New York Times best-selling author Dan Heath joins the podcast for a fascinating conversation with Cathleen about his latest book, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. Heath explains the concept of Upstream Thinking, as well as the barriers we encounter that keep us in a responsive, rather than proactive, mindset. Together, Dan and Cathleen explore how Upstream Thinking can address the more common problems associated with aging.
Episode 03: Dan Heath is a New York Times best-selling author previously known for his work as one-half of the Heath Brothers. In his first solo book, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen, Heath explores the concept of “Upstream Thinking,” and identifies barriers like tunneling, problem blindness, and a lack of ownership. Upstream Thinking could be as simple as purchasing a second power cord, or scheduling time to go on a walk. Whatever the outcome is, upstream thinking helps us avoid problems and save time.
Dan Heath We have to have that spark, that that that instinct or that initiative. I, I am not just going to suffer through this or be at the victim of these forces anymore. I'm going to do something…
Cathleen Toomey Seniority Authority exists to answer your questions on aging, the world has changed dramatically in a generation, with more retirees than ever before living longer with more choices. If you’re an older adult, or have an older adult in your life, where do you go to begin to understand those choices? I’m your host Cathleen Toomey with over a decade of work and experience in retirement home communities so send your questions on aging to me, and together, let’s get smarter about growing older.
Cathleen ToomeyI'm thrilled today to interview New York Times best selling author and innovative thinker Dan Heath, who has just published his new book Upstream The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. Dan and his brother Chip have made headlines with four New York Times best sellers made to stick, switch decisive and the power of moments. His books have sold over a million copies worldwide and have been translated into thirty-three languages. This is Dan's very first solo book and is particularly apt for our conversation today. I first met Dan when he spoke at a leading age national conference I attended pre covid. And it's I am thrilled that he has agreed to be on our podcast. Stay tuned for this really important show. Thank you to our show sponsor, the RiverWoods Group, northern New England largest family of non-profit retirement communities, where active adults find community, purpose, and peace of mind. Visit RiverWoodsGroup.org. Now, let’s hear from today’s guest. Welcome to Seniority Authority My name is Cathleen Toomey and I'm your host, and today's guest is Dan Heath, who is a New York Times best-selling author and innovative thinker who has just published his brand-new book, Upstream The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. Dan and his brother and coauthor Chip have already published four New York Times best selling books. Thank you so much for joining our podcast and to be on this episode, Dan.
Dan Heath Thank you. Cathleen It's great to be with you.
Cathleen Toomey It's great to see you. The book is called Upstream The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. And I love this idea. But tell me how you came up with this whole concept of upstream thinking.
Dan Heath Well, I'll tell you, the first time I heard the phrase upstream thinking was in the context of a parable that has become well known in the field of public health. It's often attributed to a guy named Irving Zola, a sociologist. And the parable goes like this. You and a friend are having a picnic beside a river and you've just laid out your picnic blanket. You're preparing to have a feast when you hear a shout from behind you in the direction of the river. So you look back and there's a child and the river thrashing around, apparently drowning. So you both instinctively dove in to rescue the child. You bring them to shore, then you hear a second shout again from the direction of the river. It's another child also apparently drowning. So back in you go. You fish out that child and you're wondering what's going on. And no sooner have you rescued that second child that you hear two shouts in the river. Now it's two kids. And so begins a kind of revolving door of rescue or you're in and you're out and you're saving all these kids and you're starting to get exhausted from the work. And right about that time, you notice your friend swimming to shore, stepping out and starting to walk away as though to leave you alone. You say, hey, where are you going? I can't save all these kids by myself. And your friend says, I'm going upstream to tackle the guy who's throwing all these kids in the river. And I remember the first time I heard that it just really struck a chord with me because it's a simple story. But it it captures something that I think all of us have experience, which is this trap that we all fall into in our lives and in our work of always being on the reaction side of things. You know, problems break out and we respond. An emergency happens and we try to address it and we fight fires, and we fight fires and we react, react, react. But we so rarely make the space and commit the time and resources needed to get upstream and solve these problems at the root. And so that was the initial spark for this is to figure out are there people who have succeeded in getting upstream? And if so, can we learn something about the strategies they used?
Cathleen ToomeyThat is such a great parable that is, itreally encapsulates what this concept means. I love that. And I think in some ways as human beings, we are wired for that fight or flight. So we are a little bit drawn to the saving of the kids and the energy that's connected to figuring out the problem in a crisis. But the more significant learning is really figuring out who throwing all those kids in the river to begin with.
Dan Heath Well, it's even a deeper mystery than that, because there's a lot of heroism tied up and saving all those kids, and if you fish a child out of the river, you're a hero. You're going to be in the newspaper the next day. You feel good. The child will forever. Thank you for for what happened. Meanwhile, if you're the person that tackled the guy who's throwing the kids in the river, no more kids are floating downstream. Would anyone even ever know that something happened? Often preventing bad things from happening is not quite as as glorious or heroic as responding to the emergencies when they happen. So there's this nasty dynamic where and in some ways downstream work can be more rewarding and more praised than preventing those very problems in the first place.
Cathleen Toomey That is very accurate. We get a lot more attention from the savior than the preventative, and I would think that perhaps the preventative thinking. Could be somewhat coo cooed in society, like, who knows if this is going to be a big deal, like worrying about something like that is that you find that to be a phenomenon.
Dan Heath Yeah. In fact, I talked to a public health expert, a woman named Julie Pavlin, who's worked to fight infection, infectious diseases with the army and has been a global public health expert. And she said there's this kind of curse in public health where if you do a really bang-up job, you know, you do a wonderful job preventing an outbreak of some terrible disease like Ebola. You're usually rewarded with a budget cut because when nothing happens, people say, well, why are we spending all this money to to deal with that? Right. And so so that's part of what they call the curse of prevention or the paradox of prevention, which says that the better a job we do at preventing some bad thing from happening, the less proof there is that it ever needed preventing in the first place. And so that is a nasty dynamic is like the very people that we should be celebrating are often cursed by the fact that their very success leaves us few fingerprints of how critical their work was.
Cathleen ToomeyWhen I read your book, it really connected to the topic of aging for me, because I've been in aging work for 14 years and it is constantly someone from a topic that nobody wants to talk about. No one wants to think about it. We are all aging. We are all going to likely need long term care before we pass away. And yet the vast majority of people don't want to pay attention to it, don't want to think about it. So to me, upstream thinking, really connected to aging. And my question to you is, of the folks you interviewed, who what is the character of a true upstream thinker? Is there something that sets those kinds of folks apart from your average people who want to be heroic and pull the child out of the water?
Dan Heath I think it's people who I talked to one researcher at MIT who had this great phrase. He said that the change is sparked by an insufferable frustration with the status quo. And so a lot of the people that I interviewed that were successful upstream heroes were people who had experienced or been a victim of or had just been privy to some recurring problem to the point where they just kind of couldn't take it anymore, know they were dealing with homelessness or domestic violence or teenage substance abuse, something where they just didn't feel like they could stand by anymore. And they got tired of the cycle of always coming in at the last minute to react. And so it was that insufferable frustration that that triggered them to invest the time and the energy to go upstream. And that was something I found really, really compelling and heroic.
Cathleen ToomeyI think that's a great example, especially some of these nonprofits that are set up to solve homelessness is to get at the root cause. One description in your book that I loved about upstream thinking. You just you define it as a declaration of agency, a belief that I don't have to be at the mercy of these forces. I can shake my world. Can you tell us about the story that inspired that?
Dan Heath You know, it's really about the story of mankind, if you think about what we've always done is try to bend nature, try to to bend our environment to our will. You know, we we we cut down forest to make houses for ourselves, to protect us from the elements. And we get better and better at farming. So we're not at the mercy of whatever happens to be in season or whatever grows or doesn't grow in a given period. And it's like we're always thinking, how can I not be at the mercy of forces? How can I control them? And when I point out in the book is that's a very powerful idea. And in it are the seeds of both heroism and hubris. I mean, the greatest hits and the most appalling actions in human history are both ultimately fruits of that idea.
Dan Heath You think about on the positive side, something like the eradication of smallpox. I mean, what incredible ambition you have to have as a species on the planet Earth to think that you're capable of eradicating a virus from the earth to go. And keep in mind, this was not in the era of smartphones. Right. This is I mean, they were having to trek into remote regions of countries in Africa and Pakistan and India to find, you know, the last people on earth with smallpox or who had been in contact with people with smallpox. And of course, we did successfully eradicate the disease. That's that's a beautiful example of upstream thinking. But on the flip side, you look at things like 9/11 and and we hate being the victim of something like that, of terrorism. The idea that people could come into our country and kill us in this in this kind of spectacular way. And it was. Unacceptable to us, and so we go meddling in Iraq and basically kind of tore a country up in the spirit of trying to control those forces and I think most of us would agree across the aisle, sort of made a mess of it. And so so that's sort of the the two sides of the coin when it comes to upstream thinking it's us at our best and our worst.
Cathleen ToomeyThat's a really good point, is understanding to what extent you can control your life and the world for good and at what point you don't have control any.
Dan Heath It's like the Serenity Prayer. We have to distinguish between what we can control and what we can't, and I'm not sure we're very well calibrated in general on that. But it's a lifelong struggle.
Cathleen ToomeyHow do you find the upstream thinkers in the examples in your book, how do they persist in the face of not a lot of support in their work? Was it internal? Merete and their focus. Were there did they band together where there are a couple of traits that you recognize. Certainly, among all of the different examples, leasing and. And health care. A couple of traits that helped an upstream thinker flourish, I think, more in terms of strategies than traits.
Dan Heath I mean, I do think it's fair to say that there are some people who this kind of thing comes more naturally to them. But I deeply believe that we can all be upstream actors and upstream thinkers.
Dan Heath And I think one characteristic of their work that we could all emulate is they tend to marry a long-term goal, a compelling mission with short term, measurable outcomes. So, I remember years ago, I live in North Carolina and I met this woman named Sally Herndon, who had been one of the state's top advocates against cigarette smoking.
Dan Heath And of course, North Carolina is the belly of the beast when it comes to cigarette smoking. I mean, we at one time we were home to basically all of the world's largest tobacco companies. And so, needless to say, the state legislature was in the pocket of the tobacco companies. They were one of the most powerful forces in the state. And so Sally Herndon's kind of playing this David versus Goliath role.
Dan Heath She said when she started her work, she was working with this nonprofit that worked with social service agencies and public health agencies. And they had these elaborate plans. And right about the time they were going to roll out their anti-smoking plans, the state legislature passed a bill that she refers to as the Dirty Air Act, which basically guaranteed that No. One, there would be space reserved and every government building for smokers inside.
Dan Heath And number two, this was the really horrible part of it. It ensured that no city or town or county, anybody below the state level could pass more restrictive efforts than the state did. So it's like, by God, you were going to be in the face of smoke, whether you liked it or not.
Cathleen ToomeyAnd so we're guaranteeing it.
Dan Heath Exactly right.
Dan Heath And so, Sally, you know, she said her approach was, I've got to find some way to chip away at this problem. It's sort of like the old movies, you know, where somebody wants to escape from the prison and you do it like one spoonful of concrete at a time while the guards are not watching. I mean, that was kind of her mindset. And so she had to find a place where no one you realize in the long term your goal is to wipe out smoking or get as close as you can to prevent this kind of public health apocalypse and prevent needless deaths. But on a short term basis, you know, you can't just sit around and wish for 20 years for that to happen, you've got to find something to do. And so she said what they figured out was we can start with schools because even the tobacco farmers they talked to didn't particularly want their kids to be around smoke all day at school. And so they thought this is a fight that we can pick and that we can win. So they started going school district by district, school board by school board and and fighting for smoke free schools. And even schools were not an easy fight at that time, it took them like five or seven years. I can't remember to get to 10 percent of the schools in the state, but that's how you chip away, right? You don't get out of the prison right away. It's one spoonful at a time. And then what happens is at a certain point, their success started to accelerate and started to go almost exponential. So it was like the amount of time it took them to get. Half of the school boards in the state to go smoke free was about the same amount of time it took to go 100 percent in schools and wipe out smoking inside government buildings and get it wiped out for restaurants and bars and get it wiped out from prisons. And so, you know, it kind of increased this velocity. And, of course, the ultimate product of her work is that there are thousands and thousands of people alive in North Carolina today that otherwise wouldn't have been. So I find that that kind of relentless chipping away at a problem to be really inspiring.
Cathleen ToomeyThat is a great example of upstream thinking, and I I love personally the small wins because who among us and Labor Day in and day out without feeling the progress of victory.
Cathleen ToomeyAnd I think right now, in the days of covid, we're all about the small wins and small changes in what can we do day to day because we can't change a lot of where we are right now. So I think that makes a lot of sense. One thing that I. Really was excited about when thinking about this conversation is how we take these ideas that you've illustrated so beautifully in upstream thinking and how do we apply them to our listeners right now who are listening and wanting to change things in their life.
Cathleen ToomeyAnd I thought you identified some real true barriers to upstream thinking. We all want to think bigger, right? We all want to solve that big problem. But what is standing in the way and you are so brilliant at looking at the big picture and then coming down to here are the ways to unlock your brain. And in the book you have a concept you describe as problem blindness. Tell us certainly Sally didn't have problem blindness, but can you give us an example of what problem blindness is?
Dan Heath Problem blindness is the feeling that a problem you see is inevitable or natural, unavoidable. So one of my favorite examples is actually from NFL football. There's a trainer named Marcus Elliott who joined the Patriots organization years ago.
Cathleen ToomeyAnd I've heard of them.
Dan Heath I bet you have.
Cathleen ToomeyYou know, the New England football team that wins the Super Bowl.
Dan Heath Having any second thoughts about letting Tom Brady go?
Cathleen ToomeyWell, we're we're fans of Tom Brady wherever he ends up.
Dan Heath There you go. That's right. So so Marcus Elliott joins the organization and he's been hired as a trainer. They've had a string of hamstring injuries that's been really costly to the team, something like twenty two injuries the previous season. A lot of their skill players were out for multiple games. And, you know, the law at the time in the NFL and to a significant extent still today is that, look, football is a violent game. You got lots of very large men, you know, crashing into each other. Injuries are an inevitable byproduct of that. And what are you going to do basically?
Dan Heath Well, Marcus Elliott said he had a very different perspective, and that was that most injuries sustained by players were actually the result of inadequate or improper training. So, he said in those days, you know, the NFL weight room and it's very different today, mind you. But in those days, the NFL weight room was not that different from your high school weight room in the sense that, you know, there's a lot of people like lifting very heavy weights and they're grunting and bench pressing and doing squats or. Yeah, exactly. And Mark, Azealia said, you know, this is nuts with a position like. Wide receiver, I mean, you need a very different set of muscle strengths and talents than you do as an offensive tackle. And so he started with the wide receivers and he basically created a custom training program for each one based on their signature muscle strengths and imbalances. Like he would often find that the source of an injury was say that your left hamstring was significantly stronger than your right hamstring, something that a lot of people didn't even think to test for. But he realized if you could identify these imbalances and correct them, you could actually prevent injuries. And the proof is in the pudding. So the year after he starts his custom regimen, the number of hamstring injuries declines from twenty two to three. And Josh and so that to me is is just a beautiful example of how when we're surrounded by a certain kind of problem, you know, you see homeless people on the street or you see people getting a poor education, or in this case, you see players getting injured. When it happens again and again, you almost enter the state of resignation like, well, that's just the way the world is. You know, you do this stuff in the NFL, people are going to get hurt. And then it takes someone like Marcus Elliott to come along and kind of shake us awake from our problem blindness and say, let's not forget, many of these problems are solvable. We do have agency. We do have influence over them. And so that's what I mean by problem blindness.
Cathleen ToomeyI love that example that. But also because you think about all the money that that is invested in each of these football players and then to think they have an undifferentiated training regimen, you really, really change it dramatically by saying, you individual player, you need this.
Cathleen ToomeyAnd, you know, an offensive lineman needs something different than another player in in football.
Dan Heath So I think that makes a lot of sense when you said to be fair, I mean, these days, because precisely of people like Marcus Elliott, I think all the teams have figured this out, that this is nuts and they now do much, much, much better jobs of kind of totally custom training regimens. In fact, Marcus Elliott, he has this boutique, I don't even know what to call it, training for him, I guess for four largely NBA players, more than half of the existing NBA players have been through this, the sort of insane assessment program he does where he's got all this fancy equipment that the shoots video of people in 3-D and measures impact and momentum and talk and tension. And so it's like he's creating this weird athletic, high end MRI that can show you just the tiniest of issues, you know, the the way you land after a rebound. If there's, like a little bit of twist or a little bit of tension, they can isolate that and work on it. So anyway, the quest continues to prevent injuries.
Cathleen ToomeyAnd I like the fact that he's not just making the assumption that if you're playing football, you've heard that expression of which I detest, which is it is what it is.
Cathleen ToomeyYeah, I hate that expression. And it's very fatalistic.
Dan Heath It is what I accept if we exactly what we accept. I see it every day when I am working with folks who are older who just say it is, what is it? I'm old. This is going to happen. And they don't think they can do anything about it. And so from an aging perspective, I really see problems like blindness as people not spending the time to look individually at where they are, where their life ends and be able to make changes.
Dan Heath Well, and it reminds me of this is not in the book, but I remember researching this program, I think it was a John Hopkins program called Capable. And that the spirit of it was sort of like Marcus Elliot for aging populations.
Dan Heath The idea was a lot of the injuries that aging people sustain were preventable, and they realized that people's environments had a profound impact on their health or lack of it. And so they started this program for low income people where they would send a team out to their homes. And keep in mind, these are not people in with an acute health problem or some kind of injury. It was not triggered by reaction. It was triggered by upstream thinking. They were doing this before the fact they would go out to these people's homes with three kinds of people, a nurse, an occupational therapist in which are people who can help you, you know, relearned or improve various kinds of functional movements, cooking or bathing or moving around the house or whatever.
Dan Heath And the third kind of person was a handyman because they realized if you get the environment right, it can permit all kinds of really active movements and it can keep you cooking.
Dan Heath If that's something you enjoy, it can, you know, make the place safe to play with your grandkids. It can remove potential trip hazards and on and on and on.
Dan Heath And I just thought that that was what a great example of taking a situation that that would have otherwise resulted in injury and hardship and getting ahead of it.
Cathleen ToomeyI love that idea. Is that program still going on?
Dan Heath Yes, as far as I know, the last I checked on it, it it started as a pilot. It had been so successful that was starting to spread across the country. It's called capable. I can't remember if that's an acronym for something or just just the name.
Cathleen ToomeyI would look it up and little bit in the show notes so people can research that. And I think that's true. I think part of what I see problem blindness with older adults is they think they are still forty three, but they're eighty three. And so they're not adjusting to you are capable, you're just not as capable as you were four years ago. So you have to learn how to do things differently. There's that resistance and that lack of acknowledgment that things are different. So I love that idea. I love that. I think that just want to make a.
Dan Heath Exactly right. Yeah.
Cathleen ToomeyAnother barrier that you identified, three barriers upstream, thank you very much. We have to get to her to make it happen. It's something that you call a lack of ownership. So that you describe as an area to illustrate a story.
Dan Heath Yeah, so a lack of ownership, this is something that kind of struck me as I was doing the research is how how easy it is to identify who owns a downstream problem, a reactive. Solution, so if your house catches on fire, who owns that problem? Well, it's pretty clearly the fire department's turf. They're going to come, they're going to put it out. It's on them. It's on their shoulders. They they are clear on that. You're clear on that. But a lot of times upstream, problem solving is much murkier. So if we were to flip that situation around and say, whose job is it to keep your house from catching on fire, all of a sudden things get kind of complicated. Like probably you as the homeowner are first in line. There's certainly a lot that you can do to protect yourself, but you're in no way alone, right? It also hinges on who built your home and what materials they used and what building codes they were building toward and the density of your neighborhood and the behavior of your neighbors and on and on and in situations like that, where the accountability for the situation is diffuse. A lot of times what happens is nothing. And when there is no clear answer to a problem, nothing tends to happen.
Cathleen Toomey And so that's another business for sure.
Dan Heath Oh, yeah. Yeah. And so this is another curse of upstream thinking is is I think all of us at a conceptual level say, well, gosh, of course it's better to solve a problem before it starts than to react to it. And I think what I was trying to do with the book is to say, number one, we got to get smarter about why this doesn't happen naturally.
Dan Heath We have to understand what we're facing into. And number two, these barriers are formidable, but but they're not insurmountable. And so that's why I went and found a bunch of people who'd managed to overcome them so that we could learn something from from their playbook's.
Cathleen ToomeyI think that is very, very apt. I think a lot of us have had the experience of being in a meeting and having an idea and someone saying, OK, great, now you do it right. And a lot of people don't want to accept, OK, this is now on me for myself. When I'm working with aging folks, then it can be a time where people are saying, I'm old, I have aches and pains, I can't do anything about it. I have diabetes, I can't do anything about it. And there's a lack of ownership over their own life or life choices that can make them more reactive as they get older. They don't think there are things I can do to improve my quality of life. There are things I can do to improve my social engagement. There is just this age is happening to me and I can't do anything about it. And that is very frustrating to me because it is your life, you own it and you own the consequences of your actions or inaction. So I love that you point that out as a barrier once we can say we are taking control of what our life can look like.
Cathleen ToomeyIt can be different.
Dan Heath That's it, that's it, I mean, as soon as we realize we can reclaim some agency over situations, that can often be the first step toward progress. But you're right, we have to have that spark, that that that instinct or that initiative. I, I am not just going to suffer through this or be at the victim of these forces anymore. I'm going to do something.
Cathleen ToomeyExactly is that it's it's self-determination versus. Self-pity or just stay where you are. And then I love the third barrier, which is the third barrier to thinking upstream is something that you call Tomalin. Can you give us an example of tunneling?
Dan Heath Yes. Tunneling, by the way, is a word that I borrowed from another book. It's a book called Scarcity, which is a wonderful psychology book, if you're interested in that. And in tunneling basically refers to.
Dan Heath If you think about the visual metaphor of being in a tunnel, it's like if you don't want to go backwards and you're in a tunnel, the only direction to go is forwards and you're highly constrained as to how you go forwards. You just follow wherever the tunnel leads. And the authors use that as a kind of metaphor for what it's like to operate in times of scarcity. And so, you know, for anybody who's worked a busy job, you know, you can relate to that whack a mole mindset where you get to work, you have all these grand plans and then some emergency pops up and you've got to kind of pound it down like the whack a mole game. And then something else pops up in its place. And you you just spend your whole day fighting fires. You get to the end of the day, you're worn out. You've been in action the whole day. But but did you really move anything substantively forward? No, because you were just chasing problems the whole day. That's tunneling. You know, we have to keep moving forward, but we're not doing so strategically or thoughtfully and we're not able to kind of systematically solve the things that we're up against. There's a study that I cite in the book by a woman named Anita Tucker, who followed around nurses for hundreds of hours, and she said that their days are just full of encountering weird problems and having to work around them, ranging from little stuff like you run out of towels. And so you have to run over to another unit and steal some of their towels for your patients or machines break down. And what do you do? Can you afford to go without the machine or do you need to call in people to repair it? You get a medication, it's in the wrong dosage. So you have to rush back to the pharmacy and get it reissued and on and on. And Anita Tucker said that the nurses were brilliant at reacting to these problems. Right. They would always figure out some improvization some way to keep moving forward. That's tunneling. And they had to write. They got a dozen patients in various states of ill health waiting for them. Of course, they had to keep moving forward. But Anita Tucker, Anita Tucker's point was that if you look at this from the systems perspective, what she's describing is a system that never learns, a system that never improves, because if you're always working around problems when you run out of towels, you go steal some from the nearby unit that allows you to succeed and the short term. But and here's the problem. It dooms you to face that same problem the next week because you haven't solved it, right?
Dan Heath You haven't figured out why you ran out of towels. You haven't figured out why the prescription came in the wrong dosage and figured out why the equipment broke. And so tunneling is this kind of. Perfect upstream trap where we're all so busy and so scarce of time and resources that it almost forces us into reactive mode and staying in reactive mode dooms us to not solving the things that we're reacting to. And that's why I think it's such a such a powerful and important idea.
Cathleen ToomeyIt's it reminds me of the parable that started our conversation.
Dan Heath Yeah, exactly.
Cathleen ToomeyYou know, the nurses are rescuing the kids and they're rescuing, rescuing. They're not figuring out the actual problem. I see a correlation with aging that you have a scarcity of time, so you have less time. To focus on the important things and you can focus on all the day to day things, but you have less time to focus on, maybe put off doing your will, maybe put off doing the DPLA you put off making that plan about what your health care, long term needs are going to be like because you're spending the day to day just figuring out what your day is going to look like if you put off the important for the urgent.
Dan Heath And that's exactly. In fact, I was going to talk about that of the old Stephen Covey importance versus urgency matrix and in fact, the writing a will is is an example right out of the scarcity book.
Dan Heath That's something they give as an example of what tunneling cost us, is we constantly make this trade off of doing what's urgent, as you said, at the expense of what's important. And we make that trade off just time after time after time after time. Now, I'm painting a really damning picture here, and I don't want to risk demotivating people. This is this is a real problem. But there are solutions like in health care, for instance, they've started using structures like what they call a safety huddle where they might have a standing morning meeting where nurses and doctors and staffers get together and they they're all standing in the same room for maybe 15 or 20 minutes, very short, very focused meeting. And what they talk about is. What happened yesterday that endangered or could have endangered a patient, you know, do we almost deliver medication in the wrong dosage or did anything weird happen that we should think about? And what I love about that safety huddle structure is that's the exact right forum for the nurse to be saying, hey, I've been running into the situation. We keep getting medication in the wrong dosage. We need to get to the bottom of that. It's an escape from the tunnel. And then look, after the meeting is over, the nurses most likely go right back into their tunnels and stay there for the rest of the day. But because you gave them an escape, because you gave them a chance to think at the systems level to think about recurring problems, it's like you've just opened up the door to a solution. And I think the same thing in our own lives is needed.
And, you know, there's been a thousand personal productivity books to basically grapple with this issue. And I think everybody's solution is a little bit different, whether it's some kind of calendar system or whether it's a walk that you take every Sunday afternoon or whatever works for you, run with it. There's no science to this. But the important thing is you give yourself some escape from the tunnel, from the whack a mole game so that you can get those upstream thoughts and actions in motion.
Cathleen ToomeyI think that's really true, and I think about the person who spends their time working hard and. Building their resources, building their wealth, wanting to focus on making sure they have enough money for their long run, but they don't take the time and put their will in order.
Cathleen ToomeySo all of that money that they've saved goes to probate or goes to the state or gets distributed in ways they don't want or they save and they plan, but they're afraid to think about how their long-term care is going. So, they make no plans and if it's dumped on their kids at the last-minute emergency situation.
Cathleen ToomeyBut I think what we've revealed today in our talk are three things that we can change, that each of our listeners can change in their daily habits. That will help. Them to become an upstream thinker that.
Cathleen ToomeyAlong with a walk on a Sunday afternoon, they can start saying, where do I have problems? One. Where do I, um, they can start thinking this way, so to try to create new pathways and new ways to think about this. So, I would want to ask you. What would you suggest? To our listeners to do this afternoon.
Cathleen ToomeySo how do they start thinking in an upstream way, change the.
Dan Heath My recommendation, as you know, earlier, we were talking about chipping away at the problem and getting some small wins to yourself up a small win, you know, some of the things that you might think about from an upstream perspective are quite long term, you know, like your own health.
Dan Heath But there are things you can do in hours or days just to convince yourself you have the power to do this stuff, like I talked to a guy who said he had some drops he had to put in his eyes for glaucoma, and he kept forgetting it would be the afternoon and he couldn't. Did I put in my drops this morning? Did I am I supposed to put them in? And this is an ongoing frustration. And, you know, it's not like he has a security camera. He can rewind the video and see. He just had to guess, and it made him anxious. So, he just dreams up the system where he puts his eyedrops on the windowsill in his kitchen, and when it's when he leaves it on the east side of the windowsill, and then in the morning, he puts in his drops and then he moves the eyedropper to the west side because he's supposed to put them in again at night. And then when he puts them in at night, he moves it back to the east side for the next morning. And so, it's like he always knows whether or not he's taken his drops and when the next occasion will be. And it's such a little thing, right? I mean, no one's going to write a book about that story. But what's so beautiful about it is just the exercise of agency. Right. This is a guy who had a recurring irritant in his life, a recurring anxiety, and then with just a bit of forethought, with just a bit of systems thinking, he never has to have it again. And I think there's something beautiful about that. You know, the fact that a lot of times in our lives we adapt to problems because we're adaptable creatures that we needn't have ever adapted to, that we could have vanquished, or we could have fixed. And I think that's the challenge I would leave your listeners with, is what have you adapted to that you could make go away?
Cathleen ToomeyYou did that with a power.
Dan Heath I did. Yeah, but that's right. This is my grand epiphany. So, I in the days of yesteryear, I used to write in coffee shops and so I was always lugging my laptop around and bringing the power cord. And so, I get in my little table, plug in my laptop, write for three or four hours. Then I'd come back to my normal office and I would take the power cord and crawl under my desk and plug it in. And I mean, I did this no joke, probably a thousand times over a period of years. And every time it was annoying, right? Every single time I was annoying. But what are you going to do? That's a power cord. It's just it's sort of like the injuries in the NFL. That's just that's a writer's life. And then in the course of writing this book on upstream thinking, it occurred to me, why don't you take your own medicine, buddy? And so, one day I had an epiphany. What if I just bought a second power cord? And I know that. I know. And so now I have a power cord that's permanently strapped onto my desk. I only have to move at about an eighth of an inch to plug it into my laptop when I come back. And then there's another power cord that lives in my backpack with the coffee shops. And I kind of kicked myself. How could I have just lived through this a thousand times and adapted to it rather than just have done the obvious thing of spending 50 bucks and getting a second one?
Cathleen ToomeyOh, I think that is perfect. I have an upstream thinker who is a colleague of mine who helped me with that because she suggested I buy I am addicted to a keypad. And so, she just said, get a keypad for the house, get a keypad for your office. So, you're not dropping your keypad outside of your backpack every time you go back and forth. So, it's those kinds of things that can make a difference is a small win, but it proves that you can think differently.
Dan Heath I hope all of our listeners out there are thinking about the things that they can make go away in their lives, and I hope you'll send us your stories.
Cathleen ToomeyPlease do. So, one of the things we love is to get your questions and to get your successes. So, if you have a question for Dan about upstream thinking, please send it to SeniorityAuthority.org. We'll get it to him, get an answer and come up with your example of upstream thinking. And it can be as small as a second power cord or moving your eye drops from the right to the left. We want to know that you are changing your life one idea at a time as a result of this. And if you haven't yet read Dan's book Upstream, the Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen, please run out and get it in an independent bookstore or wherever books are sold. It is a great analogy. Dan has the ability to take this idea of upstream thinking and then go into policing and health care and schools and all different environments. So, you really can understand the framework of how you think differently, and it may help inspire some things in your own life. There is so much to do for this book to discuss. We only scratched the surface, and I just am so appreciative of the time that you've spent with us, Dan, and sharing your stories because you are the best storyteller and you've done wonderful, wonderful writing. I really appreciate you being a guest on Seniority Authority and is there any last thing that I did not ask you that you'd like to share with our listeners today?
Dan Heath No, I think you covered it, and I just want to say it was a treat to be on the show with you. Thanks for having me on.
Cathleen ToomeyThank you so much. That's a dead heat. Fabulous New York Times best-selling author. He is his new book is called Upstream: the Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. Please check him out. And if you enjoyed this show, please like us and rate us on your favorite podcast platform where Seniority Authority and we hope today that we helped you get smarter about growing older. Until next time. Thank you to our show sponsor, the RiverWoods Group, northern New England largest family of non-profit retirement communities, where active adults find community, purpose, and peace of mind. Visit RiverWoodsGroup.org. That's our show for today. Did it spark a question? If so, send us your questions at SeniorityAuthority.org and we’ll track down the answer. Meanwhile, don’t forget to subscribe, like us on Facebook, follow us on YouTube, and rate us on your favorite podcast platform. Until next time, let’s get smarter about growing older.