Upstream

When we’re blind to a problem, we treat it like the weather. We may know it’s bad, but ultimately, we just shrug our shoulders. What am I supposed to do about it? It’s the weather.

When we don’t see a problem, we can’t solve it. And that blindness can create passivity even in the face of enormous harm. To move upstream

“Teachers thought that the kids [who failed] would think, ‘I need to work harder,’” Duncan said. “Sometimes that happens. But the majority of fourteen-year-olds, if they fail, interpret that as: ‘I don’t belong, I’m not good enough.’ They withdraw.”

“It’s the difference from ‘I put the work out there and I assign the grades’ to ‘My job is to make sure all students are succeeding in my class. So I need to find out why they’re struggling if they’re struggling.’”

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.

You can’t solve a problem that you can’t see, or one that you perceive as a regrettable but inevitable condition of life.

Inattentional blindness leads to a lack of peripheral vision. When it’s coupled with time pressure, it can create a lack of curiosity.

We grow accustomed to stimuli that are consistent.

People with a fear of needles, for instance, might be asked to look at images of needles, or to handle needles, so many times that eventually their irrational fear yields. The needle has been destigmatized. Normalized.

once something is coded as a “problem,” it demands a solution.

People voluntarily hold themselves responsible for fixing problems they did not create.

The upstream advocate concludes: I was not the one who created this problem. But I will be the one to fix it. That shift in ownership

“Whenever I start to get aggravated about some inane problem, I think, ‘Hey, move your chair, why don’t you?’16 and it’s an internal code for trying a new approach,”

This lack of ownership is the second force that keeps us downstream.

The first force, problem blindness, means: I don’t see the problem. (Or, This problem is inevitable.) A lack of ownership, though, means that the parties who are capable of addressing a problem are saying, That’s not mine to fix.

The question they asked themselves was not: Can’t someone fix this problem? It was: Can we fix this problem?

They went from feeling like victims of the problem to feeling like co-owners of the solution.

What if you told the story of your relationship problems as if you were the only one responsible?

“I’d like each of you to tell the story of this situation as though you’re the only one in the world responsible for where we are.”

I choose to fix this problem, not because it’s demanded of me, but because I can, and because it’s worth fixing.