Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

by Dan Heath

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.

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.

it’s the second officer who will be rewarded, because she has a stack full of tickets to show for her efforts.

it’s the second officer who will be rewarded, because she has a stack full of tickets to show for her efforts.

Create a community context where theft seems pointless because of the plentiful opportunities available.

Create a community context where theft seems pointless because of the plentiful opportunities available.

We spend billions to recover from hurricanes and earthquakes while disaster preparedness work is perpetually starved for resources. 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

We spend billions to recover from hurricanes and earthquakes while disaster preparedness work is perpetually starved for resources. 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

While every domain of upstream work will have its own unique equation—and thus its own leverage points—the strategy used by the Crime Lab’s leaders to find those leverage points is closer to universal: Immerse yourself in the problem.

Steiner and Flores wore the suits

through Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (which business travelers will know is a place that can age you all by itself). “The first thing that I noticed,” said Flores on the show, “is that it takes a longer time to get to different places, and so the need to rest and to sit is very impactful: have more benches, have more places for someone to grab on to.

Because in many domains, a very small set of people can create an inordinate burden on the system.

One of the most baffling and destructive ideas about preventive efforts is that they must save us money. Discussions of upstream interventions always seem to circle back to ROI: Will a dollar invested today yield us more in the long run? If

In order to move the needle on someone’s health, you need to open up their refrigerator. You need to ask how they’re sleeping. You need to understand the chronic stress they’re under and address those issues.”

“We can tell the students about this, we can lecture them, but until they meet a real person and feel connected to that person, they’re not really going to internalize how important this is,” said Dr. Rocchetti, the primary care doctor quoted above, who is also director of this program, called the Human Dimension.

you take a deep breath and say, 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.

The second city map was a heat map showing where certain 311 calls had originated—specifically, those calls requesting sidewalk repairs. Choe’s group had been using the 311 calls to direct the sidewalk-maintenance crews. If a Bostonian called to report a cracked sidewalk, the city would add the complaint to a queue and send construction crews to complete the repairs as resources allowed.

Three simple measures. Perfectly reasonable. Together, they reflect the values of equity, productivity, and constituent service. It’s easy to see how you could cruise along for years, navigating by these measures and never questioning them. It was only because of the two maps—and the soul-searching it sparked—that Choe realized how distorted the measures were.

Thinking, Fast and Slow, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote that our brains, when confronted with complexity, will often perform an invisible substitution, trading a hard question for an easy one.

Freshman On-Track (FOT) was the first, but even that was too long-term. (You can’t afford to wait until the end of freshman year to see whether students are off track, because if they are, the damage has already been done.) So the school leaders started watching attendance and grades—measures you could examine and influence on a weekly basis. The theory of change was: If we can boost attendance and grades, we can improve a student’s On-Track standing, and that will boost her chances of graduating. The short-term measures were well-chosen: The plan worked brilliantly, as we saw.

Getting short-term measures right is frustratingly complex. And it’s critical.

We’ve seen two kinds of ghost victories so far—one is caused by an effort that’s buoyed by a macro trend, like the local police chief heroes in the ’90s who were primarily surfing a nationwide reduction in crime. The second kind of ghost victory happens when measures are misaligned with the mission. That’s what Katie Choe realized about Boston’s sidewalk repairs: The city had chosen the wrong short-term measures.

There is also a third kind of ghost victory that’s essentially a special case of the second. It occurs when measures become the mission. This is the most destructive form of ghost victory, because it’s possible to ace your measures while undermining your mission.

We’ve all heard stories like this before. People “gaming” measures is a familiar phenomenon. But gaming is actually a revealing word, because often these stories are told with an air of playfulness.

Think about this: An NYPD official is held accountable for rape statistics. There are two ways to make those numbers look better. The first way is to actually prevent rape—to project the police’s presence into dangerous areas and thereby deter the violent acts.

reduce the rape count is to reclassify actual rapes as lesser crimes—in this case, Ritchie’s boss tries to reframe the incident with the prostitute as a “theft of service.”

They used what Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, called “paired measures.” Grove pointed out that if you use a quantity-based measure, quality will often suffer. So if you pay your janitorial crew by the number of square feet cleaned, and you assess your data entry team based on documents processed, you’ve given them an incentive to clean poorly and ignore errors, respectively. Grove made sure to balance quantity measures with quality measures.

Here are four questions to include in your pre-gaming: