Upstream: The Quest 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.

Downstream actions react to problems once they’ve occurred. Upstream efforts aim to prevent those problems from happening.

The specialization inherent to organizations creates great efficiencies. But it also deters efforts to integrate in new, advantageous ways. In upstream ways.

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.

I’m defining upstream efforts as those intended to prevent problems before they happen or, alternatively, to systematically reduce the harm caused by those problems.

systems thinking:

The downstream rescue leads to the upstream improvement.)

there’s always a way to push further upstream—at the cost of more complexity.

“To solve the aggression problems, which are mainly a male problem, we need to focus on females,”

Downstream efforts are narrow and fast and tangible. Upstream

efforts are broader, slower, and hazier—but when they work, they really work. They can accomplish massive and long-lasting good.

main reasons I wrote this book. Because, while we have a wide spectrum of available options to address the world’s problems, we’ve mostly confined ourselves to one tiny stretch of the landscape: the zone of response. React, react, react.

There are hundreds of agencies and organizations that exist to help the homeless, but how many organizations are dedicated to preventing people from becoming homeless?

When Ebola starts to spread in a foreign nation, it becomes an international priority—and afterward it’s hard to attract funding to support the local health systems that could prevent the next outbreak.

To say it a different way, for every $1 we spend on downstream health care, most of us think it would be wise to spend $2 upstream.

we spend more money fixing people’s ailments and less keeping them healthy.

Good intentions guarantee nothing.

To go upstream is a declaration of agency: I don’t have to be at the mercy of these forces—I can control them. I can shape my world. And in that declaration are the seeds of both heroism and hubris.

But that desire for control—I can mold this situation to my desires—can also tempt us to act in situations that we don’t fully grasp.

We tinker

with systems we barely understand, stumbling into a maze of unin...

“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.

She said that students will often get their first taste of failure in the ninth grade, and that teachers almost seemed to relish delivering it, in a tough-love kind of way. “Teachers thought that the kids [who failed] would think, ‘I need to work harder,’ ” Duncan said. “Sometimes that happens. But the majority of fourteen-year-olds, if they fail, interpret that as: ‘I don’t belong, I’m not good enough.’ They withdraw.”

For one thing, if ninth grade is the critical transition point, then you’ll want your best teachers teaching freshmen.

Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.

It changes relationships between teachers and students,” said researcher Elaine Allensworth. “It’s the difference from ‘I put the work out there and I assign the grades’ to ‘My job is to make sure all students are succeeding in my class. So I need to find out why they’re struggling if they’re struggling.’ ”

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.

“inattentional blindness,”

Inattentional blindness leads to a lack of peripheral vision. When it’s coupled with time pressure, it can create a lack of curiosity. I’ve got to stay focused on what I’m doing. When teachers and principals are hounded to boost students’ test scores, year after year, and denied the resources they need to succeed, and buffeted by a never-ending series of regulatory and curricular changes, they lose their peripheral vision.

habituation. We grow accustomed to stimuli that are consistent.

That is a real quote. It’s like she’s contracted sexual Stockholm syndrome.

Above we talked about how habituation can help with phobias by normalizing the problematic. What Lin was doing, with the term sexual harassment, was the opposite: She wanted to problematize the normal. To reclassify the coercive treatment of women as something abnormal—to attach a stigma to it. She helped society awaken from problem blindness by giving the problem a name.

The escape from problem blindness begins with the shock of awareness that you’ve come to treat the abnormal as normal.

The seed of improvement is dissatisfaction.

Next comes a search for community:

Something remarkable often happens next: People voluntarily hold themselves responsible for fixing problems they did not create.

The upstream advocate concludes: I was not the one who created this problem. But I will be the one to fix it. That shift in ownership—and its consequences—is what we will analyze next.

“Whenever I start to get aggravated about some inane problem, I think, ‘Hey, move your chair, why don’t you?’ and it’s an internal code for trying a new approach,” she said.

What’s odd about upstream work is that, despite the enormous stakes, it’s often optional. With downstream activity—the rescues and responses and reactions—the work is demanded of us.

These two forces often go together. Consider the leaders at Chicago Public Schools. In the beginning, what held back work on the graduation rate was problem blindness: Yes, a lot of students drop out—that’s just the way it is. On top of that, though, was the sense among some teachers and administrators that, even if the poor graduation rate was a problem, it wasn’t theirs to fix: It’s the kids’ problem to fix. Or their parents’. Or society’s.

But the question is not: Who suffers most from the problem? The question is: Who’s best positioned to fix it, and will they step up? The leaders at CPS made the graduation rate their problem. They took ownership.

Why do some problems lack “owners”? Sometimes self-interest is to blame:

people may resist acting on a perceived problem because they feel as though it’s not their place to do so. Think of a young man in college who is appalled by the incidence of date rape on campus but wonders if it’s appropriate for him to join protests led by women.

They call this sense of legitimacy “psychological standing,” inspired by the concept of legal standing. You can’t bring a suit in the justice system simply because something offended your sensibilities—you’ve got to show that it affected you.

The researchers attributed this drop-off not to selfishness—remember, both sexes opposed the measure equally—but to a lack of psychological standing.

“Unless somebody leads, nobody will. That’s axiomatic. I asked, ‘Why not us?’ ”

Perhaps what the Interface story illustrates is not that efforts at preventing problems always pay for themselves, or that good intentions are always rewarded—neither is true—but that we should push against complacency. What harms do we accept that we’re capable of changing?

it wasn’t obvious to Ray Anderson or Bob Sanders that they should accept that burden. They were provoked. Challenged. Might the rest of us be unwittingly allowing problems to persist that we could help solve? How do we open our own eyes?

Asking those questions might help us overcome indifference and complacency and see what’s possible: I choose to fix this problem, not because it’s demanded of me, but because I can, and because it’s worth fixing.