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Upstream
Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen | Dan Heath
13 posts | 5 read | 1 reading | 5 to read
New York Times bestselling author Dan Heath explores how to prevent problems before they happen, drawing on insights from hundreds of interviews with unconventional problem solvers. So often in life, we get stuck in a cycle of response. We put out fires. We deal with emergencies. We stay downstream, handling one problem after another, but we never make our way upstream to fix the systems that caused the problems. Cops chase robbers, doctors treat patients with chronic illnesses, and call-center reps address customer complaints. But many crimes, chronic illnesses, and customer complaints are preventable. So why do our efforts skew so heavily toward reaction rather than prevention? Upstream probes the psychological forces that push us downstreamincluding problem blindness, which can leave us oblivious to serious problems in our midst. And Heath introduces us to the thinkers who have overcome these obstacles and scored massive victories by switching to an upstream mindset. One online travel website prevented twenty million customer service calls every year by making some simple tweaks to its booking system. A major urban school district cut its dropout rate in half after it figured out that it could predict which students would drop outas early as the ninth grade. A European nation almost eliminated teenage alcohol and drug abuse by deliberately changing the nations culture. And one EMS system accelerated the emergency-response time of its ambulances by using data to predict where 911 calls would emergeand forward-deploying its ambulances to stand by in those areas. Upstream delivers practical solutions for preventing problems rather than reacting to them. How many problems in our lives and in society are we tolerating simply because weve forgotten that we can fix them?
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review
rabbitprincess
Pickpick

An interesting read that can apply to a wide range of situations. It took me much longer to read than it should have because of pandemic brain. It is light and breezy for a non-fiction book.

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Vivlio_Gnosi
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A quick summary.

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Vivlio_Gnosi
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Pickpick

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐💯
This book is FANATIC. Highly recommend. Heath clearly lays out our responsibility to face uncomfortable possibilities and take them head-on knowing the cost may be painfu initially but compared to the exponentially worse cost in the future the initial cost is worth it.
He clearly shows the importance of not only identifying problems but eliminating the systems that allow them to exist.
#Nonfiction #recommend

3 likes2 stack adds
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Vivlio_Gnosi
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Final Lines: "These should be our heroes, too: The people who are unsatisfied with normal. People who clamor for better."

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Vivlio_Gnosi
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"Be impatient for action but patient for outcomes."
- Maureen Bisognano

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Vivlio_Gnosi
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"Bostrom's point is that there's no guarantee that we will continue to get lucky in the same way....there are DNA 'printers' that allow companies to produce stretches of DNA quickly & cheaply... imagine if, someday, those DNA printers could be brought into the home...& someone could home-cook a copy of the 1918 Spanish flu. One human could trigger the end for us all." ? #covid19 #coronavirus

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Vivlio_Gnosi
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"The law is just a set of rules based on inputs from power sources, if you want to change the rules, you've got to change the power inputs so that the outcome will be different."
#Nonfiction #power #change

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Vivlio_Gnosi
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"The need for heroism is usually evidence of systems failure."
#Nonfiction #business #success
Sacrifice show for success & win at life! Winning is exciting, it just takes time.

2 likes1 stack add
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Vivlio_Gnosi
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"To succeed upstream, leaders must: detect problems early, target leverage points in complex systems, find reliable ways to measure success, pioneer new ways of working together, and embed their successes into systems to give them permanence."

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Vivlio_Gnosi
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Section 1: The Three Barriers to Upstream Thinking. 1) Problem Blindness, 2) A Lack of Ownership, 3) Tunneling

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Vivlio_Gnosi
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"When you spend years responding to problems, you can sometimes overlook the fact that you could be preventing them."
#Nonfiction

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Vivlio_Gnosi
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Moving this #Nonfiction book about problem solving from my #TBR stack to my current reading stack. Reading this for our book club #Elite30

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Vivlio_Gnosi
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Adding this #Nonfiction book to my #TBR stack about #business #first