Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

by Dan Heath

Okerstrom’s point is that focus is both the strength and the weakness of organizations. The specialization inherent to organizations creates great efficiencies. But it also deters efforts to integrate in new, advantageous ways. In upstream ways.

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.

A telltale sign of upstream work is that it involves systems thinking:

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

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.

“problem blindness”—the belief that negative outcomes are natural or inevitable.

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,” a phenomenon in which our careful attention to one task leads us to miss important information that’s unrelated to that task.

Inattentional blindness leads to a lack of peripheral vision. When it’s coupled with time pressure, it can create a lack of curiosity.

That’s habituation. We grow accustomed to stimuli that are consistent.

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

Next comes a search for community: Do other people feel this way?

And with that recognition—that this phenomenon is a problem and we see it the same way—comes strength.

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

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.

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?

psychological standing,”

“I’d like each of you to tell the story of this situation as though you’re the only one in the world responsible for where we are.”

They went from feeling like victims of the problem to feeling like co-owners of the solution.

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.

“tunneling”: When people are juggling a lot of problems, they give up trying to solve them all. 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.

The first thing to realize is that “creating urgency” is basically coopting the power of tunneling for good. Rather than try to escape the tunnel—as with the discussion on slack—we can try to use the extreme focus it provides to our advantage.

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

The core team should be selected more strategically. Preventive interventions often require a new kind of integration among splintered components. To succeed in upstream efforts, you need to surround the problem. Meaning you need to attract people who can address all the key dimensions of the issue.

Once you’ve surrounded the problem, then you need to organize all those people’s efforts. And you need an aim that’s compelling and important—a shared goal that keeps them contributing even in stressful situations where, as in the next story, people’s lives may depend on your work.

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.

McCannon distinguishes “data for the purpose of learning” from “data for the purpose of inspection.”

McCannon said that when he consults with social sector leaders, he’ll ask them, What are your priorities when it comes to data and measurement? “And I never hear back ‘It’s important to set up data systems that are useful for people on the front lines.’ Never,” he said. “But that’s the first principle! When you design the system, you should be thinking: How will this data be used by teachers to improve their classrooms? How will this data be used by doctors and nurses to improve patient care? How can the local community use the information?

McCannon believes that groups do their best work when they are given a clear, compelling aim and a useful, real-time stream of data to measure their progress, and then… left alone.

In searching for a viable leverage point, your first pass might be to consider, as the leaders in Iceland did, the risk and protective factors for the problem you’re trying to prevent.

Every problem will have its own array of factors that increase risk for or protect against it, and each of those factors is a potential leverage point.

As an alternative to the focus on risk and protective factors, consider whether your leverage point might be a specific subpopulation of people.

When we can foresee a problem, we have more 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?

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.

“ghost victory”: a superficial success that cloaks failure.

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 alter...

The lazy bureaucrat test: If someone wanted to succeed on these measures with the least effort p...

The defiling-the-mission test: Imagine that years from now, we have succeeded brilliantly according to our short-term measures, yet we have actually under...

The unintended consequences test: What if we succeed at our mission—not just the short-term measures but the mission itself—yet cause negative unintended consequences that outweigh the value of our work?

Upstream interventions tinker with complex systems, and as such, we should expect reactions and consequences beyond the immediate scope of our work. In “shaping the water,” we will create ripple effects. Always. How can we ensure that, in our quest to make the world better, we don’t unwittingly do harm?

Hackbarth’s point is that we don’t succeed by foreseeing the future accurately. We succeed by ensuring that we’ll have the feedback we need to navigate.

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?

“Be impatient for action but patient for outcomes.”

Macro starts with micro.

Favor scoreboards over pills.

Growth over fixed mindset