Upstream

We don’t have the bandwidth to fix everything.

It’s a terrible trap: If you can’t systematically solve problems, it dooms you to stay in an endless cycle of reaction. Tunneling begets more tunneling.

Saving the day feels awfully good, and heroism is addictive.

The need for heroism is usually evidence of systems failure.

structured slack: A space that has been created to cultivate upstream work. It’s collaborative and it’s disciplined.

Focus is both an enemy and an ally. It can accelerate work and make it more efficient, but it puts blinders on people.

There are only two areas of concern that seem to reliably trigger our upstream instincts: our kids and our teeth.

It changes too slowly to spark urgency.

A deadline supplies artificial urgency to a task.

As the deadline looms, you eventually drop everything else and get it done.

we shouldn’t fight teenagers’ instinct to “get high.” Instead, we should give them safer ways to get high.

Teens don’t just need more activities of any kind, they need activities with natural highs: games, performances, workouts, exhibitions. Activities that compel them to take physical or emotional risks.

If you play pickup basketball down the block with your friends, you’re likely to drink just as much (or more) than another teenager who doesn’t. 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.

you need to attract people who can address all the key dimensions of the issue

To react to a customer’s call required the effort of just one call-center representative. But to prevent that customer from calling at all required integration among multiple teams of people.

"do it," said Jaeger. "It's hard. It's a big mind shift. It's no longer just taking care of the problem, which is what we were doing historically, but ending the problem."

A month or two of rent payments was far more cost-effective than re-housing people if they became homeless.

Rather than acting quickly to serve people who are homeless, they’re trying to keep people in their homes to begin with.

what causes people to get sick and feel sick is a sense of a lack of control over what's happening to them

Upstream work is about reducing the probability that problems will happen,