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.

Notice what was missing: It was no group’s job to ensure that customers didn’t need to call for support. In fact, no team really stood to gain if customers stopped calling. It wasn’t what they were measured on.

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.

In this book, 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.

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

(There is usually an interplay between downstream and upstream: After the father saves his son, the waterpark will likely review the incident and make systemic changes to ensure something similar doesn’t happen again.

The downstream rescue leads to the upstream improvement.)

you don’t head Upstream, as in a specific destination. You head upstream, as in a direction.

Downstream efforts are narrow and fast and tangible. Upstream efforts are broader, slower, and hazier—but when they work, they really work.

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

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

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. Remember, though, that for anything to happen at CPS, leaders first had to awaken from problem blindness. You can’t solve a problem that you can’t see, or one that you perceive as a regrettable but inevitable condition of life. (Football is a tough game—of course, people are gonna get hurt.)

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

habituation. We grow accustomed to stimuli that are consistent. You walk into a room, immediately notice the loud drone of an air conditioner, and five minutes later, the hum has receded into normalcy.

In a therapeutic context, that normalization is desirable. But habituation cuts both ways: Imagine instead that what’s being normalized is corruption or abuse.

In society, there is a crowded marketplace of problems, all vying for a greater share of our resources and attention.

The women want C-sections. The doctors want them. There’s nothing wrong.’ ” (This is a perfect articulation of problem blindness.)

Nine months later, the rate of natural childbirth had shot up to 40%.

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

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.

The old warnings about correlation not equaling causation apply here. There was no guarantee that improving freshmen’s FOT scores would boost the graduation rates. But there were good reasons to believe the two were linked causally, and of course they were tracking their efforts so that they could prove it.

Anderson was devastated. What do you do when you realize that the cause of an enormous problem is… your own actions?

I was completely capable of moving my chair instead of getting further annoyed. I did,” she said. Problem solved.

“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.

upstream work is chosen, not demanded.

A lack of ownership, though, means that the parties who are capable of addressing a problem are saying, That’s not mine to fix.

Who suffers most from the problem? The question is: Who’s best positioned to fix it, and will they step up?

“what often prevents people from protesting is not a lack of motivation to protest, but rather their feeling that they lack the legitimacy to do so.” They call this sense of legitimacy “psychological standing,” inspired by the concept of legal standing.

The researchers attributed this drop-off not to selfishness—remember, both sexes opposed the measure equally—but to a lack of psychological standing. The men didn’t feel quite right fighting for a “woman’s cause,” and vice versa.

Princeton Men and Women Opposed to Proposition 174.

(Car seats had actually been in existence since the 1930s, but those early seats had been designed not to boost safety but to elevate kids so they could see out the windows, in hopes that they wouldn’t pester the driver.)

Note that the authors were trying to extend psychological standing to pediatricians:

In 1977, after intense lobbying, the Child Passenger Protection Act finally made it to the floor of the legislature for a vote, and it passed with about two-thirds support.I On January 1, 1978, Tennessee became the first state in the US to require car seats for children under the age of four.

in 1980, 11 children under the age of 3 died in car crashes. Nine of them were in their parents’ arms at the time.

All those destructive things we’re doing to the environment—we’re going to prevent them. And we’ll do that while still running a great carpet business. “I

Mission Zero: the quest to achieve an environmental footprint of zero by 2020.

“We became a culture of dreamers and doers.”

What harms do we accept that we’re capable of changing?

sorry.” Then she said, “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.”

strength of this tool is in helping to identify possible “levers of action” in situations where many factors may contribute to a problem.)

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

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

I started micro-analyzing my own life, looking for recurring irritants that I could vanish with a bit of upstream witchcraft.

If anybody in my family had been sick, I wouldn’t have been pondering small improvements. Or if I’d been stressed out over work or relationships. All of this is probably intuitive: We would expect big problems in life to crowd out little problems. We don’t have the bandwidth to fix everything.

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.

“Scarcity, and tunneling in particular, leads you to put off important but not urgent things—cleaning your office, getting a colonoscopy, writing a will—that are easy to neglect,” wrote Shafir and Mullainathan. “Their costs are immediate, loom large, and are easy to defer, and their benefits fall outside the tunnel. So they await a time when all urgent things are done.”

stay in the tunnel and keep digging ahead. 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.

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.