Author

Dan Heath

Rate this book

4
Average: 4 (1 vote)

This review was submitted by jmarkey77.

  • Premise: Solving problems before they emerge is always worth its weight in gold. This book talks through some high level steps on how to do it ourselves.
  • My thoughts: Preventing fires instead of putting out fires isn't often met by leadership support, acceptance, or understanding. Yes putting the fire out before it happens is critical, this book gives some high level evidence on how to prove you did, unfortunately for black swan or very rare events there is little way to prove it and the book acknowledges that artfully.
  • Insights from the book:
    • Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.
    • You don't understand the problem until you've seen it up close.
    • The postmortem for a problem can be the preamble to a solution.
    • Leaders should be wary of common sense, which can be a poor substitute for evidence.
    • The first thing to realize is that if you have a large organization filled with a relatively homogenous population of employees, then that composition did not happen by chance.