Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath. Today Dan is a consultant to Duke University’s Corporate Education program. Along with his brother Chip, the Heath brothers have been writing impactful books for over 20 years.
Dan is providing great thinking to modern problems. This is even more valuable in the age we live in today regarding opioids and COVID. Perhaps the idea of instilling his lessons of ‘Preventing Problems Rather Than Reacting to Them’ is the ground floor many organizations need today.
Upstream is certainly an excellent book that talks about the value of thinking in systems and finding/fixing the root cause of problems. In fact, our world today is simply more difficult and demanding. The daily ‘grind’ often forces groups to overlook their ability to see upstream.
So, here is a book addressing how we can begin understanding a process needed to mitigate the problem versus just putting out fires. There is certainly a lot of research across this book showing how how Dan certainly understands how colleges operate.
Secondly, Dan Heath has obviously done a lot of research on this topic and has come up with the gotchas that hit many organizations.
Babies in the river
Dan provides the Irving Zola proverb as an introduction. This is a perfect lesson for higher education in the age of COVID. The pandemic is forcing colleges to shed years of accepted behavior when addressing the pandemic’s impact upon admissions and how to best serve students:
What do you do when you’re facing a problem that has never happened before (and may never happen at all)? Most of us would agree that “an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure,” but our actions don’t match those words. In most of our efforts in society, we’ve optimized ourselves to deliver pounds of cure. Speedy, efficient pounds of cure. We celebrate the response, the recovery, the rescue. But we’re capable of greater things: less Undo and more Outdo. What the world needs now is a quieter breed of hero, one actively fighting for a world in which rescues are no longer required. How many problems in our lives and in society are we tolerating simply because we’ve forgotten that we can fix them?
pg. 17
In addition, Dan’s Expedia lesson is probably worth replicating across colleges. IMHO this is required reading for anyone in higher education. Dan really packs a wonderful amount of successful stories in this book. I am certainly not doing it justice here.
Learn to achieve by looking forward via the past
In conclusion, Dan is providing more than a roadmap to success. Learning how to break through barriers to address problems in an unpredictable world.