An upstream thinking question – how many times in the past month did we celebrate a systems solution to prevent problems? How does this compare with the number of times we celebrated an urgent problem/”crisis” that was overcome?
Dan Heath, one of my favorite authors at the intersection of psychology and business, shared a parable from his upcoming book. “You and a friend are having a picnic by the side of a river. Suddenly you hear a shout from the direction of the water—a child is drowning. Without thinking, you both dive in, grab … Continue reading Going Upstream
It was hard to narrow the list down to 5 books this year. So, I thought I’d share my top 4 and a collection of books that share 5th place. 1) Debt by David Graeber (Amazon): An anthropological dive into 5,000 years of human history from the lens of debt. I wrote an ode to … Continue reading 4+ books that might change your mind – 2020 Edition
We’re always better off starting with the assumption that the problem that appears in front of us is not the problem that needs to be solved. It is almost always just a symptom. And, treating symptoms does little good. We need to either swim upstream to understand the root cause or do the work to … Continue reading The problem that appears
A note for new subscribers: This post is part of a series on my notes on technology product management (this is what I do for a living). You might notice that these posts often link to older posts in the series on LinkedIn even though they are all available on this blog. That is intended … Continue reading 5 habits that help build high velocity product teams
Community water fluoridation (CWF) adds a controlled amount of fluoride to the water supply to prevent cavities. It is a preventative measure that costs roughly $1 per person in a community. The benefits, on the other hand, have been estimated at about 100x the investment. The Center for Disease Control in the United States declared … Continue reading Water Fluoridation
Years of writing about and reflecting on feedback have taught me to be grateful for feedback. I think I’ve done a better job reacting to feedback in the moment over the years. That means being defensive 20% of the time vs. being 80% of the time. :-) And, I think I’ve done a far better … Continue reading Welcoming feedback – a new quest
Dan Heath shared an interesting case study about city of Chicago’s quest to reduce the use of single use plastic bags. The city council started with a ban on single use plastics. But, they soon realized that this was not having the intended effect. To ensure carbon neutrality, citizens would need to use a paper … Continue reading Chicago and plastic bags
“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” | Dan Heath in Upstream So, if we’re attempting to figure out how to fix bad outcomes/outputs, we’re best served if we ignore the specific incident at hand and move upstream to figure out how the system design allowed it. To make that more … Continue reading Systems and results
The most common response to added scope or work I’ve heard from myself or others is – “I’ll need to stay up late to get this done.” Optimizing length, it turns, out is just one way to solve the problem and is the most limited tool we have at our disposal. It is limited because … Continue reading Intensity over length
