maneuvers

00:08:38.160 they'd be doing during the game and the proof was in the pudding the season after he had begun his

00:08:43.100 regimen there were three hamstring injuries versus 22 and so all of a sudden marcus elliott is making

00:08:50.180 believers out of people it's like the attitude before well injuries are just part of the game they

00:08:55.520 always will be here it's a violent game of course that happens that's problem blindness that means we may

00:09:01.340 be aware certainly we're aware when athletes get hurt but we just assume there's nothing we can do about

00:09:06.880 that and it takes in these situations someone like marcus elliott to come along and say hey wait a minute

00:09:13.180 what we're coding as inevitable what we're coding is natural is neither like we can do something about

00:09:19.880 this we can fix that problem and that's how we overcome problem blindness but how was he able to see that

00:09:25.820 there was a problem like what was it about marcus that made him different i think with people like marcus what

00:09:31.880 happens is they have an understanding of the problem that's deeper than most people i mean

00:09:38.080 keep in mind he's a medical doctor it's not often you find medical doctors and end up as trainers on

00:09:42.980 on pro teams and so you know when i'm talking to him on the phone he he no longer works with the

00:09:48.280 patriots he has his own sports training outfit and he does this this just incredibly obsessive analysis

00:09:56.080 of pro athletes i would almost describe it like an mri for the way pro athletes move i mean he they'll

00:10:03.560 train multiple cameras and all these diagnostics on on nba athletes and watch how they pivot and jump

00:10:10.200 and land and and some of the stuff he was telling me i i literally could not even understand i just don't

00:10:15.240 have enough knowledge of physiology but he can get down to the granular detail of you know look at the way

00:10:21.120 you landed after that rebound and look at the tension that that's running across your knee and

00:10:26.280 based on our diagnostics people who have the kind of tension that you're experiencing right now

00:10:30.960 almost always have a knee injury within the next season or two and so when you're that close to a

00:10:38.100 problem you start spotting leverage points you start spotting opportunities for change and i think

00:10:44.400 that's what allows them to see that there's hope another issue you say that keeps people from

00:10:49.540 actually working on these upstream solving these problems upstream is that there's a lack of

00:10:53.380 ownership that there's no one held accountable for solving those problems why why is that a lot of

00:10:59.220 times it has to do with with silos that develop in organizations i'm sure everybody that works in

00:11:04.700 business knows exactly what i'm talking about like here's an example from expedia the online travel

00:11:10.380 site so back in in 2012 this guy named ryan o'neill who worked in the customer experience unit he was

00:11:17.940 looking at some data and and he discovered something that kind of blew his mind and that

00:11:22.620 was that at that time for every hundred people who booked you know what a flight or a hotel or a car

00:11:29.800 on expedia 58 of them end up calling the call center for support 58 out of 100 now the whole point of an

00:11:38.200 online travel site is presumably self-service and yet the that not the vast majority but the majority of

00:11:44.220 customers using the site ended up needing intervention so he's like what what in the

00:11:48.240 world is going on here so he starts digging into the data figuring out why are customers calling us

00:11:52.680 the number one reason customers were calling was to get a copy of their itinerary 20 million calls

00:12:01.480 were logged in 2012 alone for people trying to get a copy of their itinerary and so this is kind of

00:12:06.380 one of those forehead slapping moments where you're like how could this have happened why was there not

00:12:11.360 an alarm going off when we logged like our eight millionth call for a copy of the itinerary and so

00:12:17.860 the ceo at that time worked with ryan o'neill to create a war room where they started analyzing this

00:12:23.500 question and figuring out hey we need to change things we need to start asking a different question

00:12:27.660 how do we keep people from needing to call us and the fixes were the easiest thing in the world right i

00:12:32.680 mean you give customers tools to get their own itinerary you change the way you send out the email so

00:12:37.280 they don't end up in spam filters and on and on and on the solution was not the hard part what made

00:12:42.400 this hard was that expedia was organized in a way where it was in everyone's interest to ignore or

00:12:50.420 neglect this problem so you think about the silos there's a marketing team whose job it is to try to

00:12:56.520 attract people to come to expedia instead of one of the other travel sites they get measured on you know

00:13:01.780 numbers of people coming and then you've got a product team whose job it is to make the site so

00:13:06.800 easy to use that you're just constantly pushing people toward a transaction and so they're measured

00:13:11.560 on can we get transactions closed and then you've got a web team that's measured on uptime and and speed

00:13:17.460 and then you've got the customer call center and they're measured on what how quickly can i get

00:13:22.500 somebody off the phone and how satisfied are they with the resolution so all those goals make kind of

00:13:28.780 superficial sense when you hear them but then you realize something it's literally no one's job

00:13:34.140 to stop a customer from needing to call nobody i mean it's even worse than that no one would even get

00:13:40.280 a gold star if that happened it's not on anybody's scoreboard and so this is the kind of thing that

00:13:45.340 happens in organizations where because we're constantly pushing for efficiencies and specialization

00:13:51.460 because we want to wring more productivity out of the process we start missing what might be

00:13:58.180 major major problems because they just transcend the gaps between silos and once expedia caught on to

00:14:05.100 that and once they decided to push their way upstream it turned out the solutions were actually very very

00:14:09.880 simple and those 20 million calls just vanished so another barrier is what you call tunneling what do

00:14:16.700 you mean by by that there's a great research study by this um this woman named anita tucker who

00:14:22.240 for her dissertation at harvard she followed nurses around for hundreds of hours just shadowed them to

00:14:28.080 see what their life was like and what she found was they're solving problems constantly you know they

00:14:33.700 they go to get a towel for a patient there's no more towel so they have to figure out where to get a

00:14:37.840 towel they ask for some medication from the pharmacy and they get the wrong medicine or the wrong dose or

00:14:42.820 the pharmacy's out or some equipment breaks anita tucker talks about this one day that a woman was

00:14:48.420 trying to discharge a mother who just had birth and in the discharge process they realized the baby

00:14:54.580 doesn't have the security anklet that goes you know around its ankle to they're intended to keep

00:15:00.140 children from being abducted and and so when it's missing it's a big deal they hunt around for it

00:15:04.460 it turns up in the baby's bassinet so great they can get the mother checked out then three hours later

00:15:10.400 the same exact thing happens with a different baby you know again missing an anklet this time they do

00:15:15.560 a frantic search can't find it so they had to create another way to check the mother out and honor

00:15:20.580 security and and so that was that and so this portrait that anita tucker is painting is nurses are

00:15:28.500 responsive they are improvisational they're resourceful they don't go running to the boss every

00:15:35.320 time something goes wrong they can kind of own things and work around problems and when you think about

00:15:39.860 it like that it's pretty pretty inspirational it's a great portrait but then from another perspective

00:15:44.980 you look at the situation and you go this is the description of a system that will never improve

00:15:52.220 a system that never learns right because if you are constantly working around problems and you're

00:15:59.580 never solving those problems at the systems level you know why are we running out of towels why are

00:16:04.620 these anklets slipping off baby's ankles you're dooming yourself to solving those problems forever

00:16:10.960 now to be clear this is not a nurse thing i'm not picking on nurses i think anita tucker could have

00:16:16.740 shadowed probably any profession and found exactly the same thing and the phenomenon she discovered

00:16:22.540 i think is well described by some psychologist who wrote a book called scarcity and they call this

00:16:28.680 tunneling and they say that tunneling happens when we have a scarcity of of time or resources to combat

00:16:36.540 the problems we're facing and when we have that scarcity it's almost like we we give up thinking

00:16:42.640 that we can solve all the problems on our plate and we may even give up trying to prioritize them

00:16:48.160 and it just becomes this experience where we feel like we're in a tunnel you know just conjure up that

00:16:53.520 that mental image and in a tunnel all you're thinking about is god how do i get forward if

00:17:00.360 there's something blocking my way i want to get it behind me as quick as possible i just have to keep

00:17:05.040 moving you know those nurses okay i'm out of towels i don't have time to do like root cause analysis on

00:17:11.100 why there's no towels i just i got 10 patients clamoring for my attention what am i going to do i got

00:17:15.180 to go steal a towel from the unit down the floor right and and that makes sense and that's familiar

00:17:21.040 behavior and i suspect all of us can empathize with tunneling but we just have to realize that

00:17:25.600 it's a trap that if we're stuck in the tunnel we stop asking the really important questions like

00:17:30.960 are we even going the right way you know are we headed to the destination might there be an entirely

00:17:36.780 different tunnel that would get us there faster or better so this is one of the key traps that i

00:17:41.900 think keeps us downstream tunneling well i think you talk about this in the book you know one problem

00:17:47.320 that we we spend a lot of time money and resources trying to solve downstream is poverty and poverty

00:17:52.740 is often caused by tunneling people who are in poverty they have scarcity of time resources bandwidth

00:17:58.940 and so they're just trying to put out all the fires they don't take the time they don't have the

00:18:02.880 ability to take the time out and they go okay what can i do to not have these problems in the first

00:18:06.920 place exactly right like if you look at something like payday loans which of course we all know are

00:18:12.940 just notoriously expensive and the aprs can be hundreds of percentage points a year and it can be a

00:18:20.100 real trap but but from the perspective of tunneling it makes sense like if you've got more problems than

00:18:26.140 you can handle if you've got a sick kid and you're working two jobs and you're already on thin ice and

00:18:31.200 you can't afford to miss any more days and and child care isn't easy for you and nutrition isn't easy

00:18:37.560 and then your car breaks down and it's like to keep your life in order i mean doesn't it make sense

00:18:44.220 that you would just walk down the street to the payday loan place and get enough money to fix your

00:18:48.460 car so you can get to work that day and not get fired it's like we come from from outside with this

00:18:53.740 attitude of of kind of pristine financial advice thinking and oh well you know that that's not wise

00:19:00.680 to make a decision where you have an apr that's so high but but if you're in the tunnel it looks like a

00:19:05.500 solution and i think that's why you know to make some of these upstream solutions possible we first

00:19:11.220 have to find ways to escape the tunnel yeah you got to provide some slack in your life exactly and i

00:19:16.840 think um i mean it's easy to say in the case of poverty i i i don't think i have the answers i wish

00:19:22.040 i wish someone did to figure out how do we get more slack in the system in organizations i think it's it's

00:19:27.620 slightly more practical though still difficult like in that nurse situation you know the way i portrayed it

00:19:33.820 seem like well they're going to be stuck in the tunnel forever but i think there are surprisingly

00:19:38.580 easy ways to at least provide an escape a temporary escape like there's a bunch of health systems that

00:19:45.060 have adopted what are called safety huddles where you know every day usually in the morning they have

00:19:50.560 an all hands meeting it might be very quick 15 20 minutes where they talk about safety near misses from

00:19:58.420 the day before you know things that went wrong or almost went wrong you know maybe a the wrong

00:20:03.540 medication almost delivered to a patient caught at the last second and they talk about hey how do we

00:20:08.220 keep those kinds of things from happening in the future and that's systems thinking and they look at

00:20:12.600 the day ahead of them they say is there anything really different or complex that's going to be

00:20:16.820 happening today that we should watch out for and what i love about that is that's a kind of

00:20:22.400 structured way to get out of the tunnel right that would have been the perfect opportunity for that

00:20:27.220 nurse dealing with the missing security anklets on babies to say hey this weird thing happened

00:20:32.660 yesterday twice with the anklets they're falling off and i swear we're putting them on tight like we

00:20:37.900 need to figure out what's going on here we need to deputize someone to take this over and so so even a

00:20:42.980 temporary escape from the tunnel i think can be really powerful one thing i've done personally in my

00:20:48.260 in my life my wife and i have done is like whenever i'm sure we all have had those experiences where

00:20:51.560 we're just getting overwhelmed everything's kind of piling up because you got sick kids got sick stuff

00:20:56.120 happened at work and you're just like i can't get this done so we have this thing called a reset day

00:21:00.520 where we just take a day off during the work week so the kids are at school we plow through all those

00:21:05.900 things have been building up and then we also take time to figure out how can we prevent this from

00:21:09.400 happening again and we do it i don't it's just you do when you feel like you need it but i've found

00:21:14.180 that to be like a way to provide slack and it pays off that taking that day off pays off dividends

00:21:19.300 down the road i love that idea and it's the perfect illustration of how slack can be the antidote

00:21:25.740 to tunneling i i've been fascinated by in researching this book you know probably we're going to talk a

00:21:31.920 lot about big social issues but i've also been fascinated by how upstream thinking can can make

00:21:38.000 a difference in our personal lives like i talked to this guy who you know all couples have these

00:21:42.620 recurring things that they bicker about uh you know you left the toilet seat up again and that sort of

00:21:47.820 thing so his thing with his wife was the hallway light and he was always going in and out usually

00:21:53.800 to take the dog out and so he'd flip on the hallway light and he'd come back in and he'd forget to turn

00:21:58.860 it off and that just irritated his wife so it became like this little thing that they bickered about

00:22:03.560 and one day all of a sudden he realizes this thing we've been fighting about that's like a recurring

00:22:08.400 irritant in our relationship i can solve this like i can make this go away forever and so he files for

00:22:16.680 divorce i'm totally kidding he didn't file for divorce no it was a much simpler fix he went to

00:22:23.640 home depot and he bought what's called a light timer which is just like a different plate that goes over

00:22:29.040 your light switch and you can press a button that says five minutes the light will turn on for five

00:22:33.620 minutes and then it'll auto turn itself off and and i just love stories like that because how many

00:22:40.120 places in our life have we just learned to adapt to something we've adapted to a problem we've just

00:22:47.300 come to accept that well we're forever going to be bickering about that one thing when i mean for god's

00:22:53.340 sake it took one trip to home depot and a ten dollar light plate and now this irritant has disappeared from

00:22:59.760 this couple's existence forever i mean that's that's upstream that actually inspired me so one of the

00:23:05.320 irritants we have in our families that with with ipads so we have like you know ipad tablets for

00:23:10.280 each of our kids and the problem is charging them like they're always running out it's like one percent

00:23:14.560 and like you only have one cable and we'd always like plug it in the computer and they'd always like

00:23:19.440 bicker about who gets it and i was like i'm tired it's like almost every other night and so i just i

00:23:23.460 decided to buy a hub for usb chargers and it's gonna put it in there they're gonna be able to plug in

00:23:29.480 their ipads at night both of them and not gonna have that issue anymore and i'm looking forward i love that

00:23:34.340 i love it and then and then you're kicking yourself like why didn't i do this like three

00:23:39.200 years ago like my favorite example i love this one because it's just so wonderfully trivial so this

00:23:46.700 woman was talking about she got transferred to a different department at work and she had to move

00:23:51.820 desks and her desk was right by one of those heavy doors that goes into a stairwell and and every time

00:23:59.880 that door was open from somebody coming up the stairs it had this just horrible squeak and it

00:24:05.480 just you know drove her crazy and so she puts up with this for like two days and then on the third

00:24:12.100 day she brings in like a can of wd-40 and just lubes up the hinges the squeak disappears and people on the

00:24:19.740 floor treat her like she is a miracle worker they are like astonished that she solved this problem

00:24:24.960 that they've probably been living with for months or for years and and that's what i mean about our

00:24:30.740 capacity to adapt to situations can almost be a curse right because we we come to just accept that

00:24:38.120 certain problems are part of our world that that really don't need to be well these three things

00:24:43.400 happened there so she saw a problem she took ownership of the problem when she didn't have to

00:24:47.480 like she had to volunteer for it like it wasn't assigned to her and then she what she got out of the

00:24:52.140 tunnel she did something about it exactly right and and your ownership point is is the one that i

00:24:58.200 really want to call out because this is a very very strange thing about upstream versus downstream

00:25:03.320 problem solving so with downstream problems you know you can almost always pinpoint when something goes

00:25:11.060 wrong whose job is it to fix you know a house catches on fire you know of course it's going to be the fire

00:25:17.200 department's going to fix that you know or or at the ymca pool someone's thrashing it's going to be

00:25:22.500 the lifeguard's job to fix that but when you flip it around and you say whose job is it to prevent

00:25:29.040 fires from happening all of a sudden the ownership gets very diffuse right well the homeowners have some

00:25:36.320 responsibility and the builders have some and the people who write building codes have some and

00:25:41.300 the fire department in the sense of education has some and all of a sudden when a problem doesn't

00:25:47.980 have an owner the chances are it's not going to get fixed and so this leads to a very odd conclusion which

00:25:53.680 is even though downstream activity is is obligated and almost mandatory like of course if there's a

00:26:00.980 problem we're going to fix it upstream activity even though the stakes can be enormous is often voluntary

00:26:08.360 i mean it's it's often chosen rather than demanded so upstream activity starts when somebody somewhere

00:26:16.020 says i didn't create this problem but damned if i'm not going to be the one who fixes it and sometimes

00:26:22.620 that's in trivial things like being the person who brings in the wd-40 to work sometimes it can be huge

00:26:27.980 things like telling some stories in the book about homelessness and substance abuse and others where

00:26:32.860 it was a group of people who voluntarily put on their shoulders the burden of solving that

00:26:38.180 problem we're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors and now back to the show

00:26:43.260 well this leads nicely to my next question so we talked about the barriers of of solving upstream

00:26:49.260 problem problems upstream once you do that you've looked at you have like seven questions that people

00:26:55.700 should ask themselves as they're trying to fine-tune what the problem is and work on working on a

00:26:59.660 solution for that problem and the first question you found that's useful is how do you unite the right

00:27:05.020 people because as you just said upstream problems the responsibility is diffuse it might be a whole

00:27:09.660 bunch of different people who are responsible that can solve that problem so how do you how do you find

00:27:15.180 those people who can actually help solve the problem before it happens this was one theme that that i

00:27:21.700 noticed again and again and very different looking kinds of problems is that people learn to do what

00:27:27.200 i call surrounding the problem so i'll give you an example from there's a city called rockford in

00:27:32.820 illinois it's actually the second biggest city behind chicago and they had a problem as do many

00:27:39.580 cities this is a kind of a former factory town um that had gone into hard times after the great

00:27:45.060 recession and so they had a homelessness problem there and the mayor was a gentleman named larry morrissey

00:27:51.180 he was in his third term he'd been working on homelessness for nine years and by his own

00:27:56.220 account he said they'd made no progress and maybe even the problem had gotten worse so he'd become a bit

00:28:02.340 jaded about the issue of homelessness and around that time one of his colleagues challenges him to

00:28:08.120 take what was called the mayor's challenge which was a uh an initiative sponsored by the federal

00:28:12.680 government to encourage communities to try to end veteran homelessness in their cities and and so

00:28:18.020 morrissey is kind of skeptical he's like what's going to change we've been doing this for nine years

00:28:21.780 we've gotten nowhere he agrees reluctantly to take this challenge and about 10 months later

00:28:28.580 rockford becomes the first city in the united states to eliminate the problem of veteran homelessness

00:28:35.420 and so you just look at kind of the the bookends of that story and you go what in the world happened

00:28:40.980 in 10 months that didn't happen in nine years and it has to do with basically two things they they

00:28:47.040 changed a bunch of their their strategic and systems work which we can unpack later but but to me i think

00:28:53.000 the fundamental thing that they did was they changed the way they collaborated so the first thing they

00:28:58.840 did was you know back to that example of whose job is it to keep fires from happening question here is

00:29:05.300 whose job is it to keep homeless people from being on the streets and you could make a case for about a dozen

00:29:10.600 different parties the va has part of the ownership and the police department uh the the health care

00:29:18.160 system the homeless shelters social services and so it's one of these situations you know back to the

00:29:24.100 expedia example where things are heavily siloed there's lots of gaps between organizations so in

00:29:28.940 rockford they start getting together you know meeting as a group with all those constituents i just

00:29:34.100 described and others they meet around the same table and so that's part one of the story is you got

00:29:39.080 the right group of people together people with all the different facets of the problem and then the second

00:29:44.740 thing is you changed how those parties collaborated so one thing that had plagued homelessness up to

00:29:51.580 that point is that they lacked useful data like the federal government requires cities to do what's

00:29:58.520 called a a point in time census where you you kind of go out one night every year and you do your best

00:30:03.880 to count all the homeless people and then you wait until the next year and you do another one and they

00:30:08.120 realize that's just totally inadequate for trying to manage a problem in real time and so what they

00:30:14.620 created on their own you know back to that notion of upstream work being voluntary they created a

00:30:19.660 by name list of every person in the community who's homeless i mean literally i saw it it's a google doc

00:30:27.100 and you go down and you're like well there's steve and there's michael and there's david and and for

00:30:31.400 every person there's a description of what their situation is and how's their health and roughly how old

00:30:36.160 they are and who's talking to them and so these meetings among the the different organizations who are

00:30:42.780 surrounding homelessness their meetings would be conducted name by name you know instead of talking

00:30:50.160 theoretically about hey what can we do about this horrible systemic problem of homelessness no no it

00:30:55.400 was steve okay who's seen steve in the last week where is he well he's still got his tent set up under

00:31:00.500 the bridge but he's been coming into the homeless shelter a bunch to eat lunch we want to let steve know

00:31:05.600 that we have housing for him when he's ready to move in you know we're ready to get him off the street so

00:31:10.320 who's going to talk to steve this week and it became practical it became human it became tangible

00:31:16.960 and it was also easy to score victories because you start seeing hey last week steve was on the street

00:31:22.860 this week steve is in supported housing and larry morrissey the mayor said that that kind of approach

00:31:29.900 was transformative that these meetings they would have used to be bitch sessions he said and now it was

00:31:36.120 like they had a goal they had a tangible mission and so that's how you can spin your wheels for nine

00:31:43.800 years on homelessness and accomplish nothing and then in 10 months you can become the first city on record

00:31:48.460 to end veteran homelessness and i think that's such a powerful illustration of how we may have more power

00:31:56.540 than we're even aware of that just by changing the way we collaborate and who collaborates and how we

00:32:02.760 measure our progress we can make a big difference in problems that we might have thought intractable

00:32:07.860 so the next question you ask or think is useful to ask when you're trying to solve these ups these

00:32:11.960 problems upstream is how to change the system and that's that's a big question because systems like

00:32:17.300 that can be hard to change they're embedded in bureaucracy they're calcified with tradition

00:32:22.420 so it can seem like it's impossible to change the system so i think i think that can that question

00:32:29.700 lead people to be like well there's nothing we can do right there's a problem blind this is how it

00:32:33.880 always is so what does that look like in action when people ask how to change the system yeah changing

00:32:39.300 the system can can be a very big deal for for the reasons that you said you know systems can be big

00:32:44.620 they can be bureaucratic they can be slow to change but i think the saving grace is that small changes in

00:32:51.620 big systems yield big changes so that's why they're worth fighting for like one of my favorite stories in

00:32:58.720 the book is about this guy named darshak sanghavi who is working in the health care system in the

00:33:04.400 federal government and his job is to look for prevention programs that deserve the support of

00:33:12.140 medicare medicaid that you know could receive funding from those two and so he's scanning and he comes

00:33:17.400 across this program called the diabetes prevention program the dpp which is a a well-known program in

00:33:23.360 health care it's been proven again and again to um to stop some people that are at risk of developing

00:33:30.760 diabetes from developing it so that's a big deal because you know diabetes is a chronic disease it's

00:33:36.560 very expensive to treat it's uh it causes a lot of harm for the individual and so to get medicare

00:33:43.380 medicaid funding for dpp sanghavi has to establish two things number one that that this program makes a

00:33:49.280 difference in people's health and so check there's a ton of evidence for that second thing he has to

00:33:53.920 prove is that the program will save the government money well it seems like there's a slam dunk case

00:34:00.060 there too because if you can stop someone from developing a chronic disease chronic diseases cost

00:34:05.600 a ton to treat surely you stand to save a bundle so sanghavi you know puts his evidence together he thinks

00:34:12.580 this is going to be my first real widespread victory in this role he takes it to the government

00:34:18.360 actuaries who are the people who can certify it as a cost saving program it's the last step before

00:34:23.740 expansion and the actuaries say no we can't certify this as cost saving and the reason is

00:34:31.400 that this dpp program is extending people's lives and when you extend people's lives their health care

00:34:39.080 costs more so just just sit with that logic for a second and think about that that is not a sick joke

00:34:45.920 i'm making that was the actual official logic of the federal government which is of course the biggest

00:34:51.020 payer in our health care system and so sanghavi is just sitting there just stunned like really

00:34:56.940 the the success of this program is going to be the force that brings it down and so he and his boss a guy

00:35:05.040 named patrick conway write an appeal to the chief actuary and then this is my favorite part of the story

00:35:11.680 this is in late 2015 and just three days before christmas something remarkable happens one of the

00:35:18.400 the actuaries that reports to the chief actuary it's a guy that's on the cusp of retirement sends

00:35:23.860 this memo and in the memo he makes this impassioned case that this ruling is just wrong it's morally

00:35:32.580 wrong and in the memo he envisions what would happen if the media got wind of this and the kind of

00:35:38.180 headlines that they would write you know medicare saves seniors die and and the press storm that

00:35:46.900 would come out of this but but fundamentally the case he's making is that we should not penalize

00:35:53.880 programs that help people live longer that that is is an abuse of what actuaries stand for and he says

00:35:59.780 you know actuaries have a special responsibility because while doctors at their worst might only harm a few

00:36:06.540 people actuaries at their worst could harm millions and he says calculators should play a role in

00:36:13.340 determining how much we should reimburse hospitals and doctors but calculators should not play a role

00:36:18.720 in determining how long people should be allowed to live you can almost hear like the trumpets playing

00:36:25.080 in the background you know with this with this memo and justice prevails in this situation the chief

00:36:31.000 actuary reverses the decision dpp gets funded there is now a change in a federal register somewhere that

00:36:38.300 says a prevention program's ability to extend lives cannot be held against it in computing its costs

00:36:46.200 and so back to this idea of systems change that's what systems change looks like i mean it's it's boring

00:36:53.880 on the merits i mean if i showed you the wording of that legal clause in an actuarial guidebook somewhere

00:37:01.680 i mean you would yawn it's it's it's not satisfying like a rescue is or a gunfight or a life-saving

00:37:09.320 expedition but boy does it matter i mean that one little tweak to the federal rule book is going to

00:37:16.380 save or extend thousands of lives there are people that will never develop diabetes who otherwise would

00:37:23.240 have in a world where that one little cluster of sentences hadn't been changed and so that's why

00:37:28.940 systems change is worth fighting for even though it can be quite difficult because it can make all the

00:37:34.120 difference upstream right it was a small change it was difficult to get through and i think the next

00:37:39.360 question you you think is useful to ask is like look what's the leverage point and in this situation

00:37:43.500 it was a small change like this was like the leverage point this was the point where change could happen

00:37:47.220 and so the question what's the leverage point can help you find out what's one thing you can change in the

00:37:52.680 system that will have all these cascading effects downstream yeah that's the thing is is when when

00:37:58.920 you're dealing with some big problem it can be paralyzing like where do you start if you if you

00:38:04.700 got interested in hunger in your community my god where would you what would you do in the first week

00:38:09.960 and i think the best advice that i've gotten from the people that i've i've studied is get closer to

00:38:15.780 the problem to immerse yourself in it if there's any people listening who are who are kind of

00:38:20.760 operations gurus lean or six sigma you know you know this phrase go to the gemba you know get close

00:38:27.020 to where the work is happening so you can observe the problem and i'll give you example from from a

00:38:31.840 really big issue in chicago you know there have been recurring crime waves in chicago and and during

00:38:39.060 one of those some academics that formed what's called the university of chicago crime lab which is

00:38:44.740 this it's almost like a bridge between academia and and police and government practice they were trying to

00:38:50.660 find you know evidence-based ways to reduce crime and at this time there had been just an absolute

00:38:56.860 wave of of youth homicide so lots and lots of young men were were being killed and the lore at that time

00:39:04.700 was it's gang activity you know it's gangs they're fighting the you know struggling over turf people are

00:39:11.960 getting killed well these academics said you know we don't know much about gang activity but we do know

00:39:17.840 how to study problems and so what they did was they went to the medical examiner's office and they

00:39:23.900 asked to examine the records and reports for the last 200 young men who had been killed and they went

00:39:31.180 through those reports and what they found was a very different picture yes there were some deaths

00:39:36.400 related to gang violence but what they found was that more commonly was a situation like this and this is

00:39:42.740 essentially a a streamlined version of a real case that a couple of groups of young men got into an

00:39:49.860 argument on the street and one of the groups was arguing that that a guy from the other group had

00:39:55.200 stolen one of their bikes and it started as an argument and it escalated and and one of the guys

00:40:02.540 started to walk away and and the other group took offense to that found it disrespectful and shot the

00:40:08.100 guy in the back and so what you found when you got close to the problem was what's happening is that

00:40:16.740 the the kind of dumb arguments that teenage boys all over the world get into were escalating to gun

00:40:23.560 violence and so harold pollack was one of the academics involved and he was studying these reports

00:40:28.580 he said you know at university of chicago we have to have equations and so our equation after reading all

00:40:34.140 these reports was young guys plus impulsivity plus alcohol plus guns equals a dead body and so you

00:40:42.220 think about that just think about that let let's zoom out of this situation and think about what

00:40:46.600 they're doing they go you know without bias to to just study and look close at what happened in these

00:40:54.660 situations that went awry and then they come out with this this kind of equation which admittedly is

00:41:00.920 simplified but what it says is those are all independent leverage points right you could try

00:41:07.180 to intervene to reduce access to alcohol you could try to intervene to reduce access to guns you could

00:41:13.020 try to combat impulsivity somehow those are all independent ways to try to get some progress on this

00:41:18.560 problem and in this case they chose the leverage point of impulsivity and we can talk more about the

00:41:25.760 the solution they ended up funding if you like but but i think the important thing for our perspective

00:41:31.220 is their instinct to get closer to the problem was what unlocked the potential leverage points that

00:41:37.320 could be used to find a solution well yeah we can talk about because i thought it was really interesting

00:41:40.680 this is they decided to do the impulsivity thing and basically they one guy developed this after

00:41:46.320 school program for boys where they learned how to control their emotions it's a fascinating program it's

00:41:52.760 called becoming a man bam that's what they call it for short and it was invented by this guy named

00:41:57.780 tony d who had kind of a rough upbringing but found himself as a young adult discovered that he loved

00:42:05.800 psychology and that he wanted to to help men young men grow up with male mentors and to teach them

00:42:12.860 how to be a man and how to live with integrity and so he he figures out this program which is just

00:42:19.120 utterly unique it's it's like imagine 10 or 12 uh 16 year old boys in in high school who are brought

00:42:27.480 together they put their chairs in a circle and and they start these sessions with uh with a check-in

00:42:32.800 which is just sort of like what's on your mind how are you feeling today how are you feeling

00:42:37.040 psychologically physically spiritually and and and at first as you can well imagine i mean these kids are

00:42:44.500 it's like crickets no one is gonna no 16 year old boy is just gonna make themselves vulnerable in a

00:42:49.640 situation like that and so for the first session or two tony d has to basically claw it out of them

00:42:55.380 will you at least tell me whether you're mad sad or glad today but eventually they come to trust each

00:43:01.560 other and they come to open up and what tony d does with them is like a combination of of a support

00:43:08.260 group and tough love and male mentorship but but there's also an important part of the program that's

00:43:15.720 about self-control and it's about tony d contrasts warrior energy with with savage energy and it's

00:43:24.840 fundamentally about anger is a natural state i mean especially for for a teenage male anger is going to

00:43:32.160 happen but it's a question of how do you use anger do you let it be a destructive force

00:43:36.980 or a constructive one can you be the person when that argument breaks out in the street about the

00:43:42.400 stolen bicycle can you be the one that takes three seconds to just reflect you know how badly could

00:43:48.360 this go and is that what i want do i want to live with the consequences of escalating this

00:43:53.620 and and so tony d had created this program called bam this kind of fascinating program and when the crime

00:44:01.000 people found out about it they said ha like what if what tony d is doing is operating on this leverage

00:44:09.040 point of impulsivity in other words what if what if his program is teaching people to rethink the the

00:44:16.360 instinct to escalate to get violent and so they they end up funding the bam program they do a randomized

00:44:22.560 control trial to test whether it really works and the results come back and they kind of astonish

00:44:27.780 everyone like it takes almost a year for them to finish crunching the data and they've had to get

00:44:34.240 the police department involved because they're trying to cross reference arrest rates and so forth

00:44:38.080 and they have this unveiling and and harold pollack the guy i mentioned earlier who had examined the medical

00:44:43.520 examiner reports he tells the people involved among the students who participated in this bam program

00:44:49.640 arrests were down 28 percent versus the control group and violent crime arrests were almost cut

00:44:55.880 and half and everybody's jaws dropped and pollack said it was one of the greatest moments of his

00:45:02.280 entire career and and that's the kind of thing that that can happen with a with a a problem that is as

00:45:10.260 seemingly complex and unsolvable as as a crime wave in chicago they took it apart they got close to it

00:45:19.080 they found a potential leverage point they found a program that would act on that leverage point and in this case

00:45:25.020 it worked and in this case they were able to measure success but one tricky thing about solving problems

00:45:31.080 upstream is sometimes it can be hard to measure right sometimes like how do you measure a problem

00:45:36.020 that didn't occur right i mean you can say well it could have been worse it's like well could it have

00:45:40.880 been worse i don't know you have nothing to judge it against exactly right and and if you go back to

00:45:46.260 at the very beginning i was talking about the two police officers and one of them you know stayed in the

00:45:50.860 busy intersection and kept accidents from happening you ask yourself how do you prove as you said when

00:45:56.480 something doesn't happen you know that that morning the police officer's presence stopped a guy who was

00:46:03.040 commuting to his job downtown he would have been killed in an accident that morning had it not been

00:46:08.320 for her presence but he'll never know and she'll never know and so the only thing that you can rely on in

00:46:14.920 a situation like that is data you know you keep logs of the accidents that happen before and after you

00:46:21.240 positioned a police officer there and and if you do your proper statistical analysis and the number of

00:46:27.060 accidents go down maybe you can attribute that to your work i mean that's that's what upstream success

00:46:31.660 looks like it's it's like numbers moving on a page it's not as tangible and it's not as satisfying

00:46:37.680 as fishing a kid out of the river but then having said that that the data is the scoreboard for this

00:46:44.420 kind of work it also opens up a whole can of worms like i think about it this way imagine that

00:46:50.360 in whatever town or city you live in the chief starts touting that crime has gone down 20 percent

00:46:57.200 you know over the past few years and and that on the surface is a huge victory everybody should be

00:47:02.760 happy about that and that's an example of of measuring upstream progress with data crime did not

00:47:08.740 happen okay so hooray but then you start having to poke at that data in different ways

00:47:14.240 for instance what if you found out that the crime had gone down by 20 percent everywhere in the u.s

00:47:20.320 now how would you feel about the police chief's genius and approaches what if you found out that

00:47:26.240 the crime was down 30 percent nationally and 20 percent locally now how would you feel about the

00:47:31.960 intervention success or failure what if you found out that that the chief had been so vigorous and

00:47:38.620 aggressive about enforcing you know a reduction in crime that you discovered that officers at the

00:47:44.300 street level were kind of burying crimes like looking the other way in certain situations or doing

00:47:50.020 what's called downgrading where very serious crimes like rape are often you know scaled down to something

00:47:57.520 like sexual assault because nobody wants to have a rape number show up on their record and so all of a

00:48:04.620 sudden what looked like just plain and simple statistical proof that you've done a good thing

00:48:10.100 we have a lot of questions like could you have actually made things worse even as the numbers

00:48:16.560 suggested you were making things better and so that's a theme in the book is number one we're almost lost

00:48:25.140 if we don't have some kind of data to use to orient us and to guide us so data is essential but data is

00:48:31.840 also just a minefield of potential problems that we have to be aware of and we have to constantly

00:48:37.340 be trying to root out well the last question i want to talk about is you know when you start

00:48:42.460 messing with systems systems are complex so you can make one change one place and like you can see

00:48:48.020 the change you want and maybe it has the desired effect but then it causes a problem somewhere else

00:48:54.500 so how do you ensure the changes you make isn't going to actually cause more problems for you

00:48:59.980 this is another one of those cautionary themes in the book is is because we're intervening in systems

00:49:07.240 we've got to be very very clear on what the ripple effects of our intervention are like here's an

00:49:13.240 example from new york city so about 10 years ago there was a a young google engineer a young man he was

00:49:20.840 just walking through central park and this freak accident happens he was struck by a falling branch from

00:49:28.100 an oak tree and it caused brain injuries and paralysis it was just a horrible thing total fluke

00:49:34.000 injury except that a bit later the the controller of new york city a guy named scott stringer

00:49:39.560 he starts analyzing the claims that the city is paying out like this this engineer's lawsuit

00:49:46.040 eventually got settled for 11 and a half million dollars and and what scott stringer realizes is

00:49:51.200 there's actually a whole rash of settlements coming from falling branches and he's like

00:49:56.720 what the hell's going on here and he keeps investigating and finds out that a couple of

00:50:03.100 years earlier the city's pruning budget had been cut in an effort to save money and so one of one of his

00:50:10.540 assistants david saltenstall said you know whatever money we thought we were saving on the pruning side

00:50:16.620 we were paying out and then some on the lawsuit side and so they start studying the city's claims

00:50:22.940 and they start finding these examples of you know there's there's one playground in brooklyn that was

00:50:28.900 responsible for multiple lawsuits like five different kids had broken their leg on this playground sued the

00:50:33.820 city because a swing had been hung a little bit too low and and that's an example of what we're talking

00:50:39.560 about where depending on how you frame the situation yes the uh the parks department saved

00:50:46.620 some money by cutting the pruning budget that looked good for them for that piece of the system

00:50:50.860 but if you zoom out and look at the system as a whole that was a bad decision it cost the system as a

00:50:56.420 whole money because it it number one cost more payouts in terms of lawsuits leaving aside the obvious human

00:51:03.440 misery that came from the falling branches and and i think a good caution is there's this systems

00:51:10.980 thinker named danella meadows who i i quote a lot in the book and she said you know when you're thinking

00:51:17.000 about a system you've got to figure out a way that lets you see the system as a whole not just the part

00:51:23.980 that might have drawn your attention to begin with and i think that's a great caution is is a lot of times

00:51:29.820 we're coming into problems with some angle you know there's some part of the income statement in a

00:51:35.660 business there's some part of our scoreboard that we're operating against that's kind of provoked us

00:51:39.820 to action but we got to be careful what are the parts that are linked up to that and might making

00:51:45.420 problem a better actually make other problems worse in a way that that brings down the system as a

00:51:50.700 whole and this is where having the right people like multiple different groups involved can help solve

00:51:56.040 that because you can see how this could affect different parts of the system that's a really

00:52:00.620 good point yeah exactly so you know the the parks department is making this budget decision unilaterally

00:52:06.500 but if they'd really thought through and if they brought in some colleagues from other places maybe

00:52:10.460 they could have discovered that in advance maybe they didn't have to learn this the hard way

00:52:14.020 so let's say someone's listening to this and they're part of an organization it could be their

00:52:17.680 business uh non-profit church or whatever and they there's a lot of like downstream problems and

00:52:23.520 they're like i want to i want to make the cell on that we're going to start solving these problems

00:52:27.400 upstream how do you any advice on how to make that cell because it's a it can be a hard sell to take

00:52:32.680 time off to solve these problems that you might not it might take a while to to solve the problems

00:52:38.720 how do you how do you think you can make the cell yeah it can be tough i mean uh this was this was

00:52:46.140 not intentional but there's kind of two meanings of the word upstream you know upstream in the sense of

00:52:50.020 preventing problems and then there's the sense of upstream as in swimming upstream and i think

00:52:55.260 it's no accident that that the word means those two things it's hard to break out of this pattern

00:53:00.660 and i think maybe your your best strategy is is to do two things one we've already talked about which

00:53:07.060 is to get close to the problem and really be able to describe it up close you know to look at those

00:53:12.000 medical examiner reports or to to get up close to the factory lines and look at where errors are

00:53:18.540 happening and then the second part that we haven't talked about is find a way to show what you've

00:53:24.660 discovered because i think showing is is as our you know eighth grade english teacher always told us

00:53:30.540 showing is a lot better than telling and i'll give you an example i was working with duPont years ago

00:53:35.360 and and one of the managers told me the story that they were trying to get one of their factories to

00:53:40.840 take waste more seriously and you know any any factory these days after you know 50 years of

00:53:47.680 quality improvement is is going to be pretty good just from the get-go and so we're talking about

00:53:51.880 you know round off error type waste probably one to five percent or something but still is a problem

00:53:57.680 we're tackling but if you're if you're somebody who works on the front line of a factory like how do

00:54:01.580 you get excited about going from three percent waste to half a percent or something and so there wasn't a lot

00:54:06.580 of motivation around this move to reduce waste and so the manager is trying to figure out like how do i

00:54:12.180 how do i get people to want to do something different and he realized that he had to stop

00:54:17.660 talking about it at the process level and he's had to to to be able to help them visualize the harm

00:54:24.580 and so one day they show up to work and they're expecting to you know get on the factory line and instead

00:54:28.780 he kind of ushers them all into a van and drives them to the landfill they used and there was one

00:54:37.260 particular section of the landfill that was kind of dupont's area and he he brought them out there

00:54:43.460 and he showed them just this vast expanse of of trash and waste and you know you see something like

00:54:51.160 that it just it hits you at a visceral level not an intellectual level just the the horror of how much

00:54:57.340 stuff you have just dumped onto the earth because of your work and he said what you're seeing right

00:55:02.920 now is the reason why i want us to start taking waste more seriously he said all of a sudden it

00:55:09.140 made a night and day difference that people started getting with the program they started helping him

00:55:13.500 iterate the processes and i love that story because i think it's a good a good inspiration for the rest

00:55:20.620 of us that that as we get closer to the problem as we turn up those leverage points we don't want to

00:55:26.180 talk about those things we don't want to intellectualize about them we want to show

00:55:30.320 people what we found you know we want to show people that medical examiner report about the two

00:55:36.740 groups of kids that ended up in a gunfight over an argument over bikes because those are the things

00:55:41.680 that are going to motivate action when other people can see what we see well dan this has been a great

00:55:46.280 conversation where can people go to learn more about the book in your work if you're interested in

00:55:50.360 and more about the book just go to upstream book.com and it will have all the details you

00:55:55.680 could ever want fantastic well dan heath thanks for your time it's been a pleasure thank you enjoyed

00:55:59.640 it my guest today was dan heath he's the author of the book upstream the quest to solve problems

00:56:03.880 before they happen it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can find out more

00:56:07.560 information about his book at his website upstream book.com also check out our show notes at

00:56:11.640 aom.is slash upstream where you can find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic

00:56:15.920 well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out our website at

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00:56:30.040 we've written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of and if you'd like to

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00:56:57.800 reminding you not only listen to the aom podcast but put what you've heard into action

00:57:10.420 you

The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

#591： Solve Problems Before They Become Problems

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