Joe: Alright Lewis, pretend you’re a 19th-century city planner. I’m telling you that in 50 years, London will be buried under nine feet of horse manure. What’s your upstream solution? Lewis: Easy. I'd invent a slightly smaller horse. Joe: And that, right there, is why we need this book. We so often tinker at the edges of a problem instead of going to its source. Lewis: We’re trying to solve a manure crisis by breeding ponies. I see your point. It’s a perfect setup for what we’re talking about today. Joe: It really is. Today we're diving into Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath. Lewis: Ah, a Heath brother. I feel like their books—Made to Stick, Switch—are practically required reading in any modern office. Joe: Exactly. And what's fascinating is that this is Heath's first solo book after co-authoring those massive bestsellers with his brother, Chip. He's a senior fellow at Duke University's center for social entrepreneurship, so he's spent his career studying how to create real, lasting change, not just react to crises. Lewis: Okay, so he's basically the guy who, instead of bailing water out of a sinking boat, asks who drilled the hole in the first place. Where do we start with this?

Joe: We start with the story that gives the book its name. It’s a simple parable. Two friends are having a picnic by a river, when suddenly they see a child floating by, clearly drowning. One of them immediately jumps in, pulls the child to shore, and saves them. Lewis: A true hero. I like it. Joe: But just as they catch their breath, another child comes floating down the river. So they both jump in and save that one. And then another, and another. It becomes this frantic, exhausting cycle of rescue. Finally, after pulling out the tenth child, one of the friends stands up, dripping wet, and just starts running away from the river. Lewis: Wait, what? He’s just abandoning the rescue mission? Joe: That’s what his friend thinks! He yells, "Where are you going? There are more kids to save!" And the friend shouts back over his shoulder, "I'm going upstream to tackle the guy who's throwing them in!" Lewis: Oh, I love that. It’s so simple but it perfectly captures the idea. We are obsessed with the downstream rescue—the dramatic, visible, heroic act—and we completely forget to go upstream and find the source of the problem. Joe: Precisely. And this isn't just a cute story; it plays out constantly in the real world. Heath tells this incredible story about Expedia, the travel website. Back in 2012, they had a huge problem. For every 100 customers who booked a trip, 58 of them called the customer support line. Lewis: Hold on, 58 percent? For an online company that's supposed to be self-service? That's an astronomical failure rate. That’s like if more than half the people who bought a toaster had to call a hotline to figure out how to make toast. Joe: It was a massive, expensive problem. So what did they do? The classic downstream thing. They focused on making the calls more efficient. They trained their agents to shorten call times, to handle more customers per hour. They were getting really good at pulling the drowning children out of the water. Lewis: They were becoming expert baby-rescuers. But the babies just kept coming. Joe: Exactly. Until one executive, Ryan O'Neill, decided to go upstream. He asked a simple question: Why are people calling? He dug into the data and found the number one reason, accounting for a staggering 20 million calls a year, was customers asking for a copy of their itinerary. Lewis: You’re kidding me. Twenty million calls because people couldn’t find an email? That’s not a customer problem; that’s a design problem. Joe: It was a total system failure. So they assembled a "war room," and instead of optimizing call times, they attacked the root causes. They made the "Find my itinerary" button on the website impossible to miss. They simplified the confirmation emails. They made it a one-click process. Lewis: They went upstream and tackled the guy throwing itineraries into the river of lost emails. Joe: And the results were stunning. The call rate dropped from 58% down to about 15%. They eliminated millions of calls. It was a huge win, but it highlights a crucial psychological bias. The person who shaves 10 seconds off a support call gets a bonus. They look like a hero on a spreadsheet. The person who prevents 10,000 calls from ever happening? Their work is invisible. Lewis: Right! There's a glory in the downstream. You get to wear the cape. The upstream work is quiet, it's preventative, and often, it's thankless. No one throws a parade for the disaster that didn't happen. Joe: And that thanklessness, that invisibility, is one of the key reasons we get stuck downstream. Heath argues it's not because we're dumb; it's because our systems and our psychology are wired for reaction.

Lewis: Okay, so if we're all wired to be these downstream heroes, what’s stopping us from thinking more like that Expedia executive? What are the big barriers? Joe: Heath boils it down to three major forces that keep us trapped. He calls them the three barriers to upstream thinking. The first one is Problem Blindness. Lewis: Problem Blindness. That sounds ominous. Joe: It is. It's when a problem has existed for so long that we stop seeing it as a problem. It just becomes a fact of life, like gravity or traffic. He uses the example of the Chicago Public Schools in the late 90s. Their high school graduation rate was a dismal 52%. Lewis: Wow. A coin flip. Joe: A coin flip. But for a long time, the attitude was, "That's just how it is." The thinking was that the students' failure was due to factors outside the school's control—poverty, family issues, etc. The system was blind to the possibility that it could be solved. Lewis: That's terrifying. It's like living in a house with a slow gas leak and you just get so used to the smell you don't even realize you're in danger. You just think, "Oh, that's just the smell of my house." Joe: Perfect analogy. And they broke the blindness with data. Researchers at the University of Chicago discovered a single, powerful leverage point: a metric called "Freshman On-Track." If a freshman passed all their classes and failed no more than one core subject, they had an 80% chance of graduating. It was more predictive than race, poverty, or test scores combined. Lewis: So it wasn't about a million different unsolvable social problems. It was about getting kids through the ninth grade. Joe: Exactly. Once they could see the problem clearly, they could act. They flooded freshman year with support, and over 20 years, the graduation rate soared from 52% to 78%. They overcame problem blindness. Lewis: Okay, so that's the first barrier. What's the second? Joe: The second is a Lack of Ownership. This happens when a problem doesn't neatly fit into anyone's job description. It falls through the cracks of organizational silos. Think back to Expedia. The customer service department's job was to handle calls, not prevent them. The tech department's job was to build the website, not worry about call volume. Lewis: Ah, the classic "not my job" syndrome. It's a problem that belongs to everyone, which means it effectively belongs to no one. Joe: Precisely. Upstream work is often optional. No one gets fired for not preventing a problem that hasn't happened yet. It requires someone to raise their hand and say, "I'll take responsibility for this," even when it's not in their official duties. Ray Anderson, the CEO of the carpet company Interface, did this. He read a book on environmentalism and had what he called a "spear in the chest" moment, realizing his petroleum-based company was a plunderer of the earth. He took ownership of a problem far bigger than his company and set a "Mission Zero" goal to have zero negative impact by 2020. Lewis: That takes incredible courage. To voluntarily own a problem that massive. Joe: It does. And it leads to the third barrier, which I think is the one most of us can relate to on a daily basis: Tunneling. Lewis: I feel like I know this one intimately. Is this just my email inbox? Joe: It's basically your entire life. Tunneling is when you are so consumed by responding to immediate problems that you don't have the mental bandwidth to think about the bigger picture. Heath tells a story about researchers shadowing nurses in a hospital. The nurses were brilliant problem-solvers. A piece of equipment is missing? They'd find a workaround. A lab result is late? They'd chase it down. They were constantly putting out fires. Lewis: They're in the tunnel of the immediate crisis. Save the patient in front of you. Joe: Right. But the researchers noticed something. A nurse would find a workaround for a missing piece of equipment, but she'd never have the five minutes of "slack" to step back and ask, "Why is this equipment always missing? How can we fix the system so it's here next time?" They were so busy dealing with the symptoms that they could never address the disease. Lewis: Honestly, that's my entire work week. I'm just swatting flies, never looking for the source of the swarm. You're juggling so many urgent things that you never have time for the important things. Joe: And that's the trap. We're all in our own tunnels, whether it's answering emails, putting out fires at work, or just getting through the day. Upstream thinking requires the luxury of pulling over to the side of the road to look at the map, but most of us feel like we're going 80 miles an hour in traffic with no exit in sight.

Lewis: Okay, so we're blind, nobody's in charge, and we're all stuck in a tunnel. This feels a little hopeless, Joe. How do you even begin to fix this? If the psychology and the systems are all pushing us downstream, how do we fight the current? Joe: It's a powerful current, but Heath shows it's not impossible to fight. The key is to stop thinking about fixing individuals and start thinking about fixing the system. And the most powerful story he tells on this is about Iceland and their teenage substance abuse problem. Lewis: I'm intrigued. I picture Iceland as a very wholesome place. Joe: It is now, but in the late 1990s, it was the opposite. Icelandic teens were among the heaviest drinkers and smokers in all of Europe. 42% of 15-year-olds reported getting drunk in the past month. It was a full-blown crisis. Lewis: So what was their downstream solution? A bunch of "Just Say No" posters and scary assemblies? Joe: They tried that, and it failed, just like it did everywhere else. It was a reactive, downstream tactic. So a group of social scientists, policymakers, and parents decided to go way, way upstream. They asked a different question: instead of "How do we stop kids from drinking?" they asked, "What does a great childhood look like, and how can we build a system that provides it?" Lewis: Whoa. That is a fundamentally different question. That’s not about prevention; it’s about creation. Joe: Exactly. They used research to identify risk factors—like boredom and unsupervised time—and protective factors—like participation in organized activities and quality time with parents. Then, they systematically changed the environment for every teenager in the country. Lewis: What did that actually look like? Joe: It was a multi-pronged attack on the system. First, they passed a national law making it illegal for kids under 16 to be outside after 10 PM. They created a "Parent Pledge," where parents in a neighborhood would agree on shared rules and curfews. But the most brilliant part was they didn't just take things away; they added better options. The government gave every family a voucher, a "Leisure Card," worth about $300, that could only be used for organized extracurriculars—sports, music, art, dance. Lewis: So they didn't just preach at the kids about the evils of drinking, they made it incredibly easy and affordable to go do something better? That's genius. Joe: It's absolute genius. They changed the choice architecture. Suddenly, being on the soccer team or in the drama club became the cool, normal thing to do. Drinking and smoking became what boring kids did. They flooded the system with positive alternatives. Lewis: And did it work? Joe: The results are almost unbelievable. Over 20 years, the percentage of 15-year-olds who had been drunk in the past month plummeted from 42% to just 5%. Daily cigarette smoking dropped from 23% to 3%. Iceland went from being the worst in Europe to the absolute best. They didn't just solve the problem; they eradicated it for a generation. Lewis: Wow. That's incredible. And it connects all the dots. They overcame problem blindness by admitting they had a crisis. They created ownership by involving parents, schools, and coaches. And they gave everyone the 'slack'—the resources and structure—to get out of the tunnel and think bigger. Joe: They changed the system. They understood that you can't just tell people to swim upstream. You have to change the flow of the river itself.

Joe: And that's the heart of Upstream. It’s not about one magic bullet or a simple five-step plan, which, by the way, is a criticism some readers have—that it's more inspirational than a tactical manual. But I think that misses the point. The point is that systems are perfectly designed to get the results they get. Lewis: I love that quote from the book. "Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets." It's so convicting. If your system is producing failure, it's because it's designed to. Joe: Exactly. If you don't like the results—whether it's high dropout rates, rampant teen drinking, or millions of pointless customer service calls—you have to stop blaming the people caught in the system and start redesigning the system itself. Lewis: And the takeaway isn't just for CEOs or mayors. It's for us. Heath talks about these micro-upstream moments. He mentions a woman named Jeannie Forrest who was annoyed in a meeting because a guy with a big head was blocking her view. She kept craning her neck, reacting, until she had the thought: "Move your chair." A simple, one-time upstream fix. Joe: He even confesses to his own. He used to get annoyed lugging his laptop power cord between home and the coffee shop every day. A recurring, tiny frustration. The upstream solution? He spent twenty bucks and bought a second power cord that just lives in his backpack. Problem solved forever. Lewis: It's about finding that one "move your chair" moment in our own lives. It’s about noticing the patterns of reaction and asking, "What's the one-time fix here?" It could be as small as putting your running shoes by the door or as big as changing how your team runs meetings. Joe: It's a powerful mindset shift. And Heath leaves us with this challenge: be impatient for action, but be patient for outcomes. The changes in Iceland took two decades. The Chicago schools turnaround took years. Upstream work is slow, it's often invisible, and it's hard. But it's the only way to solve our problems for good. Lewis: So the question for everyone listening is: What's the one recurring frustration in your life that you've been solving over and over again? What's your "drowning baby"? And what would it look like to walk upstream and solve it once, for good? Joe: This is Aibrary, signing off.