Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

by Dan Heath

(Racehorses wear blinders so they’ll ignore distractions and run faster.) When your emphasis is always forward, forward, forward, you never stop to ask whether you’re going in the right direction.

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

Ponder this fact for a moment: The most successful preventive habit we have developed as a species is for the preservation of our… lungs brains hearts teeth.

Ozone Hole: How We Saved the Planet.

Consider the April 15 tax deadline in the US. It’s an arbitrary date, but it has real power over behavior. About 21.5 million Americans file their taxes in the last week before the deadline. As the deadline looms, you eventually drop everything else and get it done.I

What also helped spread urgency was the term ozone hole, which is familiar today but actually was not embraced until the mid-1980s—a decade after the Nature publication. Some scientists objected to the term as inaccurate, but it caught on immediately with the public.

Holes are urgent; slow depletion of the ozone layer isn’t.

Maybe you’re right that nothing is going to happen, but you must agree that if this does happen, it’s going to be a catastrophe, so let’s take out an insurance policy.

“the world avoided”

problem blindness (I don’t see the problem), lack of ownership (That problem is not mine to fix), and tunneling (I can’t deal with that right now).