Upstream: How to solve problems before they happen

by Dan Heath

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 psychologists Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan, in their book Scarcity, call this “tunneling”: When people are juggling a lot of problems, they give up trying to solve them all.

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.

It is not that the poor have less bandwidth as individuals. Rather, it is that the experience of poverty reduces anyone’s bandwidth.”

Anita Tucker, an industrial engineer who once supported the operations of a General Mills frosting plant, did her dissertation at Harvard by shadowing 22 nurses in 8 hospitals for almost 200 hours in total.

The most common types of problems encountered by nurses, Tucker noted, included dealing with missing/incorrect information and contending with missing/broken equipment.

To overcome problems like these required the nurses to be creative. Persistent. Resourceful.

What Tucker is describing is a system that never learns.

Why does this keep happening? The nurse who nabbed extra towels didn’t think, Hey, we’ve got a process problem here—we need a plan for handling three-day weekends.

It’s so much easier—and more natural—to stay in the tunnel and keep digging ahead.

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

Tunneling is not only self-perpetuating, it can even be emotionally rewarding. There is a kind of glory that comes from stoppin...

The need for heroism is usually evidence of systems failure.

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.

Some hospitals, for instance, create slack with a morning “safety huddle” where staffers meet to review any safety “near-misses” from the previous day—patients almost hurt, errors almost ...

When your emphasis is always forward, forward, forward, you never stop to ask whether you’re going in the right direction.

The application that allows us to respond to visible baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that allows us to respond to threats that loom in an unseen future is still in beta testing.

Somewhat more puzzling is the regard we show for our teeth, the most coddled organ in our body. Even as our skin is shorted sunscreen and our hearts denied a brisk jog and our immune systems refused an annual flu shot, we make it a priority on every single day of our lives, even the busiest ones, to perform a twice-daily regimen of preventive scrubbing. And then we report to a dentist regularly for a more rigorous appraisal.

For years we’ve been laughing at those dumb metaphorical frogs that won’t jump out of the boiling pot until it’s too late. Turns out we’re the frogs.

In the recent past, humanity rallied to solve a major global environmental threat that shared all of the traits described above: the depletion of the ozone layer.

What Molina and Rowland figured out is that the CFCs would rise in the atmosphere higher and higher until, eventually, they’d be broken down by the sun’s rays, releasing chlorine, which would eat up the world’s ozone layer, a critical shield against ultraviolet radiation.

Fortunately, the world didn’t end, because an international coalition came together to restrict CFCs in a series of agreements, including the Montreal Protocol in 1987, which was described by one climate scientist as “a tap on the brakes,” and progressing to the Copenhagen amendment in 1992, which was more like a screeching deceleration.

There’s a paradox inherent in preventive efforts: We’ve got to create an urgent demand to fix a problem that may not happen for a while. We’ve got to make the upstream feel downstream, in other words.

The first thing to realize is that “creating urgency” is basically coopting the power of tunneling for good.

Who hasn’t been at their most productive—and most motivated—when staring down a deadline?

About 21.5 million Americans file their taxes in the last week before the deadline.

Our demands have to compete with many other pressing and emotional concerns: getting the kids to soccer practice and crunching the data for the boss and visiting grandma at the nursing home.

Meanwhile, the ozone layer stuff sounds important but ultimately outside of your daily concerns.

The research scientist Richard Stolarski said on a podcast that “it certainly made it easier to reach a greater part of the public by having a simple key word that you could describe it by.”

The notion of a “hole” made the problem easier to visualize and invoked an action mind-set.

Holes are urgent; slow depletion of the ozone layer isn’t.

In other words, DuPont likely would have resisted a US-only ban. But if all its global competitors faced the same ban, it wouldn’t feel disadvantaged.

So what international negotiators were accomplishing was a kind of orchestration of urgency: Supporters needed to feel more urgency and opponents needed to feel less.

As Secretary of State George Schultz said of Reagan’s attitude in the PBS documentary: Maybe you’re right that nothing is going to happen, but you must agree that if this does happen, it’s going to be a catastrophe, so let’s take out an insurance policy.

Climate scientists use the phrase “the world avoided” to discuss the problems that were prevented by the ozone layer agreements.

By the 2030s, we’ll be avoiding millions of new skin cancer cases per year, with a number that would only grow.”

“The world avoided” is an evocative phrase. In some ways it’s the goal of every upstream effort: To avoid a world where certain kinds of harm, injustice, disease, or hardship persist.

The path to “the world avoided” is a difficult one because of the barriers we’ve seen: problem blindness (I don’t see the problem), lack of ownership (That problem is not mine to fix),...

The leaders had awoken from problem blindness—they were no longer willing to write off this teenage behavior as natural or inevitable.

The first of those seven questions is: How will you unite the right people?

Academic research has identified a number of risk factors for teenage substance abuse: Having friends who drink or smoke is an obvious risk.

There are also protective factors that reduce the risk of substance abuse.18 Most of them boil down to having better ways for teens to spend their time: by participating in sports and extracurricular activities, or simply by hanging out more with their parents.

The campaign’s guiding philosophy, then, was simple: Change the culture surrounding teenagers by reducing the risk factors for substance use and boosting the protective ones.

Teens don’t just need more activities of any kind, they need activities with natural highs: games, performances, workouts, exhibitions. Activities that compel them to take physical or emotional risks.

When they’re done right, upstream meetings can be energizing: creative and honest and improvisational, with the kind of camaraderie that emerges from the shared struggle to achieve something meaningful.

And that feeling of success—that’s the emotional payoff that keeps people engaged in the work and attracts new collaborators to the mission.

Perhaps the most astonishing part of the story in Iceland is that its success has been so complete as to be invisible. Most teenagers today aren’t really aware of it.41 They’ve simply grown up in a world where substance abuse is largely absent.

Iceland’s campaign became the envy of the world, and teams from cities in other countries—including Spain, Chile, Estonia, and Romania—have been quick to adopt the approach.

Each one of them gets a role. Given that your progress may hinge on people’s voluntary effort, it’s smart to maintain a big tent.

Women like Dorothy were essentially falling in the cracks between these roles.