How does it feel to prevent a problem? Notice that we're not saying, how does it feel to fix a problem, but instead to never know what the consequences would have been. That's what we're talking about with today's guest, Dan Heath. Dan is the author of so many books that have been instrumental in my career and my thinking. A lot of the content on this show has been inspired by Dan's work, and I'm so grateful that Dan chose to spend some time with me here. Dan, along with his brother Chip, were co-authors in the New York Times bestselling books, Made to Stick and Switch. He and Chip also wrote The Power of Moments and a book that changed the way I think about decision-making entirely for the rest of my life called Decisive. In today's episode, we're discussing Dan's most recent book, Upstream. I highly recommend you pick up a copy of this book. It is incredibly time appropriate, and it is appropriate for especially those of you who are managers, who are designing systems. At the same time, you may find these books may help you find yourijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijij the show. People are very likely to be interested in this work as well. Perhaps years ago, I suppose three years, four years maybe, I remember being totally changed by decisive. There's the concept of having the third option is something that I talk about on this show quite a lot. So thank you for the work that you do. Thanks for saying that. I appreciate that. So we're going to talk a little bit about Upstream, your newest book on today's episode. But can you kind of back up a little bit and give a little bit of background on how you arrived at writing about solving problems upstream? Yes. And this is one where I actually know the answer to that question. Sometimes it's a little more amorphous, but this project dates back to 2009. That was the first time I started a word file with a bunch of notes with the title Upstream. And it came from two sources. The first was I heard a parable that apparently is very common in the world of public health, but I'd never heard it before. And it goes like this. You and a friend are having a picnic beside a river and you've laid out your picnic blanket and you're just about to have a meal when you hear a shout from the direction of the river and you look back and there's a child thrashing. And the water apparently drowning. And so you instinctively jump in and you rescue the child and you bring them to shore. And just as you're starting to calm down from that, you hear a second shout and you look back and it's a different child also apparently drowning. And so back in you go and you fish that child out. And then you hear two shouts. You look back now there's two kids in the river. And so begins this kind of revolving door of rescue where you're in, you're out, you're in, you're out. And right about this time, your friend swims to, to the shore and steps out and starts walking away as though to leave you alone. And, and 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 that in a nutshell is what this book is about. It's about the trap that we fall into of reacting to problems again and again, often the same problems. You know, this is true in our lives. It's true in our work where we're in trouble. And it's true in our work where we're in trouble. We put out fires, we respond to emergencies and we never get around to going upstream to tackle these problems at a systems level, potentially to stop us from ever needing to react to them. So, so that parable was kind of the first prod. The second was, uh, I had a conversation with a deputy chief of police in a big Canadian city. We were talking about something totally different, but then in the course of the conversation, he gave this thought experiment that really stuck with me. And he said, I'm going to go to the police and I'm going to go to the police and I'm going to I said, I want you to imagine two police officers. One of them goes downtown during morning commute rush. And she just positions herself in an intersection that's known to be very chaotic, very dangerous. There's a lot of accidents there. And just by being a visible presence in that intersection, she calms drivers down. They go a little slower. They're a little more cautious and she prevents accidents from happening. Meanwhile, there's a second officer who goes to a different intersection downtown. And this is one where there's a prohibited right turn and she hides around the corner. And when people make that right turn, that's forbidden. She jumps out, pulls them over and gives them a ticket. And this deputy chief said, which of these officers do you think had a bigger impact on public safety and public health? And he said, indisputably is the first, right? She probably prevented accidents and injuries from happening. But if you ask which of these officers, which of these officers do you think had a bigger impact on public safety and public health? And she said, indisputably is the first, right? She probably prevented accidents and injuries from happening. But if you ask which of these officers will be promoted, which of them will be praised, which of them will be rewarded, it's the second officer. Because she comes back with this very tangible pile of tickets. And meanwhile, that first officer, how does she prove that she did anything? I mean, how does she distinguish what she did from sitting at a donut shop for two hours? You know, there's one guy who was headed to work that morning that crossed through this intersection. And in the alternate reality where she wasn't there, he wouldn't have been able to do anything. And so she's going to have to go to the next officer. And she's going to have to go to the next officer. And she's going to have to go to the next officer. And she's going to have to go to the next officer. And she's going to have to go to the next officer. And she's going to have to go She would have been in an accident, but he slowed down just enough to avoid that accident. He'll never know the alternate fate he avoided, nor will the officer ever know that she helped him avoid it. And so there's a kind of ambiguity about upstream efforts, about preventing problems before they happen. And something about the combination of that parable and that thought experiment just became irresistible to me and started the research that led to this book. book, what, 11 years later. That's incredible. I mean, both of those stories have so much packed into them. And it's always wonderful to hear the seeds that go into kind of growing these works. Would you call it art? I suppose it's art, right? But it's these bodies of research. I think that that would be over-claiming to call what I do art, but... Fair enough. Yeah. But I mean, it is fun. I mean, it's fun to have a file where you can look back and say the origin of when I first saved this file was 2009. I don't think any of the other books I've worked on have had that span of time where the idea has just been constantly interesting to me. Yeah. You just shocked me when I realized that 2009 was 11 years ago. That's incredible. And you get into some of this. You get into how do you get the early warning of a problem, or how do you know that you're succeeding in the book? Yeah. And what's the... We're going to talk about a little bit of that. But first, I want to kind of go back to that first parable where the kids are being thrown in the water and you and your friend are saving them, kind of taking turns, tag-taming, and you run away, right? And I think this may be... This particular parable points out an interesting difficulty in upstream thinking, and that is the initial cost. By you walking away, it's possible. It's possible that one of those kids that's coming down the stream, well, they're not going to actually survive, right? You're abandoning the one to save the many in some ways. And even though it's just a parable, I'm not accusing you, Dan, of any such horrible act. Child killer. I think there's something there, right? There's a cost to that initial commitment to walk away from what is urgent and go towards something that's more potentially important or more impactful in the long run. So do you get into this in the book, this idea that there's some initial barrier and cost? No question. And you've put your finger on what is probably the core dynamic that keeps us downstream, is that there's always something urgent that commands our attention. There's a study that I cite in the book by a woman named Anita Tucker, who for her dissertation at Harvard shadowed nurses for hundreds of hours. So just follow them around. And she said, she was interested in how they solved problems and dealt with problems. And she describes what their day was like. And it was basically a never ending series of challenges. They didn't have the right medication at the moment they needed it, or a piece of equipment broke, or they ran out of towels and they had to run to the unit down the hall to steal some of their towels for their patients. And sometimes it was novel things like Anita Tucker cites this one nurse who was checking out a mother who just had a baby. And part of the checkout procedure was to check out a baby. And she said, to remove the security anklet from the baby. And in this case, there wasn't one, it was missing. And so they did this frantic search and finally found the anklet in the baby's bassinet. So problem solved, mother was checked out. And then a few hours later, Anita Tucker says this same nurse had the exact same problem happen again with a different mother, a different baby. This time they couldn't find it at all. And so they had to go to an alternate protocol for checking out the mom and making sure the baby was hers and all that. And so Anita Tucker paints this portrait of nurses that they are, they're scrappy, they're resourceful, they're capable of improvising solutions to problems. They don't just run to the boss when something goes wrong. And it's an inspiring portrait when you look at it that way. But if you shift the lens just a little bit and look at it from the organizational perspective, you realize something that's a bit shocking, which is what she's describing is a description of a woman who's in a hospital. And she's describing a woman who's in a hospital. It's a description of a system that never learns, that never improves. Because these nurses had learned, they developed a habit of working around every problem that they faced. And one thing that you can guarantee is if you just work around problems, rather than solving them, you guarantee that you're going to be solving those same problems the next month or the next year. And so this is the trap, right? You always have those kids drowning in the river. You always have those anklets falling off. You always have that missing medication. And you feel like you need to stay where you are because those things are urgent. But at the same time, you're dooming yourself to staying there forever. And I think that's the core dynamic that we face. And probably 99 times out of 100 in different situations, we make the choice to stay downstream. And what I'm trying to get at in this book is not to pretend like that's an easy dilemma or that we're all just idiots for making that choice. What I'm trying to do is present a realistic picture of, look, this is what makes upstream work hard. And this is why it's worth fighting those dynamics anyway, because the payoff can be so profound. Today's episode is sponsored by Educative. For developers, learning is really a part of your career. A fundamental part of your career never stops. 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Thanks again to Educative for sponsoring today's episode of DeveloperT. We have different types of motivations as humans. Of course we do. We have the motivation to avoid things, but also to seek things. And I heard a wonderful quote one time that said, and this is in the context of organizational culture, it said, culture is not what you say, it's what you celebrate. And I wonder if we end up in a culture where we're not just talking about what we say, but we're talking about what we're celebrating. This downstream work, just like you just mentioned in the story of nurses, they're scrappy, they're problem solving. And that feels wonderful. It feels like a badge of honor, just like saving the children who are drowning might, right? It absolutely is right. And I think a lot of times we unwittingly develop a culture of heroics. We celebrate the person who, who stays up all night to do that frantic last final work before the deadline, or the person who bails us out of some crisis. And that kind of heroism can be addictive. I mean, it feels good to be a hero. I've heard from some readers who read this, have a little rant about heroism in the book. And I have some readers who wrote to me to describe colleagues who they said were so addictive to being held up as a hero that they felt like they honestly kind of created crisis. And I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. They were blessed with these blessed with these Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp Camp It really is a hero. The implicit message here is not that I'm undermining the lifeguard. Of course, the lifeguard is a hero. If it was my child, I would want them to be there. But if you think about all the people who didn't save the day, but rather kept the day from needing to be saved, that's a lot more people who you'll never in a million years think of. I actually did study the YMCA's success at reducing drowning deaths. And you know what's behind it is a lot of really boring stuff, none of which would meet our definition of heroism. It's stuff like they learned to push the lifeguard's chairs closer to the pool to remove any blind spots. They taught lifeguards a new technique for scanning the pool so that they could see all aspects of the pool within like a 10 second span. They learned to record. They learned to rotate lifeguards among shifts, just like they do in the airport with the TSA so they don't get too bored. And it's stuff like that, right? And that involves training. That involves consultants. That involves pushing chairs around. And that saved far more lives than will the lifeguards frantically diving into the pool to fish out the kids. But those people don't get any credit, right? We'll never know their names. They won't even know that they've succeeded. I mean, at best, what they will know is that they've succeeded. What they will know is that if you look at some data on a page, the drowning deaths go down by 30% over a period of a couple of years. But even if you have confidence that data is right, you still don't know which people you helped, right? It's just numbers on a page. And so you have to take heart and confidence from seeing those numbers on a page decline, but it lacks that kind of visceral charge that you get from downstream heroics. Yeah, it's kind of an interesting thing because we're basically... We're basically talking about making things boring in a lot of ways, right? And I mean that kind of tongue-in-cheek, but in some ways, what we're doing is we're saying, hey, the negative consequences of the drama is not worth a positive feeling of the dopamine, right? We're taking away some of that underlying reward structure that we feel and replacing it with better outcomes. So is this a human... I mean, this seems like a deeply human struggle. It definitely is. And I would even go so far as to say that the need for heroism is often a sign of systems failure. The fact that we needed heroics means something that we could have and probably should have foreseen and handled competently was not. And you and I are recording in this in the midst of the coronavirus quarantine era, and it's all fresh to mind, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. It's like every day that your house doesn't catch on fire, you get like a little dopamine squirt. Exactly. I like where you're going with that. Maybe the bots will save us with something like that. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot to this. There's a lot of complexity, and I love that you've touched on this struggle between... And by the way, I feel like I want to chime in because I worry that your listeners are thinking we're just... Describing dynamics that are just innate and impenetrable. And the reality is they may be hard, but they're certainly not unconquerable. Right. Even in that nurse situation that I described, there are ways to escape that trap that don't require us to rewire our brains. Some health systems have started using, and I imagine there are comparable equivalents in the world of developers, called safety huddles. Yeah. Where every morning... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. they'll get together a group of doctors and nurses to talk about what happened the day prior. And it's a quick meeting, maybe 20 minutes, everybody's standing up. And what they're doing is reviewing safety near misses. We almost gave the wrong medication to this patient or this complicated patient almost eluded our efforts to save him or her. And they talk through what can be learned from that. And if you think about a forum like that, it might only be 20 minutes of an eight or nine hour day, but it's an opportunity to get out of that tunnel of downstream work. And it would have been the perfect forum for that nurse I mentioned that had the problem with two anklets being missing in a couple of hours. That would have been the perfect time for her to say, hey, I had this weird problem yesterday. We really need to look into these anklets and what's going on with that. So I think the good news is we are so disproportionately loaded in. And tipped toward the downstream end of the scale that even a little bit of upstream investment can pay huge dividends. That's the good news. Absolutely. I mean, yes, we do have this as software engineers and in software development, we, a lot of teams practice the daily standup. A lot of teams practice retrospectives. These are, you know, at the end of a certain iteration, it may not necessarily be daily, but every week or every two weeks or so, you know, you look back and you say, okay, what went well and what could have happened? And I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. It's very simple format, but I think there's also a really, an interesting hidden factor here in that specific example. And that is that they do it every day. And here's why I think that's important. If you did it once a month, or if you did it once a year, if you had just a yearly review, you're very unlikely to be in the pattern of sharing those failures. It's hard to share failure. Yeah. It's hard to talk about what you did wrong yesterday. So do you think that that plays it, you know, the regularity of, or maybe the kind of the social dynamics here that we're talking about? How do we construct those kinds of social dynamics in ways that allow us to accept that we are, that we need to get better? I think that's a really insightful point that the daily rhythm to this thing, is accomplishing a couple of things. I mean, number one, there's just the obvious, you allocate investment to the things that you consider worthy. And so it's a way of signaling in this organization, upstream problem solving is something that we're willing to invest in. But the second thing is it's normalizing and socializing a learning culture. So, you know, in researching this book, I talked to a lot of people that are experts in various kinds of quality movements. You know, I've been talking to a lot of people that are experts in various kinds of quality movements. And I think that's a really important thing to think about. And I think that's a really important thing to think about. And I think that's a really important thing to think about. ranging from quality improvement in healthcare to lean to Six Sigma. And I know a lot of these things have hit the world of development as well. And they all share, I think, a common spirit and even similar practices. And I think what you're moving toward with something like that daily safety huddle is you're moving toward the desire to be an organization that learns, which implies several things. One is that you're comfortable acknowledging failure, that you don't have a fear of failure. And I think that's a really important thing to think about. And I think that's a really important thing to think about. And I think that's a really important thing to think about. And of surfacing things when they go wrong, that you're going to carve out resources and time to address things at the systems level. I mean, that was what shocked Anita Tucker is that in her shadowing of nurses, she didn't find one instance of problem solving at the systems level. It was just absent. And I don't think, by the way, that's anything to do with nurses. I think that's a ubiquitous truth about professions. So, you know, I think that's a really important thing If any of the people listening to this are intrigued by this idea of kind of fumbling forward toward a learning organization, I'd recommend you check out the work of a guy named Steve Spear, who has devoted his work in the past several years to studying cultures like Toyota or Navy submarines or places where they absolutely have to get things right and have to get things better on an ongoing basis. And in all of these cultures, they're going to have to get things right. And I all of what that means from a cultural transformation point of view. The good news is there are a lot of people who have blazed this trail. I mean, there's a lot of really excellent organizations and institutions that have taken one step after another on this road to quality improvement. And they're in a place now where we can learn from them and start adopting some of these practices. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea, the first part of my interview with Dan Heath. I highly encourage you to subscribe so you don't miss out on the second part of this interview. Hopefully you can recognize Dan's thoughtful approach to this discussion is incredibly valuable, not just because of the time that we're in, but because our jobs require us, really require us to think upstream. And Dan has done such an incredible job with this book. Go and check it out on Amazon. Thank you again to today's sponsor, Educative. Educative.io slash Developer Tea can get you 10% off of everything. And they just launched their subscriptions at almost 50% off. Head over to Educative.io slash Developer Tea. A quick shout out to today's producer, Sarah Jackson. Today's episode is a part of the Spec Network. Head over to Spec.fm to find other shows like Developer Tea that you can grow with in your career. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. And until next time, enjoy your tea. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.