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.

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.

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

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.

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 your emphasis is always forward, forward, forward, you never stop to ask whether you’re going in the right direction.