And this is true in many parts of society. 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. Therapists rehabilitate people addicted to drugs, and corporate recruiters replace talented executives who leave, and pediatricians prescribe inhalers to kids with breathing problems. And obviously 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? Back in 2009, I spoke with a deputy chief of police in a Canadian city; it was one of the conversations that sparked my interest in upstream thinking. He believed that the police force was unduly focused on reacting to crimes as opposed to preventing them. “A lot of people on the force want to play cops and robbers,” he said. “It’s much easier to say ‘I arrested this guy’ than to say ‘I spent some time talking to this wayward kid.’ ” He gave 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. 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. 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. One day, there’s a family that does not get into a car accident because a police officer’s presence made them incrementally more cautious. That family has no idea what didn’t happen, and neither does the officer. How do you prove what did not happen? Your only hope, as a police chief, is to keep such good evidence of crashes that you can detect success when the numbers start falling. But even if you feel confident your efforts accomplished something, you’ll still never know who you helped. You’ll just see some numbers decline on a page. Your victories are stories written in data, starring invisible heroes who save invisible victims.
Solving problems as they pop up can be cathartic in some sense. It gives you a feeling of accomplishment as you resolve issue to issue and you get a tangible output.
Preventing them from happen in the first place? Not so fancy and engaging. Nobody lauds the security guard or measures that might have prevented a probable attack. But everyone would congratulate and celebrate those who apprehended the culprits.
This book covers this phenomenon in detail, and describes how we end up focusing on downstream impacts and how we can all make our lives easier by identifying upstream issues. I’ll be sharing certain excerpts and examples that I found interesting.
