Upstream

Dan Heath wrote Upstream: The Quest To Solve Problems Before They Happen. The book starts with an example of two adults relaxing by a river. They see a child bobbing and drowning in the water. One rushes to save the child. Success! Soon another child comes bobbing by. After saving ten children one of the adults leaves the river even though more children are coming. The other adult questions that decision. The adult says they are going upstream to stop the person who is throwing children in the river. When the author talks about upstream what he means is proactive. (I know someone who shudders when they hear that word). One example was a high school with a high drop out rate that they wanted to fix. Research showed they could predict by the end of the first quarter of ninth grade who was likely to drop out. They focused their energy on ninth grade students and watched for truancy, unfinished assignments, tardiness. Students who had those issues were discussed by name in weekly meetings and teachers focused attention on them. Subsequently the drop out rate plummeted. The teachers had to let go of their previous tough love approach. In another example, a city in India was plagued with cobra snakes. The city put a bounty on cobras. In order to make money, some people were raising cobras to collect on the bounty. According to the author, the bounty on cobras was a downstream approach and that is why it failed. Another example was the travel company Expedia. Expedia had a problem with frequent customer calls for help. Most customers wanted a copy of their itinerary. The idea of Expedia is that the customer does not need to call for help. In designing the website the designer thought it is annoying to enter your email twice. Many people enter the wrong email which is why they never got their itinerary. By fixing the website and asking for the email twice, they greatly reduced the number of calls to the customer care phone center. Some of the examples I read were great and inspirational. I found the chapters confusing and some examples were repetitive. I think this would have been a better book if it had fewer chapters and fewer examples.