Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

by Dan Heath

These should be our heroes, too: The people who are unsatisfied with normal. People who clamor for better.

My own take is that this is largely an unsolvable problem—that there are few programs for improving the lives of human beings that are as easy to reproduce on a large scale as fried chicken or lattes. (Here I’m thinking of programs in the sense of BAM—those that rely on people providing services to other people. Certainly there are more systemic approaches, from Social Security to stoplights, that scale very well indeed.) And

because of that, in the social sector, we’ve eventually got to shift from a mind-set of “scaling a specific program by reproducing it faithfully” to “owning a problem and adapting a program as needed to achieve results.”