Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

by Dan Heath

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.

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.

How can you detect problems before they occur? How can you measure success when success is defined as things not happening?

Problem blindness is the first of three barriers to upstream thinking that we’ll study in this section. When we don’t see a problem, we can’t solve it.

“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. I’ve got to stay focused on what I’m doing.

myself getting aggravated… Suddenly it occurred to me that I was completely capable of moving my chair instead of getting further annoyed. I did,”

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 capable of addressing a problem are saying, That’s not mine to fix.

“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. You can’t bring a suit in the justice system simply because something offended your sensibilities—you’ve got to show that it affected you. The evidence that you were harmed gives you standing to bring a case. The young man who’s reluctant to join a protest against date rape may feel he lacks psychological standing, since he hasn’t been affected personally by the issue.

“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.

by the way, how are her colleagues going to feel about someone who is always yammering on about “fixing processes” rather than simply grabbing more towels from another unit? It’s so much easier—and more natural—to 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.

Tunneling is not only self-perpetuating, it can even be emotionally rewarding. There is a kind of glory that comes from stopping a big screw-up at the last second.

When they’re done right, upstream meetings can be energizing: creative and honest and improvisational, with the kind of camaraderie that emerges from the shared struggle to achieve something meaningful.

Upstream work is about reducing the probability that problems will happen, and for that reason, the work must culminate in systems change. Because systems are the source of those probabilities. To change the system is to change the rules that govern us or the culture that influences us.

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’ ” The system is the water. Sometimes, it’s literally the water.

What’s the “water” you’re not seeing in your home life or at work?

Part of every social-sector organization’s mission should be to push upstream. To prevent wounds as well as bandage them; to eliminate injustices as well as assisting those who suffered them. That’s why the team in Rockford, Illinois—having just made history as the first city to eliminate veteran and chronic homelessness—immediately started pushing upstream. Can we prevent homelessness by interrupting evictions?

As an alternative to the focus on risk and protective factors, consider whether your leverage point might be a specific subpopulation of people. Many successful upstream interventions are actually very expensive programs targeted at small groups of people. At first glance this may seem like an inherently undesirable combination: Why would we ever want to spend a lot on a few people? Because in many domains, a very small set of people can create an inordinate burden on the system.

Getting proximate is not a guarantee of progress. It’s a start, not a finish. Upstream change often means fumbling our way forward, figuring out what works and what doesn’t, and under what conditions. But in this context, even a defeat is effectively a victory. Because every time we learn something, we fill in one more piece of the map as we hunt for the levers that can move the world.

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 alternate short-term measures might provide potential replacements? The lazy bureaucrat test: If someone wanted to succeed on these measures with the least effort possible, what would they do? The defiling-the-mission test: Imagine that years from now, we have succeeded brilliantly according to our short-term measures, yet we have actually undermined our long-term mission. What happened?

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?

In planning upstream interventions, we’ve got to look outside the lines of our own work. Zoom out and pan from side to side. Are we intervening at the right level of the system? And what are the second-order effects of our efforts: If we try to eliminate X (an invasive species or a drug or a process or a product), what will fill the void? If we invest more time and energy in a particular problem, what will receive less focus as a result, and how might that inattention affect the system as a whole?

Organizations are constantly dealing with urgent short-term problems. Planning for speculative future ones is, by definition, not urgent. As a result, it’s hard to convene people. It’s hard to get funds authorized. It’s hard to convince people to collaborate when hardship hasn’t forced them to. Building a habit is one way to counteract this downstream bias.

Where there’s a recurring problem in your life, go upstream. And don’t let the problem’s longevity deter you from acting. As an old proverb goes, “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.”

Be impatient for action and patient for outcomes. Macro starts with micro.