Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

by Dan Heath

his book 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.

Choosing the wrong short-term measures can doom upstream work. The truth is, though, that short-term measures are indispensable.

Getting short-term measures right is frustratingly complex. And it’s critical. In fact, the only thing worse than contending with short-term measures is not having them at all.

for many upstream interventions, gaming is not a little problem—just a quirky, mischievous aspect of human behavior—it’s a destructive force that can and will doom your mission, if you allow it. We need to escalate the rhetoric: People aren’t “gaming metrics,” they’re defiling the mission.

Are we gaming metrics? Literally with our HR Metrics and then what about maintenance? What measures should we e looking at, are our short term metrics aligned with our end state?

Third, leaders at the precinct level were held accountable for reducing crime in their areas. It’s that last point that created some terrible unintended consequences.

“If your crime numbers are going in the wrong direction, you are going to be in trouble. But

so if they couldn’t make crime go down, they just would stop reporting crime.

All of us won’t stoop to this behavior all the time. But most of us will some of the time.

if you use a quantity-based measure, quality will often suffer.

Any upstream effort that makes use of short-term measures—which, presumably, is most of them—should devote time to “pre-gaming,” meaning the careful consideration of how the measures might be misused.

In planning upstream interventions, we’ve got to look outside the lines of our own work.

When we fail to anticipate second-order consequences, it’s an invitation to disaster, as the “cobra effect” makes clear. The cobra effect occurs when an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse.

The thing to do, when you don’t know, is not to bluff and not to freeze, but to learn. The way you learn is by experiment—or, as Buckminster Fuller put it, by trial and error, error, error.”

you just need to be aware that whatever the plan you have is, it’s going to be wrong,”

Feedback loops spur improvement. And where those loops are missing, they can be created.

improvement shouldn’t require heroism! Online marketing messages don’t get better because of heroics—they get better because the feedback is so quick and targeted that you almost can’t escape improvement.

do not mistake this chapter’s emphasis on experimentation for the ethos of “move fast and break things.”

Upstream work hinges on humility.

“Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can’t surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them.…

No single training, no matter how ingenious, is sufficient to prepare for a catastrophe.

...or a NTC rotation

Organizations are constantly dealing with urgent short-term problems. Planning for speculative future ones is, by definition, not urgent.

It’s hard to convince people to collaborate when hardship hasn’t forced them to.

There’s a concept called “the prophet’s dilemma”: a prediction that prevents what it predicts from happening. A self-defeating prediction. What if Chicken Little’s warnings actually stopped the sky from falling?

How can you, personally, move upstream? Consider your own problem blindness. Which problems have you come to accept as inevitable that are, in fact, nothing of the kind?

“Be impatient for action but patient for outcomes.”

Change won’t come without action. At the same time, it can take a while for action to bear fruit.

that’s how upstream victories are won. An inch at a time, and then a yard, and then a mile, and eventually you find yourself at the finish line: systems change. Be impatient for action and patient for outcomes.

You can’t help a thousand people, or a million, until you understand how to help one.

Macro starts with micro. If you want to help solve big problems in the world, seek out groups who have ambitious goals coupled with close-up experience.

Don’t obsess about formulating the perfect solution before you begin your work; instead, take ownership of the underlying problem and start slogging forward.

These should be our heroes, too: The people who are unsatisfied with normal. People who clamor for better.

What are we doing to be better? How are we refining and reshaping systems to better serve our Soldiers?