Most of us spend our days dealing with symptoms. The same complaint, the same argument, the same fire that needs putting out every few weeks. We get quite good at putting it out. We rarely ask why it keeps starting.
That’s the whole idea behind Upstream by Dan Heath. Dan is one half of the Heath brothers, and between them they’ve written some of my favourite books ever. They make big ideas really, really simple. Upstream is Dan on his own, and it’s every bit as good.
The line from it in my guide says it plainly. “Stop reacting to problems and start preventing them.”
Who’s throwing them in?
The book is built around an old parable. You’re by a river and you spot a child in the water, struggling. You jump in and pull them out. Another one comes past, and another, and you keep jumping in. Eventually your friend gets out of the water and starts walking away. You ask where they’re going. They’re going upstream, to find out who keeps throwing the kids in.
Downstream is where the rescuing happens. It’s fast, it’s visible and people thank you for it. Upstream is slower and messier, and when it works, nothing happens. Nobody throws a party for the problem that never turned up.
Heath is good on why we stay downstream. Sometimes we don’t see the problem at all, because it’s been there so long it just looks normal. Sometimes we see it but tell ourselves it isn’t our job to fix. And sometimes we’re so busy rescuing that we never get our heads up long enough to look.
He’s also good on a tricky question. How do you know upstream work is working, when success means something not happening? It’s easy to pick a number that looks good and miss the point completely. He shows how people end up hitting the target and still missing the thing the target was there to measure.
One of the stories I like is about Expedia. A huge number of their customers were ringing up for help. A big chunk of those calls were people asking for a copy of their itinerary. Someone finally asked why so many people needed to call about that. They made the itinerary easy to find online, and the calls dropped away.
A tap on the shoulder
Here’s how I think about it. Most problems give you a tap on the shoulder before they punch you in the face. The question is whether you spot the tap.
That shows up in health, in business, in relationships, in just about everything. The niggle you ignore until it’s an injury. The customer who goes quiet before they leave. The conversation at home you keep putting off until it turns into a row.
Let’s get real: dealing with the symptom feels like progress. You’re busy, you’re useful and something gets ticked off. Stepping back to find the cause feels slow, and it can feel like you’re doing nothing. But if you find the cause and deal with it, you won’t have to keep dealing with the symptoms. That’s where the time comes back.
In a business it can be as simple as noticing the question your team answers ten times a week. Or the job that always comes back to be redone. Or the type of client who always ends up unhappy. Each one is a tap on the shoulder. Each one has a cause somewhere further up the river.
The people closest to a problem are often the last to see it, because they’re too busy dealing with it. That’s just what happens when you get good at rescuing. Sometimes it takes someone stepping out of the water for a minute, asking a slightly awkward question, to spot where it’s all coming from.
What Upstream leaves you with is the habit of asking one more question before you jump in again. Why is this happening, and who could stop it happening in the first place?
If you like this one, it sits nicely next to Made to Stick and Switch by the Heath brothers. All three are in my free guide, 50 Books That Shaped Me, with a line on what each one meant to me.
Maybe it’s time you took a walk up the river and had a look at what keeps falling in.
