Against the tide

We all tend to work around problems. And we're good at it. We've become so used to dealing with crises that it doesn't even occur to us to think about how we could prevent them in the first place.

The police investigate crimes, we treat chronic diseases, and we offer shelter to the homeless. But we would all rather live in a world where crimes didn't happen, where diseases didn't spread, and where people didn't lose their homes. So why do we put so much effort into solving problems instead of focusing on prevention?

In our professional and personal lives, we constantly have to prevent problems, and we can solve some of the most pressing ones—if we start thinking about the system as a whole, not just the individual symptoms. When we start thinking upstream.

Upstream draws on Dan Heath's extensive research and hundreds of interviews with people who are skilled at finding unconventional solutions to problems, preventing them rather than just reacting to them.