Welcome to the Monthly Newsletter by Amer Kaissi
Edition #6, April 2020
The book for this month is “Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems before They Happen” by Dan Heath. Dan is one of my favorite writers, and along with his brother Chip, has written some classical business books such as “Switch” and “The Power of Moments”.
In Upstream, Dan introduces a very simple, yet profound idea: humans generally tend to focus on solving problems after they happen (Downstream thinking), rather than preventing them from happening in the first place (Upstream thinking). They invest most of their resources on putting out fires and dealing with emergencies. They deal with one problem after another, but they never get around to fixing the systems that caused the problems. The main reason for that bias is that Downstream work is easier to see and measure, whereas Upstream work is ambiguous and hard. “How do you prove what did not happen? Your victories are stories written in data, starring invisible heroes who save invisible victims,” he notes.
Upstream was published earlier this year, before the current Covid-19 crisis. But the lessons are directly applicable to how the world should have dealt with it: instead of scrambling to solve the problem after it happened (quarantines, lock-downs, face masks, etc.), we should have focused our attention on how to prevent the problem from happening in the first place (investments in robust public health systems). Upstream warns us: “We spend billions to recover from hurricanes and earthquakes while disaster preparedness work starves for resources. There are hundreds of agencies and organizations that exist to help the homeless, but how many organizations are dedicated to preventing people from becoming homeless? When Ebola starts to spread in a foreign nation, it becomes an international priority-and afterward it’s hard to attract funding to support the local health systems that could prevent the next outbreak.”
I hope you enjoyed this edition of the Newsletter. Every month, I will share with you one leadership or management book that I am reading, and tell you what I learned from it.
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Dr. Amer Kaissi is a Leadership Keynote Speaker and a workplace culture and high-performance teams’ expert.
