Dan Heath

So often in our organizations and communities, we fall into a cycle of reaction. A problem happens, and we respond. We fight fires. We contend with emergencies. Researchers call this "tunneling": We don't see the big picture, and we don't think about the future, we just keep pushing forward from one crisis to the next. What if instead we could shift our energies upstream -- uncovering and addressing the source of those problems?

In this talk, Heath will reveal how some leaders have learned to spot problems in advance: There's a school district that can predict which students will drop out -- 4 years before graduation. There's an internet service company that can predict which customers are likely to cancel their subscriptions -- as early as two weeks after they sign up! When we shift from downstream response to upstream planning, it can cause miracles: One company eliminated 25 million customer support calls by asking, "How can we make sure our customers never need to call us?" And one nation in Europe has almost eliminated teenage substance abuse by asking, "How can we create a teenage culture that offers such compelling sober activities that teens simply don't feel like drinking or doing drugs?"

Heath will share the three forces that push us downstream, as well as the powerful levers we can use to start preventing problems before they happen.

Dan talks with Reworked editor Mike Prokopeak about how the pandemic reshaped our priorities at work and home and what we can do to rise above the day-to-day and make meaningful upstream changes that improve our results.

For more conversations like this, be sure to subscribe to our Get Reworked podcast here.