Something You Should Know
How to Solve a Problem Before It Happens & When Less is Really More
Thu, 05 Jun 2025
Ask anyone if they prefer fresh or frozen fish and almost everyone says – Fresh! But it turns out to be not so simple. A lot of fish you think is fresh may have been frozen at some point. This episode begins by unraveling this issue of fresh or frozen fish and which is better. https://www.thespruceeats.com/frozen-fish-better-than-fresh-fish-1300625 How do you solve a problem before it even becomes a problem? The perfect example is changing the oil in your car. You do that to prevent problems from happening later. And it turns out a lot of problems in life can be solved – or prevented - that way if we just change how we look at them. That’s according to Dan Heath author of the book Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen (https://amzn.to/3atB1Os). Listen as he reveals this way of preventing problems that everyone can put into practice. Our tendency is to add. When the government sees a problem, they add a new law. When there is a problem at work, management adds a new rule. We add. But what if a better solution is to subtract? Take away a law or a rule or remove an obstacle. We tend not to think that way, but we should according to my guest Leidy Klotz. Leidy is a professor of engineering and architecture at the University of Virginia and author of the book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less (https://amzn.to/3olHXG5). If you have a sweet tooth you would like to tame – the solution just might be a pickle! Listen as I explain. http://www.wisegeek.com/why-do-some-pregnant-women-crave-pickles-and-ice-cream.htm PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! MINT MOBILE: Ditch overpriced wireless and get 3 months of premium wireless service from Mint Mobile for 15 bucks a month at https://MintMobile.com/something ! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at https://FactorMeals.com/something50off ROCKET MONEY: Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster! Go to https://RocketMoney.com/SOMETHING QUINCE: Elevate your shopping with Quince! Go to https://Quince.com/sysk for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! DELL: Introducing the new Dell AI PC . It’s not just an AI computer, it’s a computer built for AI to help do your busywork for you! Get a new Dell AI PC at https://Dell.com/ai-pc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is better, fresh or frozen fish?
Today on Something You Should Know, what's better, fresh or frozen fish? Turns out to be a bit of a trick question. Then, how do you solve problems before they happen? It can be done if you change your thinking.
For instance, there was one swing on a playground in Brooklyn that had been responsible for multiple lawsuits. All somebody needed to do was go out and raise this swing six inches and all of the injuries would have been eliminated, but nobody thought to do that.
Also, why the secret to cutting back on sweets may be pickles. And you often hear that more is better, but maybe the better solution is less. Subtract something.
Think about subtracting as a way to make things better. One of my favorite quotes, to gain knowledge, add things every day. To gain wisdom, subtract things every day. All this today on Something You Should Know.
I'm Charissa and my recommendation to all entrepreneurs is to successfully start with Shopify. I've been using Shopify for the first day and the platform never causes me any problems. I have a lot of problems, but the platform is never one of them. I have the feeling that Shopify continuously optimizes their platform. Everything is super easy to integrate and linkable.
And the time and money that I save through it, I can invest in other things. Especially in growth.
Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. So the other day we had some people over and we were cooking fish on the grill and the question came up, what's better, fresh or frozen fish? The answer seems obvious, but I did a little digging. And it's actually kind of a trick question, what's better, fresh or frozen, because a lot of fresh fish was frozen.
The term fresh fish doesn't have anything to do with how old the fish is. Fresh fish just means it's not frozen. And if it was never frozen, it may be several days old and may not taste as good as it would have when it was just caught. So to solve this problem, stores often buy frozen fish, ideally fish that was flash frozen right after it was caught, then they thaw it out and sell it.
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Chapter 2: How can we prevent problems before they happen?
Imagine if you could solve problems before they happen. Well, the fact is you do, and the perfect example, I think, is when you change the oil in your car. You take your car in for an oil change not because there's anything wrong with it. You know that if you don't take it in for an oil change, you're asking for trouble down the road.
So you change the oil to prevent the problem before it happens. Yet so much of our life is putting out fires, not preventing them. But what if you could actually solve a lot more problems before they happen in the first place? Well, that's what Dan Heath has been looking into, and he has authored several really interesting books.
His latest is called Upstream, The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. Hey, Dan, welcome. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me on the show. You bet. So explain why you took a look at this and why you think this is important to talk about.
My interest in this topic goes back to a parable that's pretty well known in public health circles, but not well outside it. And it's originally attributed to a guy named Irving Zola. And the parable goes like this. You and a friend are having a picnic by the side of a river.
And just as you've laid out your picnic blanket, getting ready to eat, you hear a noise from the direction of the river and you look back and there's a child thrashing around in the water, apparently drowning. And so, of course, both of you instinctively jump in and you fish the child out and you bring them to the shore and
just as your adrenaline is starting to subside a little bit, you hear another shout and you look back, there's a different child drowning in the river. So back in you go and you fish that child out. And no sooner have you brought that child to shore that you look back, there are two more kids drowning in the river.
And it begins a kind of revolving door of rescue where you're in and out and fishing kids out. And just as you're starting to grow fatigued from all the rescue work, your friend swims towards shore and steps out, seeming to walk away and leave you alone. And you say, hey, Where are you going? I need your help. All these kids are drowning. We can't just leave.
And your friend says, well, I'm going upstream to tackle the guy who's throwing all these kids in the river. In life, whether we're talking about our personal lives or in our businesses or even in society, I think that too often we find our attention focused downstream on the reaction, the reaction, the reaction.
And we never make our way upstream to try to tackle the systems and the forces that are causing the problems in the first place.
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Chapter 3: What is upstream thinking?
Where would you even start to solve that?
It's incredibly... complicated to solve problems upstream. I'll give you a simple example. I had a conversation with a deputy police chief about a decade ago, and he had this thought experiment where he said, imagine two police officers. And one of those police officers goes downtown where there's a very chaotic intersection. It's a place where cars have collisions a lot of times.
And the officer just kind of stations herself visibly in the intersection. And because she's there and drivers see her, they They slow down, they get a little bit more cautious and accidents are prevented. And then he says, imagine a second officer that goes to a different part of downtown where there is a prohibited right turn. Um, and she stations herself around the corner.
And when people make that illegal right turn, she jumps out and naps them and gives them a ticket. And he says, if you think about these two officers, which one is doing more to protect the public safety? And he says, indisputably, it's the first one. She's preventing crashes. She might be preventing injuries or deaths. But if you ask a different question, which of these officers gets rewarded?
Which of them gets praised? Which of them gets promoted? It's the second officer because she comes back with this stack full of tickets that show what a good job she's done. And meanwhile, that first officer, how does she prove she did anything? You think about there was a guy commuting downtown that morning who crossed through this intersection.
And in an alternate reality where the police officer hadn't been there, he would have been in a car crash, possibly fatal. His life was saved by virtue of the officer being there that morning. He'll never know it, nor will the officer ever know that she saved him in particular. And so there's a kind of maddening ambiguity about upstream efforts. that I think is interesting.
It's like even as you and I could probably say, well, of course you want to go upstream and keep the kids from being thrown in the river. What I wanted to show in the book was basically two things. Number one, there are lots of obstacles to getting upstream.
And number two, despite the presence of those obstacles, we've got to try because that's the only recipe for permanently improving systems in our lives and our work and in our communities.
Well, but maybe that's happening. I mean, like you say, when you prevent things from happening, you never know they would have happened. So there may be a lot of this going on because we just never see it.
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Chapter 4: How can subtraction help solve problems?
And today, it's down to one. There's been an 80% reduction in fatalities. And you ask, how is that so? I mean, are we all just naturally better drivers today? And the answer is no. I don't think driving ability has improved a lick. It's all about the systems that have been designed to try to forestall those problems. It's about safer roads. It's about better lighting.
It's about better brake systems. It's about seat belts and airbags. It's about mothers against drunk driving, reducing the incidence of drunk driving on the roads. And we're talking about thousands of people over decades who are all committed to this idea of what if we put our hands together? What if we put our resources toward preventing bad things from happening?
And like the police officer in that story, those people will never know who they helped. They won't know who those thousands of people are whose lives were saved because of their work, but we can see in the data that it happened. And that's the power of upstream thinking.
Can you bring this down to a more personal level? I mean, we can talk about how police deploy their officers and how that affects policies and all that, but what about on a more personal level?
Yeah, it's a fair question. I think the advantage of upstream thinking is it works really on any level. You can think about it at the national level, like with the healthcare example, but you can think about it in your own life. And I'll give you the most trivial example possible from my own life. So I am, you know, as you know, I'm a writer and I tend to write in coffee shops.
I don't know why that works for me, some busy, loud coffee shop, but it does. And so I'm used to shuttling my laptop around. Like I'll go to the coffee shop and write for a while, then I'll come back to my office. And so I'm constantly packing my laptop, unpacking it. I bring a power cord and I plug it in at the coffee shop, pack it back up, bring it back to my office, plug it in there.
And after a while, I mean, after years of this behavior, it occurred to me, hey, what if I just bought two power cords and one of them could live forever in my backpack where I carry around my laptop and And one of them could be just strapped down on my desk so that when I come back, I can just plug it in and not have to mess with unpacking the power cord.
And I'm not telling that story to share my genius with you because I don't think there is much genius there. But it's almost a clue that in our lives, so often we adapt to problems or we come to take problems for granted that need not exist. You know, that I had just come to accept a reality where I was forever going to have this nuisance of power cord shuffling.
And yet the actual amount of labor it took to fix that problem was I had to go online for five minutes and press, you know, buy. And one of the interesting things to me about this work is why is that shift in our thinking so difficult? And why do we choose to endure things that we might have prevented?
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Chapter 5: Why do we often react instead of prevent?
Many people don't, but many people ignore the advice.
No, it's definitely true. And I think something like smoking is compounded by the addictive nature of the product. But I think you're pointing out that there's something universal at play here. And I think that something is tunneling, which is a word I stole from a couple of psychologists who wrote a book called Scarcity. So let me explain what this is.
There was a researcher named Anita Tucker who followed around a bunch of nurses as they went through their day. So she shadowed them for hundreds of hours as part of our dissertation at Harvard.
And she found about what you'd expect, that these nurses were constantly dealing with unexpected problems, like they couldn't get the right medication at the right moment, or they ran out of towels and had to run around and find some somewhere. This one morning, Anita Tucker described a situation where there was a nurse who was checking out a new mother. She was ready to take her baby home.
And as part of that checkout process, they have to remove the security anklet from the baby's leg. And unfortunately, they couldn't find it. It had fallen off somewhere. So they do this frantic search, and it turns up in the bassinet. And then Anita Tucker says three hours later the exact same thing happens with a different mother. The anklet's missing again.
They do another frantic search, and this time they can't find it at all. So the nurse goes to the boss. They figure out an alternate checkout process, and the mothers are dismissed. And so this is what it's like to be a nurse. You're running around. You're trying to figure out novel solutions to problems. You're being resourceful. You don't have to run for help every time something goes wrong.
You can handle it. And it's kind of an admirable portrait when I say it that way. But if you look at this from another perspective, what you realize, it's something that's a bit shocking, which is the system I'm describing here is one that will never improve. It's one that will never get better. Because what these nurses have learned to do is work around problems.
But they're never going upstream to solve them at the system's level. And back to this word tunneling, that's essentially what tunneling is. And to be clear, like the point of this story is not to throw stones at nurses, quite the opposite.
My point here is that I think all of us are tunneling in our own professions in the same way that when we're juggling too many things, too many issues, too many problems, we kind of abandon the idea that we might strategically prioritize them. And we just kind of get in the tunnel. If you can picture that in your mind, just being in a tunnel, there's only one direction, there's four words.
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Chapter 6: What lessons can we learn from police strategies?
But they also doomed themselves to solving exactly the same kind of problems the next week and the next month. And so I think this is what we have to overcome, this kind of universal force of tunneling, if we're going to get serious about solving problems.
A problem, though, I see is that, and using your example of that guy throwing kids in the river so we go upstream and tackle him and get him to stop. Well, there are a lot of cases where that guy is hard to find, that the cause of the problem is hard to find upstream. And if you can't find it, you can't fix it.
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. That often what we find is when we start trying to get to the root cause of a problem, it gets really confusing. It gets very complex. I mean, there's a comfort in rescue because it's very tangible. You see the kid thrashing in the river. You can pull them out. You feel good. You get glory from your friends because you rescued a kid.
And then when you start talking about, well, what caused this to begin with, all of a sudden you've got a debate. You've got a discussion. And it can get very confusing. And that's why one of the themes that stuck out in my research was so often to solve problems rather than just react to them required a different set of people to come together.
One of my favorite stories in the book is about the city of Rockford, which is the second biggest city in Illinois behind Chicago. And it became the first city in the U.S. to solve the problem of veteran homelessness. And what's fascinating about it, I talked to the former mayor, a guy named Larry Morrissey, and he said he'd been working on homelessness for nine years.
You know, Rockford's one of these places that was an industrial hub and then all the factories closed and all the problems that come along with that. And he said they basically got nowhere on homelessness in nine years. I mean, they just tread water at best.
And he said they discovered something in the 10th year where in a period of 10 months, they went from nowhere to that first city achievement that I talked about. And so I was asking him how they did this. And he described the following changes.
Number one, they stopped treating it as a problem where everybody got to stay in their silos because there's so many people that have a stake in homelessness, ranging from the homeless people themselves to social services, to the VA, to the police, to homeless shelters, to the fire department. And everybody kind of did their little piece of the puzzle, but they never really collaborated.
So the first thing they did was they brought everybody around the same table. And then the second thing was they didn't just bring them around the table to pontificate, to brainstorm about you know, the origins of homelessness and how to solve it at a societal level. What they did was they oriented people around specific homeless individuals.
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Chapter 7: How did Rockford solve veteran homelessness?
He's coming to the shelter a few times a week to get lunch. Okay, who's going to reach out to them and see if he's ready to be housed? Well, someone raises their hand and said, we'll do that this week. And that's what the meetings are like. They're very concrete. They're very human.
And the result of that is you come to understand all the moving parts in the system so much better because you see them through the lens of these real individual cases and And that taught me something powerful that what feels like macro change often starts with micro understanding that you can't help thousands of people or millions until you can help one.
And I think that's part of the antidote here is learning how to change the way we collaborate and learning how to get closer to the systems that yield the problems.
Dan Heath is my guest. He is a writer and researcher, and he's author of the book Upstream, The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen.
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I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times. And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director. You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters. We come together to host Unspooled, a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits, fan favorites, must-sees, and in case you missed them. We're talking Parasite to Home Alone.
From Grease to the Dark Knight. So if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure. Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to hit the follow button.
So, Dan, I think one of the problems in trying to identify those upstream problems is that we live in an era of specialization. You know, in the factory, one person does one job is not necessarily aware of what everyone else does or how they do it. They just know that to do their one job. So they don't see the big picture enough to know how to tackle the big picture as a whole.
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Chapter 8: What role does collaboration play in problem-solving?
And by God, with a lot of practice, he gets very efficient at screwing in the widgets. But that very same structure is also the deterrent to solving bigger problems than exist at any one level of that kind of fragmented infrastructure. Just to be more tangible about this, there's a story about Expedia, which is the online travel site where you can book hotels or airfare or whatever.
They had a problem back in 2012 where of every hundred customers who booked a reservation on the site, 58 of them ended up calling the call center for support, which is just kind of mind-boggling, right? Because the whole point of an online travel site is that you can do it yourself. And yet almost 60% of the people who did it themselves ended up needing help.
So this guy named Ryan O'Neill starts digging into this to figure out what in the world is going on. And he figures out the number one reason that people are calling is to get a copy of their itinerary. That's it, to get a copy of their itinerary. 20 million calls. were placed in 2012. That's like every single person in Florida calling Expedia in one year to request a copy of their itinerary.
And so if you ask, how do you solve that problem? It doesn't take a genius, right? Well, they added a branch to the IVR, press two if you're calling for a copy of your itinerary. They allowed people to self-serve online. They changed the way that they sent out the confirmation so that they wouldn't end up in spam, which is part of the problem. The solutions were easy.
The more interesting thing to me is how does a problem like that boil up to that point? Why wasn't there a kind of red flag triggered when you got your seven millionth call for an itinerary? And the answer is back to that idea of fragmentation, where at Expedia, like virtually every other business, you have these distinct groups of people with different goals.
The marketing team's goal is to attract people to Expedia. And then you've got a product team whose job it is to design such a smooth, easy interface that they get to the point of booking a transaction. And then you've got the IT team whose job it is to keep everything humming and keep uptime as high as possible.
And then you've got the call center and their job is to resolve people's issues quickly and keep people happy. And on an individual basis, all those goals make perfect sense. They sound logical. But then when you ask a very basic question like, whose job in this ecosystem is it to make sure that customers don't need to call us for help? The answer is nobody. It's nobody's job.
It's even worse than that. Like there's no one in this whole system who would even be rewarded if that happened.
It just seems, as I said before, that even when you decide to tackle a problem upstream, it doesn't mean you'll always find the problem upstream and you may find something else. You may say this is the solution and in fact it's not.
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