Dan Heath’s Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen addresses a familiar challenge in our world: We seem to spend more time and effort fixing problems as they occur, rather than preventing them from occurring in the first place. The book travels familiar roads for people interested in “systems thinking” and it brings in some new-to-me examples. I like that the main focus of the book is on the challenges involved in moving upstream to resolve problems at their root.
The overall goal here is pretty clear from the subtitle - how do we solve those endemic problems before they happen? And of course the first question there might be why we don’t do it more often. This is how Heath starts the discussion.
Do we see the problem? Or have we lived with it for so long that it is like water to a fish, it is just there. Heath calls this problem blindness - “that’s just how it is.” I also like to think about whether everyone involved sees the same problem in the same way. When everyone has their own perspective on the “problem,” I often see familiar game of whack-a-mole with each party coming up with local solutions to their variant of the problem - none of which solve the underlying core problem. Even worse, sometimes solving a local problem exacerbates problem elsewhere, causing a reaction, which causes a reaction, which causes a reaction…. which can end up cycling back and ripping the bandaid off the first “solution.” This is a perfect situation where the system is responding to small perturbations, instead of looking deeper for the reasons why these problems keep coming up in the first place. But that requires people to open their eyes and see the problem.
Then you have the challenge of people who see the problem but don’t think they can do anything about it - or they believe they aren’t allowed to do anything. This is a familiar lack of ownership or belief that it is outside my sphere of control. In the discussions of the path to upstream, Heath does a nice job of describing the changed mindset from “I can’t do anything” to “How could I” that is key to some of the deeper challenges people face - from sports injuries to high school graduation rates and his many other examples.
It is so easy to get wrapped up in the day-to-day that the option to do something about a problem might never occur. There are so many things to do that this one never gets anything beyond minimal attention. This is Heath’s last challenge of tunneling or “tunnel vision” - there are just so many problems calling for their attention that they cannot solve them. They just deal with whatever is screaming loudest at the moment.
These challenges are all about the barriers and comprise the first several chapters of the book. The bulk of the book goes after ways to paddle upstream. Heath describes this in the form of seven questions (with my comments):
How to unite the right people? This one helps with the “it’s not my problem” challenge. Often systemic problems have many players who are vested either in the resolution of the problem or operate in the system. Finding the right people to swarm around the problem can be a critical aspect of understanding and solving the problem.
How to change the system? This question should be asked after the next one in my mind. If we don’t know where the point of leverage is, changing the system is going to be difficult. But this question is still valid - there are often many options on the table. Which one to pursue? Which will have the biggest impact on the overall outcome? Maybe just as important here is to remember the decision of what to do includes decisions on what not to do. Don’t let the team get distracted.
Where to find a point of leverage? This is the root cause in the system. The point of leverage that if changed will impact the outcomes (in the right direction). This is the heart of systems thinking: understanding there is one or very few leverage points that have a large impact on the whole system. The book - and many systems thinking books - is full of examples of finding the right upstream point to change the flow of the entire river.
How to get early warning of the problem? Assuming the problem cannot be eliminated entirely, how do we know it is coming? Can we get an early-enough warning to head off the flood of symptoms? And of course, what will we actually do when those signals arise?
How to know you’re succeeding? Eliminating endemic problems in a system is a great thing, but in large-enough systems it isn’t always obvious that THIS intervention was the one that caused the change. That said, having measures that help indicate before-and-after impact on the outcomes is critical. Heath highlighted an important challenge numeric measures that become a reward mechanism - people always find ways to game such measures. Heath suggests that numeric measures be paired with more qualitative measures so that the desired effect of the interventions is still achieved.
How to avoid doing harm? Do we understand the system well enough that our intervention won’t cause new problems or cause problems elsewhere in the system? Sometimes the we don’t, but can we setup the intervention in such a way that we can check for these things? Small experiments? Fail safes? The examples from the book are environmental disasters caused by invasive-species. But there are interventions in business that can have surprising effects too - these are often seen in cyclic changes in business: hold more inventory to protect sales / production - hold less inventory to control costs. Maybe a deeper understanding of the system could help improve the interventions?
How will pay for what doesn’t happen? I suspect this is another place where systemic changes get hung up, along with “it’s not my problem.” System changes designed to prevent disasters like Y2K or catastrophic flooding or global warming are initially expensive, but if they work then the disaster doesn’t happen. But does that mean that it was wasted money? There are plenty of examples where we decide not to spend money to prevent potential problems only to spends orders of magnitude more to fix the resulting problems. A similar challenge here is when the group “paying” for the intervention don’t benefit from it - this often blocks interventions in business when everything is tied to local P&L statements. If the manufacturing group pays for an improvement that enables sales to sell more product, that is great for the company. But if the manufacturing leader ends up “hurt” by spending more, then there are only so many times this happens before they say “no.” Or the system changes to enable better collaboration.
Overall this was an easy book to read, as I have experienced with many of the other Heath brothers books. Upstream covers some familiar ground with systems thinking, and it does a good job of synthesizing many of the ways people approach making lasting systemic change. Do we recognize the problem and that we can do something about it? Do we understand the underlying system that is generating the problem? Will our solution have the desired impact and not cause additional problems? And do we have the fortitude to make the changes?