Upstream

When you spend years responding to problems, you can sometimes overlook the fact that you could be preventing them. O’Neill shared his findings with his boss,

When you spend years responding to problems, you can sometimes overlook the fact that you could be preventing them.

Downstream actions react to problems once they’ve occurred. Upstream efforts aim to prevent those problems from happening.

The tech group kept the website’s features humming along smoothly. And the support group addressed customers’ issues quickly and satisfactorily. Notice what was missing: It was no group’s job to ensure that customers didn’t need to call for support.

The tech group kept the website’s features humming along smoothly. And the support group addressed customers’ issues quickly and satisfactorily. Notice what was missing: It was no group’s job to ensure that customers didn’t need to call for support. In fact, no team really stood to gain if customers stopped calling. It wasn’t what they were measured on.

the side effect of that decision, of course, is that some customers would mistype their emails, and they’d end up calling for an itinerary. That’s a system failure. That customer never needed to call. Yet both teams would still look like heroes according to their goals: The product team closed a transaction, and the support team handled the resulting call quickly.

“When we create organizations, we’re doing it to give people focus. We’re essentially giving them a license to be myopic. We’re saying: This is your problem. Define your mission and create your strategy and align your resources to solve that problem.

“When we create organizations, we’re doing it to give people focus. We’re essentially giving them a license to be myopic. We’re saying: This is your problem. Define your mission and create your strategy and align your resources to solve that problem. And you have the divine right to ignore all of the other stuff that doesn’t align with that.”

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.

it’s great that there are professionals who can address these problems, but wouldn’t it be better if the addicts never tried drugs, and the executives were happy to stay put, and the kids never got asthma? So why do our efforts skew so heavily toward reaction rather than prevention?

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.

an example of two police officers: The first officer spends half a shift standing on a street corner where many accidents happen; her visible presence makes drivers more careful and might prevent collisions.5 The second officer hides around the corner, nabbing cars for prohibited-turn violations. It’s the first officer who did more to help public safety, said the deputy chief, but it’s the second officer who will be rewarded, because she has a stack full of tickets to show for her efforts.

Your victories are stories written in data, starring invisible heroes who save invisible victims.

Teaching kids to swim, for instance, is an excellent upstream way to prevent drownings.

The downstream rescue leads to the upstream improvement.)

I prefer the word upstream to preventive or proactive because I like the way the stream metaphor prods us to expand our thinking about solutions.

you don’t head Upstream, as in a specific destination.

you don’t head Upstream, as in a specific destination. You head upstream, as in a direction.

at the cost of more complexity.

there’s always a way to push further upstream—at the cost of more complexity.