I don't know whether you've seen the Chip and Dan Heath have written a number of books, but Dan Heath wrote one more recently called Upstream,[1] and he tells the story in the beginning of the book where small children are drowning in a river. And so the adults see this and they're rushing in to pull the children out of the river, except this one person who says, I'm going to run upstream, and the other one says, Why? We got to save these children. He said, I want to find out what's putting them in the river in the first place.
He said that we have to approach downstream problems. First of all, we have to be aware of downstream problems. But then we have to approach them by going back and looking at root causes. And, of course, in It systems and in debugging large system problems, root causes is one of the key techniques that we use. And so I thought that's an interesting way to look at problems, particularly ecosystem, even problems, is to say, what's our upstream view?
Now, of course, the climate change folks would say, well, that's because we put too much carbon or carbon dioxide in the air, that that's a root cause. But the other thing we learned in system troubleshooting was the five whys, right? Well, why is there more carbon in here? Well, there are more cars. Why are there more cars?
And you keep asking the whys, and you might get back to root causes. Maybe one of the root causes is population growth. All right. Well, every forecast we're looking at now is pointing to population slowdown and even the possibility of reversal of population. What impact will that have downstream? We've talked about the impact it'll have on universities and enrollment, but what impact might it have on the ecosystem?" |