[心得分享] Upstream: Prevention is how we stop Intervention

 

Upstream

The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

Author： Dan Heath
Recommendation：⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

Preface

The reason you are reading this in English is because my sharing will be English when I read English version, and when I read mandarin version, it will be in mandarin. The reason I do this is because I hope to improve my personal English skill and also seek to force others to read some English writings as well. Although my English isn’t as good as lots of people, but I hope my review of this book may help you refresh how you think you should solve a problem.

So, back to our business, what is upstream? Take COVID-19 as an example, what should be the first step we take when such a pandemic happens? Is it to develop a medicine for cure? Or is it to research for a vaccine to prevent more infections? Or maybe, a more structured system to handle and control the spread of the virus is our top priority? When things happened, we usually wanted to resolve the problem we confront, and when we solved it, problem repeats, and the circulation keeps going. We get stuck, but we feel satisfied. Upstream is when we dive into the source of the problem, instead of resolving the issue we face, we prevent problems happening. When issues don’t even happen, there are nothing to solve.

What are the barriers of prevention?

Problem Blindness

“We can’t avoid this impact that causes the decrease on our sales.” 

“Injuries just happen, we can’t prevent athletes from getting hurt.” 

The belief that negative outcomes are natural or inevitable is one of the main reason that keeps us away from upstreaming. Just like the quote in the famous series Games of Thrones "Valar Morghulis", we are stuck into this mindset and can’t stop thinking about it. The escape of problem blindness is when you have the awareness that you treat abnormal as normal. Always question the status quo and ask yourself is the current situation satisfied or not. That’s how we avoid problem blindness.

A Lack of Ownership

“Street shelter belongs to local government‘s public work department but township office is in charge of illegal structure." When talking about illegal structure built on street shelter, who is responsible of the destruction?” If the work is not chosen by someone, the underlying problem won’t get solved. That’s the issue what Taiwan’s sidewalk currently facing. People need to have a mindset, “unless somebody leads, nobody will”, so be the one who volunteers and lead.

Tunneling

This is when people deal with complicated problems, we choose to fix the immediate one we confront. Think when the last time you were heading in some difficult job then your boss came by and ask you a favor, because you have no cognitive capacity to think about it, you reactively answered ok then do the job your boss newly asked for and totally forgot the one you were doing previously. Tunnel is useful in someways, but it kept us away of seeing out of the box. It’s kind of the extension of problem blindness so when you are doing something, you have to ask the purpose of it and see if it really helps to solve the upstream problem.

Examples & Controversial Topics

Traffic Safety

Imagine a sector where we send police officers to fine people who violate traffic laws. Now, there are 2 polices who execute it in different ways. One officer spends half a shift standing on the street corner where many accidents happen; his visible presence makes drivers more careful and might prevent collisions. The other one plays hide and seek, nabbing cars for prohibited-turn violations. What is the result of their year end performance review? The second one gets better performance as he gets a bunch of tickets that helps our government earn lots of money. Is this fair? To be honest, the KPI was set fairly. Officers who fines more tickets should get better performance as he or she really caught more law breakers. But thats why we need to think upstream, instead of fixing the problem we confront(catching law breakers), we should prevent problems happening(avoid traffic accidents). The question is how can we measure a performance when there is no standard to measure the improvement?

What I think is, maybe a A/B test might work. By calculating the accident rate with these 2 implementation comparing it to a scenario with no officers. We can see which one really works on the topic of " Traffic Safety" instead of who fines more tickets.

Open Space Office & Face to Face Interactions

So this scenario starts with a good intention to increase team work. John and Abby decide to move their office to an open space office where their employees have greater chances to meet face to face. They thought this is very intuitive because they increased the possibility of meeting each other and it should show impacts on team works. The result? The team decreased 70% of F2F conversation because they found it noisy when talking in the office, and it makes the office very crowded. What do we call this? Cobra Effect. This happens when an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse. In order to resolve this effect, you have to experiment. " Whatever your plan is, it's going to be wrong." Having this mindset is not telling you not to do a plan, but to keep adjusting your plan until your direction is leading you to your goal.

What's Wrong with Smoking?

When we were talking about the lack of ownership, we said about the mindset of taking lead to make changes. " Tobacco companies are in the best position to prevent millions of deaths caused by their products, but of course doing so would interfere with their ability to make money." This is what we called self-interest conflicts, when we want to solve problems that impact what we can benefit from, we will refuse to do so. This is a really selfish mindset, but I can't say I will never do so. 

The reason I pointed this topic out is because I had read some slogan such as " Smoking is our human right, it represents our freedom.", and I scoff at this kind of idea. Freedom is when you don't impact others when you do the thing you want, and when you are smoking, you impact my feeling, health and emotion. It isn't your freedom to smoke, and it is our freedom to constraint where you can smoke(link). I'm impressed of how New Zealand prohibits smokers last year, "From 2023, people under 14 may never buy tobacco lifelong."(link). This is something what our government should consider, and try to impose tax from other places.

Summary

What I like about this book is that it provides lots of examples, such as why banning plastic bags isn't a useful policy on reducing global warming or why in public health, if you do your job, they cut your budget, because no one is getting sick. From time to time, we are trained to solve the problem we confront because the education had taught us to solve the math problem we get. We rarely learned why we are solving those problems. This book will refresh how you should think about the problem, instead of saving people drowning, try to prevent them form drowning is the ultimate goal.