John Thompson, semi-retired and living in Goderich, Ontario, had been forgetting to use the twice-daily eye drops that were prescribed for his glaucoma. So he decided to put the drops on the windowsill above the kitchen sink—that way, he’d spot them every time he made coffee in the morning. “Also, I put the drops on the east side of the sill so I would know they were for the morning,” he said. “After putting them in my eyes, I would move them to the west side of the sill. That would confirm that I had put drops in in the morning and cue me to put drops in at night. After I did that, I would put the drops back on the east side of the sill.” Thompson’s windowsill system eliminated the problem.
Rich Marisa had a similar upstream epiphany in his personal life. “My wife had been unhappy with my leaving on lights, particularly the one light in the hall when I go out or come in,” said Marisa, an application programmer who lives near Ithaca, New York. The hallway lights were a minor source of marital friction—the kind of trivial thing that keeps people bickering for years. (“You left the toilet seat lid up again!”)
But Marisa realized he could prevent these arguments from happening. By filing for divorce.
I’m kidding. Sorry. Here’s what he actually did: “I took ownership of the situation and got a timer light switch. Now I push the button and get five minutes of light. Then the light turns off, and what was an issue just isn’t anymore,” he said.
In my research, I sought out stories like these—people who stopped reacting to problems and started preventing them. I found them oddly inspirational. I started micro-analyzing my own life, looking for recurring irritants that I could vanish with a bit of upstream witchcraft.
I used to spend a lot of time shuffling my laptop power cord, for instance. Despite having a proper office with a proper desk, I seem to do my best work in coffee shops. I was always unplugging the cord, packing it, and plugging it in somewhere else. So—prepare to be astonished—I bought a second power cord. Now one stays on my desk permanently, and the other resides in my backpack.
These are easy victories. All they require is an awareness of the problem and a small measure of planning. Yet in my interviews, I found that it was difficult for most people to think of their own examples. (This is not my way of bragging, by the way: Remember, I shuffled power cords for years—and what finally sparked action was, um, writing a book on upstream thinking.) Which raises the question: If upstream thinking is so simple—and so effective in eliminating recurring problems—why is it so rare?
Consider how easy it would have been to derail my own upstream thinking. If anybody in my family had been sick, I wouldn’t have been pondering small improvements. Or if I’d been stressed out over work or relationships. All of this is probably intuitive: We would expect big problems in life to crowd out little problems. We don’t have the bandwidth to fix everything.
But this issue of “bandwidth” is actually more insidious than that: Researchers have found that when people experience scarcity—of money or time or mental bandwidth—the harm is not that the big problems crowd out the little ones. The harm is that the little ones crowd out the big ones. Imagine a single mother who can barely pay the bills each month and who has maxed out her credit card. Her kid needs $150 to play in a local basketball league. She can’t bear to say no—it’s one of the few healthy opportunities open to him in the neighborhood. But she doesn’t have the money and is still 10 days from her next paycheck. So she takes out a payday loan from the lender down the street. She’ll need to repay the loan in a month with 20% interest (the equivalent of a 240% APR). And if she doesn’t, it will roll over, and the interest will mount. It’s not a huge amount of money, but it might be enough extra debt to make her precarious finances topple.
A financial advisor would say the woman has made a bad financial decision. But her son got his opportunity, and she has bought herself a few days or a few weeks of crucial maneuvering room. The crisis may come, but not today. The psychologists Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan, in their book Scarcity, call this “tunneling”: When people are juggling a lot of problems, they give up trying to solve them all. They adopt tunnel vision. There’s no long-term planning; there’s no strategic prioritization of issues. And that’s why tunneling is the third barrier to upstream thinking—because it confines us to short-term, reactive thinking. In the tunnel, there’s only forward.
It’s often said that a chain of bad decisions can lead people to be poor. That is undoubtedly true in some cases. (Think of the highly paid superstar athlete who later declares bankruptcy.) But Shafir and Mullainathan argue convincingly that we’ve got the causation backward: that in fact it’s poverty that leads to short-sighted financial decisions. As the authors write, scarcity “makes us less insightful, less forward-thinking, less controlled. And the effects are large. Being poor, for example, reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going one full night without sleep. It is not that the poor have less bandwidth as individuals. Rather, it is that the experience of poverty reduces anyone’s bandwidth.” When people’s resources are scarce, every problem is a source of stress. There’s no way to use money as a buffer—by keeping a car’s maintenance up to date, by paying out of pocket for a dental visit, by taking a few days off work to stay with a sick parent. Life becomes a tightrope walk.
People who are tunneling can’t engage in systems thinking. They can’t prevent problems; they just react. And tunneling isn’t just something that happens to poor people—it can also be caused by a scarcity of time.
“Scarcity, and tunneling in particular, leads you to put off important but not urgent things—cleaning your office, getting a colonoscopy, writing a will—that are easy to neglect,” wrote Shafir and Mullainathan. “Their costs are immediate, loom large, and are easy to defer, and their benefits fall outside the tunnel. So they await a time when all urgent things are done.”
But of course we never run out of urgent things to do, and all of the sudden, we’re 70 years old without a will. This tunneling trap plagues organizations, too. Anita Tucker, an industrial engineer who once supported the operations of a General Mills frosting plant, did her dissertation at Harvard by shadowing 22 nurses in 8 hospitals for almost 200 hours in total. What she discovered was that the nurses were, in essence, professional problem solvers. An unexpected problem popped up every 90 minutes or so, on average. As a representative example, after one three-day weekend when some of the laundry staff had been off duty, a nurse noticed that her unit had run out of towels. So she nabbed some towels from a neighboring unit, then asked the secretary to call laundry for more.
The most common types of problems encountered by nurses, Tucker noted, included dealing with missing/incorrect information and contending with missing/broken equipment. In one case, Abby, a nurse on duty, was preparing to discharge a new mother from the hospital. Abby noticed that the woman’s newborn wasn’t wearing a security tag. The tags, worn around the ankle, are expensive (about $100 apiece) and important—they reduce the risk of abductions. After a quick search, Abby found the tag in the baby’s bassinet. Then, three hours later, the same thing happened again: Another baby who was about to be discharged was missing a tag. This time, a hunt by multiple people came up empty, so Abby let her manager know that the tag was lost. Because of her quick actions, both mothers were discharged with only a brief delay.
To overcome problems like these required the nurses to be creative. Persistent. Resourceful. They didn’t go running to the boss every time something went wrong. They worked around the problems, so they could keep serving their patients. That’s what it meant to be a good nurse.
It’s an inspiring portrait, isn’t it? Until you realize something: What Tucker is describing is a system that never learns. Never improves. “I was really shocked, to be honest with you,” Tucker said. Shocked because what Tucker had observed was the utter absence of upstream action.
Abby, who dealt with two missing security tags in three hours, didn’t think to ask, Why does this keep happening? The nurse who nabbed extra towels didn’t think, Hey, we’ve got a process problem here—we need a plan for handling three-day weekends.
The nurses were tunneling. Their time was scarce; their attention was scarce. Grabbing towels from another department—which might cause that department to run out a few hours later—is roughly the equivalent of taking a payday loan. The bill will come due, but not right now. For the moment, the nurses can keep digging forward.
Is the intent of this story to throw stones at nurses? Hardly. My guess is that if Anita Tucker had picked another group of professionals to shadow—lawyers or flight attendants or teachers—the results would have been about the same. And, by the way, think of how unnatural it would have been for those nurses to escape the tunnel. Okay, so a nurse discovers that newborns’ security tags are prone to falling off. She tells her supervisor. What else could she be expected to do? Conduct an on-the-spot root cause analysis, while she’s got a dozen patients who need her attention right now? And, by the way, how are her colleagues going to feel about someone who is always yammering on about “fixing processes” rather than simply grabbing more towels from another unit? It’s so much easier—and more natural—to stay in the tunnel and keep digging ahead.
It’s a terrible trap: If you can’t systematically solve problems, it dooms you to stay in an endless cycle of reaction. Tunneling begets more tunneling.
Tunneling is not only self-perpetuating, it can even be emotionally rewarding. There is a kind of glory that comes from stopping a big screw-up at the last second. Look at all the clichés we have at our disposal: “Team, we owe Steve a big round of applause for putting out that fire / saving the day / bailing us out / rescuing us from disaster. If it weren’t for him, those inventory stock-out reports would have been a day late.” Saving the day feels awfully good, and heroism is addictive. We all have colleagues who actually seem to relish those manic “stay up all night to meet the critical deadline” adventures. And it’s not that the day doesn’t need saving, sometimes, but we should be wary of this cycle of behavior. The need for heroism is usually evidence of systems failure.
How do you escape the tunnel? You need slack. Slack, in this context, means a reserve of time or resources that can be spent on problem solving. Some hospitals, for instance, create slack with a morning “safety huddle” where staffers meet to review any safety “near-misses” from the previous day—patients almost hurt, errors almost made—and preview any complexities in the day ahead. A forum like that would have been the perfect place for a nurse to mention, “The security ankle bands keep falling off the babies!”
The safety huddle isn’t slack in the sense of idle time. Rather, it’s a guaranteed block of time when staffers can emerge from the tunnel and think about systems-level issues. Think of it as structured slack: A space that has been created to cultivate upstream work. It’s collaborative and it’s disciplined. The same idea was used in the Chicago Public Schools effort to reduce the dropout rate: The Freshman Success Teams had a standing meeting where they reviewed progress on a student-by-student basis. This kind of forum will never happen “naturally”: It’s no trivial feat to carve out time from teachers’ already crazy schedules.
Escaping the tunnel can be difficult, because organizational structure resists it. Remember the quote from Mark Okerstrom, the CEO of Expedia: “When we create organizations, we’re doing it to give people focus. We’re essentially giving them a license to be myopic.” Focus is both an enemy and an ally. It can accelerate work and make it more efficient, but it puts blinders on people. (Racehorses wear blinders so they’ll ignore distractions and run faster.) When your emphasis is always forward, forward, forward, you never stop to ask whether you’re going in the right direction.
It’s even fair to say that our own brains are designed for tunneling. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert argues that a focus on the immediate and the urgent is a default feature of our thinking. In an article for the Los Angeles Times, he wrote:
Like all animals, people are quick to respond to clear and present danger, which is why it takes us just a few milliseconds to duck when a wayward baseball comes speeding toward our eyes. The brain is a beautifully engineered get-out-of-the-way machine that constantly scans the environment for things out of whose way it should right now get. That’s what brains did for several hundred million years—and then, just a few million years ago, the mammalian brain learned a new trick: to predict the timing and location of dangers before they actually happened.
Our ability to duck that which is not yet coming is one of the brain’s most stunning innovations, and we wouldn’t have dental floss or 401(k) plans without it. But this innovation is in the early stages of development. The application that allows us to respond to visible baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that allows us to respond to threats that loom in an unseen future is still in beta testing.
Upstream thinking, in Gilbert’s telling, is a new feature of our brains.
There are only two areas of concern that seem to reliably trigger our upstream instincts: our kids and our teeth. When it comes to our children, we’re capable of thinking years down the road: Are they getting too much screen time? Are they eating healthy diets? Will they be able to get into a good college?
Somewhat more puzzling is the regard we show for our teeth, the most coddled organ in our body. Even as our skin is shorted sunscreen and our hearts denied a brisk jog and our immune systems refused an annual flu shot, we make it a priority on every single day of our lives, even the busiest ones, to perform a twice-daily regimen of preventive scrubbing. And then we report to a dentist regularly for a more rigorous appraisal. We might even cap or fill a particular tooth, even if it’s not causing us any discomfort at the time. Ponder this fact for a moment: The most successful preventive habit we have developed as a species is for the preservation of our… lungs brains hearts teeth.
Could we someday learn to pamper and preserve the planet half as much as we do our teeth? The ongoing international failure to slow down climate change meaningfully would suggest not. For years we’ve been laughing at those dumb metaphorical frogs that won’t jump out of the boiling pot until it’s too late. Turns out we’re the frogs.
Climate change is like a product designed by an evil mastermind to exploit every weakness in the human psyche: It changes too slowly to spark urgency. It lacks a human face: As Dan Gilbert wrote in the piece cited above, “If climate change had been visited on us by a brutal dictator or an evil empire, the war on warming would be this nation’s top priority.” To address climate change successfully would require people to collaborate across nations and parties and organizations in tribe-defying ways. Finally, climate change features a mismatch of acts and consequences: The people who are causing most of the harm are not the ones who will suffer the most as a result.
That portrayal appears bleak, but here’s one hopeful counterpoint: In the recent past, humanity rallied to solve a major global environmental threat that shared all of the traits described above: the depletion of the ozone layer. Let’s go back to 1974, when the scientists Mario Molina and F. Sherwood (Sherry) Rowland published a paper in Nature titled “Stratospheric Sink for Chlorofluoromethanes: Chlorine Atom-Catalysed Destruction of Ozone.” It was a sober title for a frankly apocalyptic finding.
The scientists had discovered something about chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), chemicals used as propellants in spray deodorants and coolants in air conditioners, among other applications. CFCs were a dream to work with, because they were both nonflammable and nontoxic. Extremely stable, too—they hung around in the atmosphere for a long time, and nobody had thought very much about where they ended up after they escaped from your fridge or armpit. What Molina and Rowland figured out is that the CFCs would rise in the atmosphere higher and higher until, eventually, they’d be broken down by the sun’s rays, releasing chlorine, which would eat up the world’s ozone layer, a critical shield against ultraviolet radiation. The potential result: disruption of the world’s food supply and skin cancer in epidemic proportions.
So what happened after their bombshell findings were released? Not much. “It didn’t make any noise because we were talking about invisible gases reaching an invisible layer [that protected us from] invisible rays,” said Molina in the excellent PBS documentary Ozone Hole: How We Saved the Planet. “They said, ‘Oh, you must be exaggerating.’ ”
They weren’t exaggerating. Fortunately, the world didn’t end, because an international coalition came together to restrict CFCs in a series of agreements, including the Montreal Protocol in 1987, which was described by one climate scientist as “a tap on the brakes,” and progressing to the Copenhagen amendment in 1992, which was more like a screeching deceleration. (There have been several more agreements since.) As a result, humanity has stopped making the problem worse. The ozone layer is not “fixed” by any stretch—it won’t return to its 1980 level of health until 2050, if present trends continue. But we have stopped digging our own grave, and our willingness to set aside that shovel seems worth celebrating.
There’s a paradox inherent in preventive efforts: We’ve got to create an urgent demand to fix a problem that may not happen for a while. We’ve got to make the upstream feel downstream, in other words. Think about the situation in 1974, when Molina and Rowland released their paper. There were a few dozen people in the world, maybe, who felt the hair-on-fire urgency needed to address ozone depletion. Imagine a global heat map depicting “passion for fixing the ozone layer,” with a blazing red speck marking the location of Molina and Rowland’s academic departments and the rest of the planet covered in an indifferent blue. By 10 years later, red had spread like wildfire—we were on the cusp of a global agreement. How did that happen?
The first thing to realize is that “creating urgency” is basically coopting the power of tunneling for good. Rather than try to escape the tunnel—as with the discussion on slack—we can try to use the extreme focus it provides to our advantage. Who hasn’t been at their most productive—and most motivated—when staring down a deadline? A deadline supplies artificial urgency to a task. Consider the April 15 tax deadline in the US. It’s an arbitrary date, but it has real power over behavior. About 21.5 million Americans file their taxes in the last week before the deadline. As the deadline looms, you eventually drop everything else and get it done.I It’s not that you’ve stopped tunneling. It’s more like the government has jammed the task into the tunnel, ensuring that you’d get it done.
We’d all love for our pet issues to be “in the tunnel,” but it’s crowded in there. Our demands have to compete with many other pressing and emotional concerns: getting the kids to soccer practice and crunching the data for the boss and visiting grandma at the nursing home. If you don’t do these things, they don’t get done. Meanwhile, the ozone layer stuff sounds important but ultimately outside of your daily concerns. Out of your tunnel. To combat that indifference, many of the scientists involved, including Sherry Rowland, became vocal advocates for action—against their own training and instincts—stressing the human consequences of ozone depletion, even to audiences who were hostile to their findings.
Their advocacy created converts in unexpected places. In 1975, the TV show All in the Family—the most popular show in America—ran an episode in which Mike (aka “Meathead”), a liberal college student, chastises his wife, Gloria, for using hair spray with CFCs, saying the chemicals will destroy the ozone layer and “kill us all.” The sale of aerosol sprays dropped noticeably after the episode aired.
What also helped spread urgency was the term ozone hole, which is familiar today but actually was not embraced until the mid-1980s—a decade after the Nature publication. Some scientists objected to the term as inaccurate, but it caught on immediately with the public. The research scientist Richard Stolarski said on a podcast that “it certainly made it easier to reach a greater part of the public by having a simple key word that you could describe it by.” The notion of a “hole” made the problem easier to visualize and invoked an action mind-set. When there’s a hole in something important—a roof or a boat or a sweater—you fix it. Holes are urgent; slow depletion of the ozone layer isn’t.
There was also another side of the campaign: handling potential opponents to international action. Companies like DuPont, a top producer of CFCs, had fought the bans for years, but by the time of the Montreal Protocol, DuPont had become a supporter. Two researchers who later studied DuPont’s role in the issue concluded that “DuPont’s support for the protocol had also depended on US officials’ ability to assure that the European-based producers could not gain a competitive advantage through any provisions of the international treaty.” In other words, DuPont likely would have resisted a US-only ban. But if all its global competitors faced the same ban, it wouldn’t feel disadvantaged.
Other opponents included the leaders of developing nations, who complained about bearing high costs for a problem that was largely not of their making. Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister of the UK, led the charge to ask industrialized countries to contribute most of the necessary resources. (The “Iron Lady” might seem an unlikely champion of the ozone work, but her background provides one clue: She studied chemistry in college and was briefly a research chemist.)
Before these compromises, international action on the ozone layer would have been a threat to DuPont and to the developing nations. Threats are urgent, by definition. So what international negotiators were accomplishing was a kind of orchestration of urgency: Supporters needed to feel more urgency and opponents needed to feel less.
Success stories like this one can acquire inevitability in retrospect. Of course we fixed the ozone layer—we had to! But there were countless ways for the whole effort to have blown up. To cite just one example: In May 1987—just a few months before the Montreal Protocol was signed—the US Interior Secretary Donald Hodel was quoted as speaking critically in internal debates about the proposals, suggesting that instead of a CFC ban, people could start wearing hats, suntan lotion, and sunglasses. A media firestorm followed. (You almost wish Twitter could be beamed back in time to react to that comment.) Hodel backpedaled, and the Reagan administration remained a critical player in the accords.
President Reagan, initially a skeptic, eventually became a believer in the work. As Secretary of State George Schultz said of Reagan’s attitude in the PBS documentary: Maybe you’re right that nothing is going to happen, but you must agree that if this does happen, it’s going to be a catastrophe, so let’s take out an insurance policy.
Climate scientists use the phrase “the world avoided” to discuss the problems that were prevented by the ozone layer agreements. “I think it helps us to contemplate the world we’ve avoided,” said Sean Davis, a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in a TEDx talk. “The world we’ve avoided by enacting the Montreal Protocol is one of catastrophic changes to our environment and to human well-being. By the 2030s, we’ll be avoiding millions of new skin cancer cases per year, with a number that would only grow.”
“The world avoided” is an evocative phrase. In some ways it’s the goal of every upstream effort: To avoid a world where certain kinds of harm, injustice, disease, or hardship persist. The path to “the world avoided” is a difficult one because of the barriers we’ve seen: problem blindness (I don’t see the problem), lack of ownership (That problem is not mine to fix), and tunneling (I can’t deal with that right now).
As we move into the next section of the book, we will study leaders who’ve fought for “the world avoided.” The problems they’re seeking to avoid are wide ranging in both domain and significance: from domestic violence to elevator breakdowns to invasive species to broken sidewalks to lost customers to school shootings. But despite the great difference in focus, the strategies they’ve embraced share critical similarities. They’ve each, in their own way, had to address seven key questions, ranging from: “How will we unite the right people?” to “Who will pay for what does not happen?”
Just ahead we will encounter a nation that has accomplished the unthinkable: almost eliminating the problem of teenage substance abuse. If you think a generation of happily sober teenagers is a fantasy, turn the page.
I. Imagine if we didn’t face a tax deadline, and instead, we could submit our taxes for the previous year any time we liked. After January, though, each month we waited would add an additional 2% interest to the amount owed, like a credit card balance that keeps rolling over. One suspects that this would be a terrific moneymaker for the federal government—if we didn’t eventually run out of cash as a nation as the IOUs mounted.