Review by Booklist Review
Most problems are solved by reacting: doctors treat patients for diseases; firefighters put out flames; consumers borrow money to cover expenses. Heath proposes another approach: working "upstream," that is, heading off problems before they become problems. To do this, you need to first identify the real issue, then take ownership of its solution, and finally break out of the usual responses. Of course, it's not as easy as it sounds. Heath goes into detail describing ways to bring fellow problem solvers together, measure successes, and pay for changes. He warns of traps, including manipulating data and causing more harm than good, as on Macquarie Island, where hunters destroyed wildlife, and biologists made things worse by introducing other species. He shares a variety of successes, including pediatricians uniting to promote children's car seats, Chicago Public Schools cutting drop-out rates, and city planners in Boston finding equitable ways to fix sidewalks. Not every threat of crisis comes about, but Heath presents a convincing argument for shifting resources "upstream" and focusing on prevention rather than cure.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Heath (The Power of Moments, coauthor), a senior fellow at Duke's CASE Knowledge Center, urges a preventive, rather than reactive, problem-solving approach in his eloquent manifesto. With the frenetic pace of modern life, Heath observes, it's easy to become accustomed to putting out fires instead of looking for the spark that's igniting them. His examples of proactive, "upstream" thinking include a domestic violence prevention task force which, by bringing together police officers, victims' advocates, health-care workers, and others, has eliminated intimate partner-perpetrated murders in the Massachusetts communities it has served for 14 years running. His takeaways include the need to "unite the right people" (as the domestic violence task force demonstrates), pay attention to early warnings, and find the right point of "leverage" to solve a problem. To illustrate this last principle, Heath cites a mentoring program which, by teaching young men peaceful conflict resolution skills, drastically reduced arrests and violent crimes in a Chicago neighborhood. He finishes by addressing larger-scale problems, using as an example a hurricane preparation exercise conducted in New Orleans just 13 months before Katrina that saved many thousands of additional people from dying. This is a pragmatic guide for those seeking big changes on either an individual or organizational level. Agent: Christy Fletcher, Fletcher & Company (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Psychology meets neuroscience and self-help in this engaging study by business writer Heath (co-author: The Power of Moments: Why Certain Moments Have Extraordinary Impact, 2017, etc.).If the fish floating down a river have three heads, then it behooves any curious-minded person to travel upstream and find out why. Just so, if half of high school students are failing in a certain district, then one can either try to throw money and words at the problem ("Stay in school, kids!") or venture into the alien territory outside the classroom to find out how to keep them going. That's just what happened in Chicago, writes Heath, where teachers formed interdisciplinary teams offering support to legions of at-risk students, determining that if first-year students can be kept on track, they're likely to stay in school to the endand wind up making at least $500,000 more over a lifetime as compared to their dropout peers. The author examines numerous turning-point moments when finding "upstream" things to fix might have led to better and different results. For example, when, in 1974, a scientific paper was published describing a disappearing ozone layer, that was the time to do something about itnot now. "Creating urgency" is one task the would-be problem-solver must address. Another is getting the right people on board to create desired effects, such as lowering teen drug use by making it outr: "What if drug and alcohol use came to feel abnormal in their world rather than normal?" A change of mindsets is rarely easy, but it can be done, and best so, by Heath's account, by looking farther along at the chain of events than the problem itself. That habit of mind, he writes, helps explain why the incidence of death by thyroid cancer is so low in South Korea, and it also points to a central truth: "Systems have great power and permanence; that's why upstream efforts must culminate in systems change."A smart, provocative book that guides readers to better decision-making when confronting seemingly intractable problems. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
