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Dan Heaths problem-solving book Upstream opens with a vivid scene: Two friends keep hauling drowning swimmers out of a river, pulling person after person from the current. The catastrophe seems insurmountableuntil one of them heads upstream to stop whoevers pushing them in. Organizations replay that drama daily. Executives sprint from burnout to data breaches to supply-chain snarls, applauded for their stamina even as the current churns faster. Imagine directing even a fraction of that adrenaline toward stopping the cause instead of managing the chaos. The Hidden Cost of Endless Firefighting Downstream heroics may seem essential, but they siphon money and morale away from efforts to confront their root causes. The toll is hard to ignore. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 90% of U.S. healthcare spending is allocated to largely preventable chronic diseases. Gallups latest poll reveals global disengagement at 79%, resulting in a $9.6 trillion productivity loss. Burnout now costs employers $3,999 per employee per year, according to the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. And McKinsey, a multinational strategy and management consulting firm, warns that climate-related shocks could shave four points off the global GDP by 2050. Crisis mode isnt simply exhausting; its economically irrational. When New Zealand trust company Perpetual Guardian piloted a four-day workweek, productivity increased by 20%, stress levels fell markedly, and electricity use decreased, all without implementing pay cuts. The takeaway isnt necessarily fewer hoursits smarter design. Leaders looked upstream at workload, well-being, and carbon impact, then adjusted the system before it broke. A Practical Playbook for Going Upstream Upstream thinking may sound lofty, yet it can be a methodical approach. Think of the following four moves as checkpoints on a continuous loop. Examine root causes. If turnover is climbing, probe beyond exit interviews to the sales quotas or approval bottlenecks that prompt people to leave. The goal is to surface the lever that actually moves the metric. Map system incentives. Every culture is perfectly designed to get the results it rewards. When speed and quarter-end revenue drive promotions, then quality and sustainability predictably lag. Audit performance goals, bonus structures, even cultural rituals; they often explain why yesterdays fires keep reigniting. Invest in preventive measures. Carve out 5% to 10% of the operating budget for early-warning tools like AI dashboards that flag burnout patterns, mandatory ethics reviews for machine-learning products, or circular-economy pilots like Patagonias repair hubs. Those hubs diverted nearly a thousand tons of gear from landfills in a single year while deepening loyalty. Test and iterate. Upstream work scales best from pilot to platform. Cal Fire and Google trialed wildfire-prediction AI in one California county; when alert times dropped by 20 minutes, they expanded statewide. Data, not hype, financed the rollout. Making Prevention a Daily Reflex Upstream habits stick when theyre baked into calendars and compensation. Several of my client teams now block a weekly Look-Forward Hour focused solely on emerging risks and design ideasno status updates allowed. One multinational business rewired variable pay so that managers earn more for problems averted than for heroic recoveries. And in every new-product sprint, we run a premortem analysis: The team imagines total failure, surfaces the causes, and fixes them before launch. Attention gradually shifts from a reactive to a proactive mindset. A recent client engagement with a global biotech company underscores the payoff. Scientists were burning out during regulatory sprints. Instead of hiring more staff, leadership paused to map root drivers: Conflicting approval gates and a siloed culture had been holding them back. By redesigning the approval process, rewarding early-warning data, and incentivizing collaboration, they reduced rework by 30% and cut voluntary turnover in half within nine months. Wisdom From Practitioners Who Live Upstream Surgeon-author Atul Gawande developed operating-room checklists that prevent complications before they occur, writing: The cost of complication avoidance dwarfs the cost of treatment. And they work: Those checklists have saved thousands of lives and cut surgical mortality by double-digit percentages, demonstrating that a simple upstream tool can outperform millions in downstream ICU costs. AI ethicist Timnit Gebru fights bias at the design stage because bias is cheaper to prevent than to litigate, she writes. Her work on diverse AI training data and ethics review boards demonstrates that identifying discriminatory patterns early saves companies the multimillion-dollar expense and reputational damage of post-deployment recalls and lawsuits. Author Heath reminds us: Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. His research on upstream interventionsfrom Chicago Public Schools early-warning dropout flags to hotel housekeeping teams that reduce injuries by redesigning cartsdemonstrates that when you address the system, problems often disappear quietly. Their collective message is clear: Prevention isnt a perk; its the most strategic investment a leader can make. Three Questions for Your Next Strategy Retreat Before your team locks in next years goals, pause to ask: Where are we spending more on remediation than we would on prevention? Where are people metaphorically drowning downstream, and what is happening upstream that might be causing it? Which single budget shift this year would erase the most recurring headaches next year? Heroic responses make great headlines, but they seldom solve systemic flaws. The leaders who will thrive in the coming decade are not the fastest firefighters; they are the architects who design buildings that donot ignite. Going upstream means less adrenaline and more intention, fewer dramatic rescues and more quiet wins. Lets stop bracing for the next crisis and shape conditions that prevent far fewer crises from arising in the first place.
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E-Commerce
Intangible is the first tool that could make generative AI video truly usable. The new web appcreated by Pixar, Apple, Google, and Unity alumniis trying to change the user experience of generative AI video by letting you fully control your video using a 3D interface, thus solving the lack of control of current text prompts. Think about it as a 3D animation program that lets you control the stage, characters, and camera in your film, with a generative AI rendering engine that will turn those elements into reality. Intangible’s current version feels half-baked, and it will not produce The Godfather yet, but its definitely a step in the right direction for the generative AI video user experience.“To deliver professional-grade results in creative industries like film, advertising, events, and games, the directors, producers, and every creative on the team needs control over set design, shot composition, art direction, pacing, cameras, and more to deliver on the creative vision,” Intangible chief product officer Charles Migos tells me over email. “Current AI models are reliant on extensive prompting, and language alone isn’t enough to convey creative intent. By providing generative AI models with spatial intelligence, Intangible allows creatives to get closer to professional-grade results with less prompting, more feel, and more control.”Migos is right that we need a better way to control the imagination of generative AI video engines. While generative AI video is getting to the point at which it is truly indistinguishable from reality, creating it is like rolling the dice. There’s still a chasm between the vision in your mind and what comes out of Google’s Veo 3 or Kling. This makes it pretty much unusable for everything but memes, skits, storyboards, and the occasional ad stunt.While some AI models let you set camera paths or define some characters and objects using images, the prompts that create the videos are inherently limited by the interpretable nature of language. Every person and AI visualizes any given text differently. Thats the beauty of reading a book, but it’s a limitation when it comes to creating what you have in mind. That’s why Alfred Hitchcock meticulously planned his films using storyboards, so that everyone in the production could truly visualize the intangible nature of his imagination to faithfully capture Cary Grant’s desperation as a biplane tried to kill him in North by Northwest.[Image: Intangible]Spatial intelligenceMigos and CEO Bharat Vasan believe that to truly unleash the power of generative AI for video production, we must add spatial intelligence to the interface. Computer vision expert Fei-Fei Li, known as the godmother of artificial intelligence, has defined spatial intelligence as the ability, both in humans and artificial intelligence systems, to perceive, interpret, reason about, and interact with the three-dimensional world. This involves not just recognizing objects, but understanding their positions, relationships, and functions within a physical space, and being able to act upon that understanding.“By building in interactive 3D from the outset, Intangible’s world model gives generative AI image and video generation models the ability to be more precise, without extensive prompting,” Vasan says. This precision is what current text-to-video tools fundamentally lack. When you describe a scene in words, you’re forcing the AI to interpret spatial relationships through languagean inherently imprecise translation that often results in the AI changing things and adding objects or actions that you didnt have in mind. Intangible grounds generative AI models in structured 3D scenes with real camera control and spatial logic, which Vasan says “provides best-in-class coherence in the results, which we further improve with object descriptions, reference imagery, and fine-tuning models [LoRAs, or low-rank adaptations]. The goal is to address one of the biggest complaints about current AI video tools: the lack of coherence and continuity between frames.”[Image: Intangible]How it worksThe platform allows users to build custom 3D scenes using drag-and-drop objects, set up cameras, and control them. The interface is pretty simple: You can start from a preset scene or with a blank world. Theres a general viewport that shows you the scene, with a ground ready for you to start dropping buildings, characters, and other objects from a library of more than 5,000 assets.At the bottom of the interface, a toolbox gives you access to all you need. To the left, icons allow you to open a scene panel in which you can add and reorder all the shots that will form your final video. In the center, a central prompt allows you to add new objects using text. To its left, there are three icons to add objects to the scene. The first one allows you to display a palette to pick an object from the library of premade assets. Then there is an icon to add primitiveslike spheres, cubes, or pyramidsto create your own basic objects. Finally, a third button lets you add what the company calls “interactables”: cameras, characters, waypoints to tell the camera where to move, and “populators,” which will fill your scene with variations of the same objects, like bushes or shrubs in a forest.Working in this interface is pretty straightforward. Objects in the scene can be moved around with standard 3D handles, with arrows to move, cubes to scale, and arches to rotate the objects in all three axes. The interfaceat least using Chrome in my Macbook Air 15 with M2 chipwas sluggish but usable, with some serious pauses at the beginning of the session, which got better later on.To the right of the prompt field, there are two icons that switch between edit and visualization modes. The latter opens a side panel on the right of the screen that contains all you need to tell the generative AI how to render your scene: how the objects look, how they interact with each other, what the lighting and the atmosphere look like, and anything else you want to define. There are also options to set up the time of the day or the final look of your video, which includes modes like photorealism, 3D cartoon, or film noir. Once you write your prompt, click the “generate” button . . . and thats it.The idea is good. I tried it (here, its free for now), and it works-ish. I started from one of the templates, a Roman urban scene. I quickly added an elephant, positioned and scaled it up with the object handles, and then I clicked on the visualization icon to set the prompt (a premade one was already there), and clicked on generate.The results were just okay. Intangible does what the company claims, but it still makes mistakes. You can see it in the way it rendered this scene with a giant elephant in a Roman street. The Colosseum is gone, replaced by a mountain and some pointy things I cant identify. There are rendering mistakes as well, and the people are wearing the wrong clothesthat is, unless I missed the history class in which they teach that Romans wore jeans and Daisy Dukes.Once you have your shot, you can turn it into a video. This is where things get disappointing. I thought Intangible would use its own generative AI engine to directly interpret the 3D scene itselfas Nvidia demonstrated six years agoand turn it into a final photorealistic video using the objects to guide the final rendering. In reality, it feeds your still image to the latest version of Klinga popular, pretty realistic rendering engine from China that can turn any image into a living video, following a prompt. If you are a 3D artist, you will be better off combining your current workflow using Kling or any other image-to-video generative AI (as some people are already doing).If you are starting from scratch with 3D software, Intangible can work for you even if it is nowhere near perfect. The software will get better: In the next three years, we expect tools like Intangible will be able to cover all aspects of preproduction and digital production for existing forms of media, Migos and Vasan tell me. They also believe that AI tools bring an opportunity to expand visual storytelling as an art form, creating new categories that human creativity thrives in, as linear, interactive, and immersive media blend. . . . We expect tools like Intangible to be both simple and powerful enough that it empowers a new generation of creatives, not just those who are technical or prompting experts.For now, despite the glitches, Intangibles premise is the right one: People need a better way to control AI video because text is not a good interface when you are trying to visualize an idea. Spatial intelligence may be the key to solving it. At the very least, this new software shows that, when it comes to artificial intelligence, we still need to work on a better, more natural, and precise user experience.
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E-Commerce
After years of research, learning, and development, Ikea says it’s ready to release a line of products it hopes will change the smart home game. The Swedish furniture manufacturer and retailer announced Wednesday that it will release 20 smart home products in January 2026 that it calls its “biggest step” yet to make smart home technology open, simple, and affordable. Ikea has released smart light bulbs and systems before, and previously partnered with Sonos for speakers, but this relaunched smart home line was designed to be universal. [Photo: Ikea] “Our goal is to make the smart home easy to use, easy to understand, and within reach for the many,” Ikea of Sweden’s range manager David Granath said in a statement. The heart of Ikea’s smart home system will be Dirigera, a hub that’s compatible with the smart home technical standard Matter. That means Ikea’s line will work with smart home devices across different brands. It’s a system built for versatility and designed specifically to lower the threshold for consumers to get started on their own smart home systems. [Photo: Ikea] Ikea didn’t reveal much about the products other than to say the goal was not to add technology for technology’s own sake. Instead, Ikea wants to build a smarter smart home that’s supportive and adaptable. Forthcoming products will replace the functions of existing products, Granath confirmed to The Verge, and a pair of Bluetooth speakers being released ahead of the wider January launch act as a preview. Nattbad, coming out this month, was designed to look like a vintage speaker in yellow, pink, or black, while Blomprakt, a table speaker-lamp that will come in beige, black, and blue, will be released in October. Both are minimal but attractive and signal Ikea’s general direction for home tech design. [Photo: Ikea] “We understand how people want to furnish with sound in a way that adds atmosphere and feels natural in the home,” Granath says. “Our aim is to make sound accessible, functional, and enjoyable without adding complexity.” This is smart home tech made easy. And if Ikea can deliver for consumers like it thinks it can, more connected homes could soon be coming to the massesand the retailer will mark its territory in the smart home space.
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E-Commerce
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