The effort to reduce call volume at Expedia was a successful upstream intervention.

Downstream work is easier to see. Easier to measure. There is a maddening ambiguity about upstream efforts.

But even if you feel confident your efforts accomplished something, you’ll still never know who you helped. You’ll just see some numbers decline on a page. Your victories are stories written in data, starring invisible heroes who save invisible victims.

The number one reason customers called? To get a copy of their itinerary. In 2012, roughly 20 million calls were logged for that purpose. Twenty million calls! That’s like everyone in Florida calling Expedia in one year. At a support cost of roughly $5 per call, that’s a $100 million problem.

Problem blindness is the first of three barriers to upstream thinking that we’ll study in this section. When we don’t see a problem, we can’t solve it.

Elliott later founded a sports science firm called P3, which assesses and trains elite athletes. The firm uses 3-D motion capture technology to micro-analyze athletes while they run, jump, and pivot.

What the world needs now is a quieter breed of hero, one actively fighting for a world in which rescues are no longer required. How many problems in our lives and in society are we tolerating simply because we’ve forgotten that we can fix them?

Good intentions guarantee nothing. What I find fascinating about upstream efforts is the way they reflect humanity at its best and worst. To go upstream is a declaration of agency: I don’t have to be at the mercy of these forces—I can control them. I can shape my world. And in that declaration are the seeds of both heroism and hubris.

if you wait for the bad things to happen, you can never quite put things back together the way they were before.”