Upstream¶
Metadata¶
- Author: Dan Heath
- ASIN: B07THBM1M6
- ISBN: 1982134720
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07THBM1M6
- Kindle link
Highlights¶
As a teacher, if you accept that your job is to support students, not appraise them, it changes everything. — location: 335 ^ref-63526
You can’t solve a problem that you can’t see, or one that you perceive as a regrettable but inevitable condition of life. — location: 362 ^ref-56706
“inattentional blindness,” a phenomenon in which our careful attention to one task leads us to miss important information that’s unrelated to that task. — location: 370 ^ref-33335
What Lin was doing, with the term sexual harassment, was the opposite: She wanted to problematize the normal. — location: 404 ^ref-61781
The escape from problem blindness begins with the shock of awareness that you’ve come to treat the abnormal as normal. — location: 482 ^ref-18036
“what often prevents people from protesting is not a lack of motivation to protest, but rather their feeling that they lack the legitimacy to do so.” — location: 548 ^ref-45450
“Unless somebody leads, nobody will. That’s axiomatic. I asked, ‘Why not us?’ ” — location: 626 ^ref-21375
I choose to fix this problem, not because it’s demanded of me, but because I can, and because it’s worth fixing. — location: 711 ^ref-3124
When people are juggling a lot of problems, they give up trying to solve them all. They adopt tunnel vision. There’s no long-term planning; there’s no strategic prioritization of issues. And that’s why tunneling is the third barrier to upstream thinking—because it confines us to short-term, reactive thinking. In the tunnel, there’s only forward. — location: 749 ^ref-22542
it’s poverty that leads to short-sighted financial decisions. — location: 753 ^ref-9170
If you can’t systematically solve problems, it dooms you to stay in an endless cycle of reaction. — location: 790 ^ref-36255
The need for heroism is usually evidence of systems failure. How do you escape the tunnel? You need slack. Slack, in this context, means a reserve of time or resources that can be spent on problem solving. — location: 796 ^ref-36045
orchestration of urgency: Supporters needed to feel more urgency and opponents needed to feel less. — location: 888 ^ref-36691
“I had the realization that people were not getting addicted to drugs so much as changing the chemistry of their brains,” said Milkman. “So the corollary to that was natural highs.” — location: 974 ^ref-14338
But if you play in a basketball league, it’s different. You’ve made a commitment. You’re on a team. Your social network orbits a healthy activity. — location: 984 ^ref-24109
Always meetings. Doctors prescribe, miners dig, teachers teach, and upstreamers meet. — location: 990 ^ref-38296
McCannon distinguishes “data for the purpose of learning” from “data for the purpose of inspection.” — location: 1103 ^ref-9774
groups do their best work when they are given a clear, compelling aim and a useful, real-time stream of data to measure their progress, and then… left alone. — location: 1110 ^ref-36223
IF IT’S GLAMOUR YOU’RE AFTER, GET BACK DOWNSTREAM. — location: 1146 ^ref-8118
Simply by changing the way they collaborated, and the goals that guided their collaboration, their efforts became dramatically more effective. — location: 1190 ^ref-24842
Every year, we read about a kid with every strike against her who is admitted to Harvard. We rejoice for her. But should we? “Every year I read that story, I get irritated,” said Iton. “Of course, there are smart kids of color in the inner city! There are millions of them. We’re celebrating this one kid—who deserves to be celebrated—but we’re not asking the real question: Why is this such a rare story?” — location: 1278 ^ref-6620
what we don’t appreciate is that our celebration of her carries an implicit indictment of the environment we put her in. We forced you to climb Everest to get ahead in life—and you did it! Congratulations! (No one gets misty-eyed reading the story about the Greenwich, Connecticut, hedge funder’s kid who makes it into Harvard.) — location: 1286 ^ref-56510
Upstream work is about reducing the probability 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. — location: 1288 ^ref-16538
problems can sometimes be solved with minor changes to the environment. — location: 1310 ^ref-37851
Meaningful participation in democratic processes allows you to express agency, and agency is good for your health.” — location: 1392 ^ref-52473
“The law is just a set of rules based on inputs from power sources,” said Iton. “If you want to change the rules, you’ve got to change the power inputs so that the outcome will be different.” — location: 1425 ^ref-52870
(Upstream leaders should be wary of common sense, which can be a poor substitute for evidence.) — location: 1462 ^ref-10918
When you can precisely target a group of people who are causing big problems on an ongoing basis, you can afford to spend a small fortune trying to help them. — location: 1597 ^ref-26042
when we start talking about preventing children from going hungry, suddenly the work has to pay for itself. This is madness. The reason to house the homeless or prevent disease or feed the hungry is not because of the financial returns but because of the moral returns. Let’s not sabotage upstream efforts by subjecting them to a test we never impose on downstream interventions. — location: 1607 ^ref-50839
you take a deep breath and say, Nothing is easy. The world is complex and there are no quick fixes. But if I can learn to uncross my arms and extend my hands, I can be someone who eases suffering rather than ignores it. — location: 1670 ^ref-18281
to make a difference in creating a healthier community, a healthier society, a healthier nation, and thus a healthier economy, we’ve got to find ways to get proximate to the poor and the vulnerable,” — location: 1680 ^ref-35290
“I absolutely believe that when we isolate ourselves—when we allow ourselves to be shielded and disconnected from those who are vulnerable and disfavored, we sustain and contribute to these problems. — location: 1682 ^ref-34336
first kind of ghost victory, your measures show that you’re succeeding, but you’ve mistakenly attributed that success to your own work. — location: 1936 ^ref-44141
The second is that you’ve succeeded on your short-term measures, but they didn’t align with your long-term mission. — location: 1938 ^ref-26672
third is that your short-term measures became the mission in a way that really undermined the work. — location: 1939 ^ref-37589
Her first question was: What are we trying to accomplish, ultimately, with these repairs? — location: 1983 ^ref-44860
This substitution—of easy questions for hard ones—is something that happens with both downstream and upstream efforts. — location: 2010 ^ref-38080
The short-term measure the leaders chose did not align with their true mission, which was to boost sales. — location: 2021 ^ref-51138
Choosing the wrong short-term measures can doom upstream work. — location: 2021 ^ref-51356
We need to escalate the rhetoric: People aren’t “gaming metrics,” they’re defiling the mission. — location: 2049 ^ref-60077
if you use a quantity-based measure, quality will often suffer. So if you pay your janitorial crew by the number of square feet cleaned, and you assess your data entry team based on documents processed, you’ve given them an incentive to clean poorly and ignore errors, respectively. — location: 2123 ^ref-40954
Grove made sure to balance quantity measures with quality measures. The quality of cleaning had to be spot-checked by a manager; the number of data-entry errors had to be assessed and logged. — location: 2125 ^ref-6145
“And realize that, especially in the short term, changes for the good of the whole may sometimes seem to be counter to the interests of a part of the system.” — location: 2193 ^ref-38583
we don’t succeed by foreseeing the future accurately. We succeed by ensuring that we’ll have the feedback we need to navigate. — location: 2271 ^ref-6802
we could try to concoct the perfect intervention—the new curriculum, the new model—and hope for the best. Or we could settle for a pretty good solution that’s equipped with so many built-in feedback loops that it can’t help but get better over time. The second option is the one that systems thinkers would endorse. — location: 2301 ^ref-13094
about the need “not to bluff and not to freeze but to learn”—that — location: 2362 ^ref-6307
the “wrong pocket problem”: a situation where the entity that bears the cost of the intervention does not receive the primary benefit. — location: 2500 ^ref-16461
No longer are we cycling from Infestation to Rescue to Inaction (and repeat). Now it’s just a quiet and mostly invisible routine: maintain, maintain, maintain. — location: 2533 ^ref-53777
“Be impatient for action but patient for outcomes.” — location: 2973 ^ref-45166
You can’t help a thousand people, or a million, until you understand how to help one. — location: 3001 ^ref-60044
Macro starts with micro. — location: 3010 ^ref-30240
If you want to help solve big problems in the world, seek out groups who have ambitious goals coupled with close-up experience. — location: 3010 ^ref-31751
the problem comes when the obsession with testing becomes a hindrance to scale and learning. — location: 3015 ^ref-8244
These should be our heroes, too: The people who are unsatisfied with normal. People who clamor for better. — location: 3095 ^ref-18419