Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

by Dan Heath

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.

By contrast, upstream work is chosen, not demanded.

A corollary of that insight is that if the work is not chosen by someone, the underlying problem won’t get solved.

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 capa...

“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 evidence that you were harmed gives you standing to bring a case. The young man who’s reluctant to join a protest

The question they asked themselves was not: Can’t someone fix this problem? It was: Can we fix this problem? They volunteered to take ownership.

CHAPTER 4 Tunneling

In my research, I sought out stories like these—people who stopped reacting to problems and started preventing them.

looking for recurring irritants that I could vanish with a bit of upstream witchcraft.

These are easy victories. All they require is an awareness of the problem and a small measure of planning.

If upstream thinking is so simple—and so effective in eliminating recurring problems—why is it so rare?

We would expect big problems in life to crowd out little problems. We don’t have the bandwidth to fix everything.

But this issue of “bandwidth” is actually more insidious than that: 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.

Wow!

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. 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.

Wow good!

It’s often said that a chain of bad decisions can lead people to be poor. That is undoubtedly true in some cases.

But Shafir and Mullainathan argue convincingly that we’ve got the causation backward: that in fact it’s poverty that leads to...

scarcity “makes us less insightful, less forward-thinking...

Rather, it is that the experience of poverty reduces anyone’s bandwidth.”

People who are tunneling can’t engage in systems thinking. They can’t prevent problems; they just react. And tunneling isn’t just something that happens to poor people—it can also be caused by a scarcity of time.

“Scarcity, and tunneling in particular, leads you to put off important but not urgent things—cleaning

that are easy to ...

“Their costs are immed...

large, and are easy to defer, and their benefits fall outside the tunnel. So they await a time when...

This tunneling trap plagues organizations, too.

The nurses were tunneling. Their time was scarce; their attention was scarce. Grabbing towels from another department—which might cause that department to run out a few hours later—is roughly the equivalent of taking a payday loan. The bill will come due, but not right now. For the moment, the nurses can keep digging 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.

“When we create organizations, we’re doing it to give people focus. We’re

essentially giving them a license to be myopic.”

Focus is both an enemy and an ally. It can accelerate work and make it more efficient, but ...

When your emphasis is always forward, forward, forward, you never stop to ask whether you’re g...

people are quick to respond to clear and present danger,

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.

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,

SEVEN QUESTIONS FOR UPSTREAM LEADERS

CHAPTER 5

How Will You Unite the Right People?

Recall that many upstream efforts are a kind of volunteer work. Chosen, not obligated.

How will you unite the right people?

Given that your progress may hinge on people’s voluntary effort, it’s smart to maintain a big tent.

But a philosophy of “the more, the merrier” is not sufficient. The core team should be se...

To succeed in upstream efforts, you need to surround the problem. Meaning you need to attract people who can address al...

By contrast, downstream action is often much narrower.

Once you’ve surrounded the problem, then you need to organize all those people’s efforts.

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.

How Will You Change the System?

“Fundamentally, what causes people to get sick and feel sick is a sense of a lack of control over what’s happening to them,”

So low-income people in this country are basically juggling