Upstream: How to solve problems before they happen

by Dan Heath

When you spend years responding to problems, you can sometimes overlook the fact that you could be preventing them.

And this is true in many parts of society. So often in life, we get stuck in a cycle of response. We put out fires. We deal with emergencies. We handle one problem after another, but we never get around to fixing the systems that caused the problems.

That’s one reason why we tend to favor reaction: Because it’s more tangible. Downstream work is easier to see. Easier to measure. There is a maddening ambiguity about upstream efforts.

It’s not that the upstream solution is always right. And it’s certainly not the case that we should abandon downstream work—we will always want someone there to rescue us. The point is that our attention is grossly asymmetrical. We’re so focused on saving the drowning kids in the river that we fail to investigate why they need saving at all.

How many problems in our lives and in society are we tolerating simply because we’ve forgotten that we can fix them?

THE THREE BARRIERS TO UPSTREAM THINKING 2. PROBLEM BLINDNESS 3. A LACK OF OWNERSHIP 4. TUNNELING

Pro athletes play hard. Injuries are gonna happen. You can’t change that. That mind-set is an example of what I’ll call “problem blindness”—the belief that negative outcomes are natural or inevitable. Out of our control. When we’re blind to a problem, we treat it like the weather. We may know it’s bad, but ultimately, we just shrug our shoulders. What am I supposed to do about it? It’s the weather.

That’s just how it is—so no one questions it. That’s problem blindness.

To succeed upstream, leaders must: detect problems early, target leverage points in complex systems, find reliable ways to measure success, pioneer new ways of working together, and embed their successes into systems to give them permanence.

The seed of improvement is dissatisfaction.

This lack of ownership is the second force that keeps us downstream. The first force, problem blindness, means: I don’t see the problem. (Or, This problem is inevitable.) A lack of ownership, though, means that the parties who are capable of addressing a problem are saying, That’s not mine to fix.

What if you told the story of your relationship problems as if you were the only one responsible? What if employers told the story of their employees’ health as if they were the only ones responsible? What if school districts told the story of high school dropouts as if they were the only ones responsible? Asking those questions might help us overcome indifference and complacency and see what’s possible:

choose to fix this problem, not because it’s demanded of me, but because I can, and because it’s worth fixing.

Researchers have found that when people experience scarcity—of money or time or mental bandwidth—the harm is not that the big problems crowd out the little ones. The harm is that the little ones crowd out the big ones.

They adopt tunnel vision. There’s no long-term planning; there’s no strategic prioritization of issues. And that’s why tunneling is the third barrier to upstream thinking—because it confines us to short-term, reactive thinking. In the tunnel, there’s only forward.

It’s a terrible trap: If you can’t systematically solve problems, it dooms you to stay in an endless cycle of reaction. Tunneling begets more tunneling.

How do you escape the tunnel? You need slack. Slack, in this context, means a reserve of time or resources that can be spent on problem solving.

“When we create organizations, we’re doing it to give people focus. We’re essentially giving them a license to be myopic.” Focus is both an enemy and an ally. It can accelerate work and make it more efficient, but it puts blinders on people.

SEVEN QUESTIONS FOR UPSTREAM LEADERS 5. HOW WILL YOU UNITE THE RIGHT PEOPLE? 6. HOW WILL YOU CHANGE THE SYSTEM? 7. WHERE CAN YOU FIND A POINT OF LEVERAGE? 8. HOW WILL YOU GET EARLY WARNING OF THE PROBLEM? 9. HOW WILL YOU KNOW YOU’RE SUCCEEDING? 10. HOW WILL YOU AVOID DOING HARM? 11. WHO WILL PAY FOR WHAT DOES NOT HAPPEN?

The lesson of the high-risk team’s success seems to be: Surround the problem with the right people; give them early notice of that problem; and align their efforts toward preventing specific instances of that problem.

They’re moving further upstream: Rather than acting quickly to serve people who are homeless, they’re trying to keep people in their homes to begin with. That’s an example of systems change, which is the topic we’ll explore next. Can we learn to reengineer the machinery that creates problems? And, in the process, can we improve the odds that the problems will not arise in the first place?

There’s a well-established link between chronic stress and a variety of health problems, among them cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and inflammation.

Remember: “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” These neighborhoods were systems designed to produce premature deaths.

Upstream work is about reducing the probability that problems will happen, and for that reason, the work must culminate in systems change. Because systems are the source of those probabilities. To change the system is to change the rules that govern us or the culture that influences us.

The Greek polymath Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” It’s an inspiring quote for change leaders.

Immerse yourself in the problem.

Let’s not sabotage upstream efforts by subjecting them to a test we never impose on downstream interventions.

Nothing is easy. The world is complex and there are no quick fixes. But if I can learn to uncross my arms and extend my hands, I can be someone who eases suffering rather than ignores it.

Getting proximate is not a guarantee of progress. It’s a start, not a finish. Upstream change often means fumbling our way forward, figuring out what works and what doesn’t, and under what conditions. But in this context, even a defeat is effectively a victory. Because every time we learn something, we fill in one more piece of the map as we hunt for the levers that can move the world.

maneuvering room to fix it. That’s why a key question bearing on upstream efforts is: How can you get early warning of the problem you’re trying to solve? Imagine a smoke detector that’s custom-tailored to your work. At LinkedIn, the smoke that activated the alarm was a customer’s inactivity in her first month as a subscriber. In Chicago Public Schools, the smoke was being off-track as a freshman.

As we design early-warning systems, we should keep these questions in mind: Will the warning give us enough time to act effectively? (If not, why bother?) What rate of false positives can we expect? Our comfort with that level of false positives may, in turn, hinge on the relative cost of handling false positives versus the possibility of missing a real problem.

Getting short-term measures right is frustratingly complex. And it’s critical. In fact, the only thing worse than contending with short-term measures is not having them at all.

We cannot be naïve about this phenomenon of gaming. When people are rewarded for achieving a certain number, or punished for missing it, they will cheat. They will skew. They will skim. They will downgrade.

Here are four questions to include in your pre-gaming: The “rising tides” test: Imagine that we succeed on our short-term measures. What else might explain that success, other than our own efforts, and are we tracking those factors? The misalignment test: Imagine that we’ll eventually learn that our short-term measures do not reliably predict success on our ultimate mission. What would allow us to sniff out that misalignment as early as possible, and what alternate short-term measures might provide potential replacements? The lazy bureaucrat test: If someone wanted to succeed on these measures with the least effort possible, what would they do? The defiling-the-mission test: Imagine that years from now, we have succeeded brilliantly according to our short-term measures, yet we have actually undermined our long-term mission. What happened?

“As you think about a system, spend part of your time from a vantage point that lets you see the whole system, not just the problem that may have drawn you to focus on the system to begin with,” wrote Donella Meadows in an essay.12 Meadows was a biophysicist and systems thinker whose work I’ll draw on several times in this chapter. She continued, “And realize that, especially in the short term, changes for the good of the whole may sometimes seem to be counter to the interests of a part of the system.”

In planning upstream interventions, we’ve got to look outside the lines of our own work. Zoom out and pan from side to side. Are we intervening at the right level of the system? And what are the second-order effects of our efforts: If we try to eliminate X (an invasive species or a drug or a process or a product), what will fill the void? If we invest more time and energy in a particular problem, what will receive less focus as a result, and how might that inattention affect the system as a whole?

The answer was almost laughably clear: F2F interactions plunged by about 70% in both companies. Meanwhile, email and messaging activity spiked. When people were placed closer together so that they’d talk more, they talked less.

heroism! Online marketing messages don’t get better because of heroics—they get better because the feedback is so quick and targeted that you almost can’t escape improvement.

Upstream work hinges on humility. Because complexity can mount quickly even in simple interventions.

“Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned.44 We can’t surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them …. We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!”

The natural life span of human beings today is not that different than it was a hundred years ago.3 What’s different is that we’re saving a lot of people—especially babies and children—from dying too early.

“wrong pocket problem”: a situation where the entity that bears the cost of the intervention does not receive the primary benefit.

Paying for upstream efforts ultimately boils down to three questions: Where are there costly problems? Who is in the best position to prevent those problems? And, how do you create incentives for them to do so?

How can you, personally, move upstream? Consider your own problem blindness. Which problems have you come to accept as inevitable that are, in fact, nothing of

the kind? Maybe it’s something small: say, the irritation of finding a place to park in a crowded parking lot. I met a woman who told me about an epiphany: “I literally have a step-counter on my wrist and yet I was driving myself crazy trying to find a close space. It was madness. So now I always park in the most remote spot in the lot. I think of it as a ‘VIP spot,’ away from the other cars. I get some extra steps and don’t stress about finding a spot. It’s such a wonderful sense of relief, like I’ve purged that concern forever from my life.”

Be impatient for action and patient for outcomes.

Favor scoreboards over pills.

So if you’re looking for a place to contribute your talents, favor Scoreboards over Pills. Don’t obsess about formulating the perfect solution before you begin your work; instead, take ownership of the underlying problem and start slogging forward.

We are drawn to the glory of the rescue and the response. But our heroes shouldn’t only be the people who restore things to normal, extinguishing fires and capturing felons and fishing drowning kids out of rivers. Our heroes should also include a teacher who skips lunch to help a freshman with math, in hopes that she’ll get back on track to graduate. And a cop who makes himself a conspicuous presence around an abused woman’s home, ensuring her ex-husband will think twice before coming around. And an activist who rallies an underserved community to fight for the parks and investments they’ve always been denied. These should be our heroes, too: The people who are unsatisfied with normal. People who clamor for better.