551: How to Save Massive Time, Energy, and Frustration by Solving Problems Before They Happen with Dan Heath

Pete Mockaitis
Dan, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Dan Heath
Hey, thanks for having me on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am so excited to speak to you in person and digging into the wisdom of your book here “Upstream.” And so, I want to maybe hear from you on the personal side, talking about preventing problems instead of reacting to them, is there an area in your own life where you’ve applied some “Upstream” mindset principles to get some good results?

Dan Heath
Yeah, there actually is one, and it’s so utterly mundane, I’m almost embarrassed to share it, but here was my epiphany. And, keep in mind, this was while I was writing a book on upstream thinking, and by upstream, I mean the quest to solve a problem before it happens. So, anyway, as you know, I’m a writer and, for whatever reason, I tend to do my best writing in coffee shops. So, I had this coffee shop I go to every morning, and I sit in the same place, and I order the same thing. And so, as a result of that, I’m constantly shuffling my laptop back and forth. I have a proper office that stays largely abandoned, and then I go to this coffee shop to write.

And so, I go to the coffee shop, I plug in the laptop, and then when it’s time to go, I pack everything up, I pack up the power cord, I get back to the office, I unwind the power cord, plug it in there, and it’s just a lot of power cord shuffling, and it’s just like an everyday annoyance. And I’ve been doing this for years. I mean, for years, I’m packing up, unpacking my power cord a couple of times a day. And then, in the course of this research, it occurs to me, “Hey, what if I bought a second power cord, and one of them could stay in my backpack when I go to the coffee shop, and one of them could stay permanently wired on my desk, so when I get back and I put my laptop down, I just easily plug it in.

And it was like this great relief where this little everyday annoyance was just gone forever. And then I started kicking myself, like, “How could I get in this mode where for years…?” I mean, it’s not like this was some major hardship obviously, but it was an annoyance, and it never needed to be one. And that’s the spirit of “Upstream” the book, in a very mundane personal story.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I actually totally connect and relate to that. And I think about travel in terms of I’m always sort of reassembling my toiletry bag 3-1-1 and just get two of the things, and just leave the thing in the suitcase forever.

Dan Heath
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
So, lessons learned.

Dan Heath
And I think this is also true in relationships. Like, every couple has something that they bicker about, “Oh, you left the toilet seat lid up again,” there’s just some recurring irritant, maybe many, depending on your relationship. And so, I also got to talk to some people who’d figured out how to solve those kinds of problems. I met this guy named Ritch Marissa, and he and his wife, their thing was the hallway light. So, Ritch would go outside, often just to take the dog out or something, and he would flip the hallway light on. He’d come back in and he would inevitably forget to turn the hallway light off, and that bugged his wife, and so this was just like a little nagging problem for them.

And one day, Ritch Marissa has this epiphany, and realizes, “Hey, we don’t ever have to do this again. I’ve got it. I know how to crack this.” And so, the next day, he filed for divorce. No, I’m kidding. That is just a cheap joke. No, what he did was he went to Home Depot and he bought something I didn’t even know existed, which is called a light switch timer, and this is like a little panel that goes where your light switch is, and there’s buttons on it with different timestamps, so he can just press the five-minute button, the light comes on, and after five minutes, it turns itself off.

What is just so profound to me about this, I know these are little things, but it’s just a signal that, in our lives, it’s so easy to get into these patterns where we can fight the same problem again and again, and it’s like it takes a miracle for us to snap awake and realize, “Hey, with the right intervention, this could be gone forever.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that’s resonant and it’s exciting, and I think it really just, even for the relationship itself, that’s a loving action. That’s going to say, “Hey, honey, I heard you, I listened to you, and I’m doing something about it,” and so not only do we have that irritant gone, but we have kind of, “Oh, that was really nice of you. Thank you,” going for you.

Dan Heath
If only more of our relationship problems could be addressed with a $10 gizmo from Home Depot, the world would be a better place.

Pete Mockaitis
Home Depot on Valentine’s Day is a peak day for them. Well, cool. So, then we talk about upstream and this notion of solving problems before they happen. I’d love to hear, have you made any particularly surprising counterintuitive discoveries about our human nature while digging into this stuff?

Dan Heath
I think what really captured me about this topic, because I’ve been thinking about this, I checked the other day, and literally my first Word file where I started taking notes on this upstream topic, was in 2009, so this has been on my mind a long time. And what kept me with it really involved the definition of a hero. So, when I say hero, what associations start popping to mind? It’s probably a policeman, or a firefighter, or a first responder, or a lifeguard who saves someone. It’s people who save the day, that’s a hero.

And it occurred to me at a certain point that there’s a whole another class of people who keep the day from needing to be saved. Someone invented a smarter building code that reduced the incidents of fires in buildings. And someone else consulted with lifeguards at public pools and taught them how to scan the pool in a better way and to position their chair in a smarter place. And a high school coach who’s mentoring teenagers in a way that keeps them out of trouble with the law. And these are upstream heroes.

These are people who stop emergencies from happening, and yet they hardly ever get any glory. In fact, their work may be largely invisible. We may have no idea what they did. I mean, how would we? How would we know that the consultant at the swimming pool kept a child from drowning one day? And so, that idea just captured me that there’s this whole invisible set of heroes whose identity we may never know even though they’re having a profound influence on us.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is powerful. And so, you’ve got a number of excellent tales that you’ve got some of the best story teasers on the back of your book that I’ve ever encountered, so well done. Well done.

Dan Heath
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
You and editor and team for those. So, maybe let’s just bring this to life with a little couple of those. So, tell us, all right, so there’s a school district, they had an issue with dropouts, and they did something upstream to prevent a whole lot of dropping out. How’s that story unfold?

Dan Heath
Oh, this is one of my favorites in the book. So, this is the Chicago Public School district, massive school district, I mean, this district has a $6 billion budget which is the same as the city of Seattle. So, when you talk about a difficult change environment, I mean, this is it. and if you want to hear a depressing stat, back in 1997, the graduation rate at CPS, Chicago Public Schools, was 52%. Like, if you were a student at CPS, you basically had a coin-flip’s chance of graduating. And it had been true for years.

And in a situation like that, people start to habituate to that level of success. If you were a teacher, or an administrator in this system, you’d certainly bemoan the fact that you’ve got a poor graduation rate, you regret it, but it almost comes to seem inevitable that, “Well, it’s a shame, but this is a complicated world. These kids come from difficult environments. Their K through 8 education didn’t serve them very well. And so, what are we going to do about it?”

Well, there was a point that came when they realized, “Maybe we can do something.” So, some academics, including Elaine Allensworth, figured out that there was a test they could perform in the ninth-grade year that could predict with 80% accuracy which students would graduate and which wouldn’t. And the test, I don’t mean like the SAT. All I mean is the test was, “Did the student take five full-year course credits and passed them successfully?” and, “Did they fail more than one core course?” Core course like Math or English. And if they received five full-year credits, and they didn’t fail more than one course, one was okay, but two was a real warning flag, then that meant they were off track for graduation.

And so, for the first time, it’s like they had a kind of smoke detector for dropouts, they advanced warning, they had time to do something about it. And so, this becomes a way of opening the door to changing the way the system worked. And some of the things they did, I’ll give you two examples, one was they realized some of their own policies were sabotaging kids. So, this was like the “get tough on discipline” era in schools, and it was routine at the time. For a couple of kids who shoved each other in the hallway, they’d get a two-week suspension. They just doled those out like candy.

But the research shows if you take a kid who’s kind of on the borderline, and you kick him out of school for two weeks, what happens is they come back, they’re lost, they feel bad that they’re lost, they end up failing the course, and then if they fail a couple of courses, they’re off track for graduation. It’s this absurd situation where nobody realized that by handing out a two-week suspension, they might well be dooming them to dropping out of high school, but that’s what the research showed.

The other thing is they reorganized the way that they worked. So, all of the freshmen teachers, traditionally, they would just stick to their own within the discipline. The Math teachers would meet with Math, and English with English, and so forth. Now, they formed what they called freshmen success teams where they met across departments and they would go student by student. I mean, they would be sitting around the table, literally saying, “Okay, Michael. How are his grades and his subjects right now? How has his attendance been the last couple of weeks? Have we been calling his home when he’s missing school? Can we get him some extra tutoring?” And they’re figuring out, on the fly, how to take these kids who are at the risk of being off track and getting them back on track.

And what happens is, as the years go by, and as they learned how to get ahead of these problems, how to encourage attendance, how to get extra resources for the students who need it, they start moving the needle. They start moving the needle at the freshman level. More and more students are now on track versus off track. And then, four years later, when it comes time to graduate, this early warning system pays off. And, now, the graduation rate in CPS is something like 78% or 79%. I mean, I can’t overstate the magnitude of a change that has to happen in a system like CPS to move the graduation rate by 25 points. It’s just astonishing work.

And for every student that graduates that, in an alternate reality probably would’ve dropped out without this work, their lifetime income is going to go up by $300,000 to $400,000. I mean, this is a massive, massive effort that started with the upstream notion to think, “Hey, what if we could prevent some of these kids from dropping out?”

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. So, that’s so powerful right there. It’s like, “What is the smoke detector, or the early warning system, which then, in turn, lets us prioritize and wisely concentrate resources or interventions to prevent the issue from occurring there?” So, I think that can have all kinds of applications in all kinds of settings, professionally and personally, in terms of, “What might make high-performing, high-potential employees want to drop out or exit the organization? What are some of those tests you can run?”

Dan Heath
That’s actually a great example. And I think a lot of organizations, we constantly hear about the big data revolution, and I think in many cases it’s overblown. But I think this is one case where it’s not, where what data is so powerful at doing is figuring out ways to detect that problems are coming. And I’ve spoken with a number of HR leaders that have figured out very diagnostic tests for knowing when employees are in trouble, when they’re at the risk of leaving.

I’ll give you another example on the customer side. So, LinkedIn, we all know LinkedIn, they sell a very expensive package to employers who are doing a lot of recruiting on the site, and it’s a subscription. What they figured out years ago is the way it would work is the employers would subscribe to an annual thing, and then about month 11, the sales reps would start really putting the full-court press on the customers just to make sure that they were going to renew because that’s how everybody was measured, is what’s the retention rate. And, churn, as most of you probably know, churn is a measure of how many people are not renewing. And so, churn is always what you’re fighting in a subscription business.

And so, they would send in the rescue troops in month 11 to make sure these customers are going to renew. And somebody started digging through the data, and they made a curious discovery that they could predict as early as the first four weeks of a customer’s subscription who was likely to renew and who wasn’t. And, at first, they were puzzled, they’re like, “How could we possibly know from the very start who’s going to renew and who’s not?” You would think that it would take time to figure that out. And they dug in and they realized the deal was people either got value from LinkedIn almost immediately or they never did.

So, they realized, “Aha, we’ve got to get out of the business of rescuing customers, and we’ve got to get in the business of making sure customers have a bang out first month.” And so, they put a lot of resources into onboarding customers, and they would do a lot of handholding where if you’re hiring a developer in Atlanta, they would get on the phone with you and walk you through step by step, “Okay, here’s how to define your target profile. And I’ve actually written some copy for you for emails that you can send out to prospects.”

And the effect of this work is, over a period of four or five years, if memory serves, churn rate was cut in half, even as the company’s revenue absolutely exploded. And that is an intervention that’s probably worth tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in value, simply by paying attention to, “How can we see problems before they happen?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s huge and it totally makes sense in terms of you’re getting the value or you’re not getting the value, and you can know that pretty early. So, Dan, hey, keep it coming with these stories. So, you also mentioned that there’s an online travel website, and they were able to cut 21 million customer service calls by doing something a little different with their website. What was that?

Dan Heath
This story is almost hard to believe. So, this is a story about Expedia, and in 2012, there’s a guy named Ryan O’Neill that was digging through a bunch of data, and he found something that even today I find hard to believe, which is that, at that time, for every hundred customers who booked travel, a flight, or a hotel, or rental car, whatever, 58 of the hundred would end up calling the customer support center for some kind of help.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow.

Dan Heath
Which would seem to nullify the whole point of the online travel model. It’s sort of like if you went to a gas station where you could swipe your credit card at the pump, and then 58 out of 100 times something went wrong where you had to go inside. Like, you’d be pretty irritated with that business. And so, he starts to dig in, “Well, what in the world is going on? Why are so many people calling us?” He figures out the number one reason that people are calling is to get a copy of their itinerary. That’s it. Number one. Twenty million calls were placed in 2012 of people asking for a copy of their travel itinerary, and he’s just kind of slapping himself in the forehead, and he’s thinking, “How could this happen?”

Well, there’s a good reason why it happened. I mean, Expedia is a big profitable business. It’s not like these people were ignorant or unskilled. What happened was they were organized to neglect this problem. So, there was a whole set of people whose job it was to get customers to the site, and then there’s a whole another set of people whose job it was to make sure that people who came to the site, ended up booking something, and there’s a whole another set of people whose job was to keep the website running smoothly, and a whole another set of people whose job it was to take the customers’ calls and resolve them quickly.

But if you look across this whole ecosystem and you ask, “Whose job is it to make sure customers never need to call us?” The answer was, “Nobody.” It was nobody’s job. And if that goes even worse than that, that nobody would even benefit if that were true. And so, the top executives at Expedia realized they’ve got a problem, and they formed a special taskforce and put them in a war room, and they challenged them, “Hey, let’s keep these customers from needing to call us.” That’s the shift upstream. “Rather than get more efficient at handling customer calls,” which had been the way they’ve measured themselves to-date, “let’s just keep these calls from happening.”

And the solutions came very quickly, as you’d well imagine. They gave customers ways to get their own itinerary, and they added different trees to the IVR, “Press 2 if you need a copy of your itinerary,” and they changed the way they sent the emails with itineraries so they wouldn’t get in the Spam folder. And what happens is those 20 million calls essentially vanished, they go to zero over a very short period of time.

And I think what this tells us is something interesting, which is organizations always push for specialization. We’re divided into silos, we’re pressed to specialize, and there’s good reason for that. It makes things more efficient. It makes us more productive. But it can also be a deterrent to solving really thorny complex issues because we stay in our silos, and those silos create blinders. And so, all of a sudden, really obvious questions like, “Hey, why do all these customers need to call us if we’re an online website?” It’s like it gets purged from our existence because of the way we’re organized.

And I think that’s the promise. If you’re listening right now, and you’re in a big organization, let me promise you, there are issues just like this, these silos-spanning issues, that are waiting for someone to discover them and organize a response, and that’s the upstream mindset.

Pete Mockaitis
And those are great opportunities to bring your career upstream or up the hierarchy when you identify and you get proactive, and then you make some real value happen by tackling it. That’s huge.

Dan Heath
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then we’ve heard some fun stories. Now, I want to get your view on kind of what are the fundamental principles or key questions to ask to surface these opportunities all the more readily and to not let them just sit under the radar for months and years?

Dan Heath
Yeah, let me identify, I’ve got a couple of skills that I think people can consciously build that will make them better upstream-thinkers. And the first is anytime you’re trying to prevent a problem before it happens, you’re going to be dealing with complicated systems, and you’ve got to understand the system, and, in particular, you’ve got to find some point of leverage, somewhere you can tinker with the system to get a different result.

So, in the case of Chicago Public Schools, they had this discovery that, “Hey, ninth grade is the critical time when we can take a student who’s off track and get them back on track.” So, one way to get closer to problems to identify a point of leverage is to immerse yourself in the specifics of the problem. So, I’ll give you an example. There’s an organization called the Crime Lab that’s associated with the University of Chicago, and they do a lot of research on, “What policies could potentially help reduce the crime rate?”

And so, years ago, during the forming of the Crime Lab, they were asked to work on the problem of gang violence, which is a recurring problem in Chicago. The problem there has to work on was homicide, and the lore was that the homicides were the result of gang violence.

And so, they started by questioning that premise and tried to get closer to the problem. And the way they did it was they went to the medical examiner who always writes a report on why young people died, or why anybody died, and they went through the last 200 reports of homicides of young people and they just read through the situations to train their intuition. And, yes, there were some that were the result of gangs jockeying for power or what have you, but what was far more common was a situation where some teenagers got in a fight over something stupid.

One example was a couple of groups of guys, one of the groups accused one of the guys on the other group of stealing someone’s bike, and the fight escalated. And in some places, a fight like that might’ve ended in throwing some fists. In this case, one of the kids had access to a gun and somebody got shot. And that became, what they discovered in these medical examiner reports, as they got closer to the problem, they saw this is not fundamentally about gang violence, that if they wanted to intervene to reduce the number of homicides, we got to somehow be able to speak to these situations that are normal teenage disagreements that escalate out of control.

And what they eventually did is they created a program that trained young men in high schools how to resist that urge to go nuclear when you get mad or when you get in a disagreement, to build a little bit of self-control and reflectivity in situations like that. But the way they discovered that point of leverage, which turned out to be quite successful, was by getting closer to the problem.

Another example, the same thing, that I write about in the book is there were some architects that helped design big public spaces like airports, and they’ve been asked to think about how to make those spaces more convenient and more accessible to older adults, and these were young architects. So, how do you get closer to an issue like that when you’re not in the target population? And they discovered something that’s called an age simulation suit, which is something you can wear to help you feel, not just learn about it, not just hear about it, but feel for yourself what it’s like to be older.

So, there are elbow braces that mimicked the reduced movement you get in your elbow joint. And as you age, you lose dexterity in your fingers, so they have these gloves that simulate the loss of dexterity. And they wear something called overshoes which simulate nerve loss in your feet, which makes it a little bit harder for you to perceive where the ground is. And so, they wear these age simulation suits, and they walk around DFW just to feel what it’s like to be old. And any business traveler listening to this knows DFW will make you feel old, just in general, much less without an age simulation suit.

But they start figuring out, “Hey, we need another step on the escalator because it’s really hard to get your balance when it’s moving as quickly as it is.” And they realized that there aren’t enough opportunities to take a rest, that these big hallways are intended to help people get where they need to get quickly, but older people need breaks, and there just aren’t good spots where they can put their hand on a railing or take a seat for a moment, and they realized they need some rest stops.

So, just to zoom out to the bigger issue here, what I’m saying is whatever industry you’re in, whatever role you have, there’s always going to be recurring problems in your organization. And one systematic way that you can get better at helping your organization solve those problems is to be the person who has the instinct to get closer to the problem, to go through those medical examiner reports, to put on an age simulation suit to give yourself a better instinct about what it’s like to navigate these spaces. I think that’s an upstream skill that we can all cultivate.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And I imagine the hang-up and the reason people don’t do that is they might say, “Oh, my gosh, who has time to look at 200 of these reports or to find this special suit and to go through it?” And so, I guess, in the moment, I would imagine that can feel like, “Where will I find the time?” But if you zoom out, boy, I imagine there’s huge multiples of time saved associated with doing this stuff.

Dan Heath
You have put your finger on what may be the fundamental tension of upstream thinking. And I want to tell you about a study that I think really brings this tension to life. So, a woman named Anita Tucker, who’s just a fascinating thinker, at one time she ran a frosting plant for General Mills, I believe. And now she is an organizational researcher, and, at one point, for her dissertation at Harvard, she followed around nurses. So, she shadowed them during their day, and she figured out that nurses are basically professional problem-solvers. There’s always something weird popping up that they had to deal with, and sometimes it’s small stuff, like they ran out of towels, and they had to figure out where to get a towel for a patient.

Sometimes it’s bigger stuff. Like, Anita Tucker tells a story of a nurse who was trying to check out a new mother from the hospital ready to take her baby home, but the security anklet that they put on babies had fallen off and so you can’t check out the mom without that, so they went on this frantic search, “Where is the anklet?” It turns out it was just in the baby’s bassinet. So, easy, they checked out the mother and were done.

Three hours later, the same thing happens again with a different mother, and this time they do another search, they can’t find it, and so they have to go through another set of protocols to resolve the situation, but they managed to get the mother out. And so, when Anita Tucker first encountered this story, she thought, “Hey, these are nurses being really resourceful. They’re scrappy, they manage to work around problems, they don’t let things stand in their way, they don’t go running to the boss every time something goes wrong. It’s an inspiring portrait.”

Pete Mockaitis
These were the heroes.

Dan Heath
Until you realized that what she’s describing is an environment that never learns, that never improves, because when you work around problems, and when you heroicized people who work around problems, what you’re guaranteeing is that those problems will recur.

Pete Mockaitis
Because you get glory by addressing them.

Dan Heath
Exactly. And it didn’t occur to the nurse who check out two mothers in three hours that had problems with the anklet falling off to ask, “Hey, why is this happening? What can we do to stop this from happening? What’s the root cause? How can we make sure we never have to solve this problem again?” And I want to be clear here, I’m not throwing stones at nurses. I think that this study could’ve been done on any profession that it would’ve come down to the same conclusion, which is our lives are so busy and so full of emergencies and issues to be dealt with that we get in this trap of, “Let’s just get through it. Let’s just work around. Let’s figure out how to get by.” But what we have to realize is that is a trap. When we work around problems every day, we guarantee ourselves to have to deal with them again tomorrow.

And so, when you said, what it feels like in the moment is, “Oh, my God, where am I going to find time to go through to 200 medical examiner reports?” that’s exactly the issue, is in the short term, it is extra work, it is stepping outside of that cycle of workarounds, but it’s basically the only ticket out of that self-perpetuating cycle of firefighting. And that’s something, that trap of firefighting, is something that I call in the book tunneling. It’s actually a term from some psychologist in a book called “Scarcity.”

But I love that mental image of tunneling, that that’s the trap we get in where we kind of lose our peripheral vision and all we’re doing is making our way forward, “How can I get through these problems as quickly as possible to get onto the next set?” And we start to lose sight of the big questions, which is, “Is this tunnel going the right way? Is there an easier way to get where we’re trying to go? Are we even pursuing the right goals?” When you’re in the tunnel, the only real direction is forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and that totally connects and resonates. Like, even just biochemically, it seems like, “Okay, all right, my back against the wall. We got to hustle. We got to hurry. Let’s do, do, do, go, go, go,” and then it’s that vicious cycle.

Dan Heath
It is. And I empathize with the nurses because what are they suppose to do? I mean, honestly. So, the mother is trying to get checked out, they can’t find the anklet. What would we advise of the nurse in that moment? Is she suppose to conduct a root-cause analysis of the circumference of the anklets and contact the manufacturer and talk about product improvements? It seems absurd. It’s almost like we can’t envision another reality other than the tunneling reality.

But just to give you a feel for a way out of the tunnel, what many health systems have done is start to hold standing meetings, sometimes called safety huddles, where a bunch of nurses and doctors and staffers get together in the morning, it might be a 20-minute meeting, and they talk about, “Okay, what near misses did we have yesterday where someone was almost hurt or we almost gave somebody the wrong medication? What can we learn from that? How can we improve our processes to make sure it doesn’t happen again?” And then they look forward to that day, “What’s coming today that’s more complex than usual that we should think through?”

And I think that’s a perfect example of how you can escape the tunnel, even if it’s just for a 20-minute meeting, because that’s the forum where that nurse could’ve said, “You know, something weird happened yesterday. We had two mothers with the same problem happened to.” And that’s a meeting where you could deputize a subgroup to work on that and figure out what was going on and solve it. So, I think it may be too much to ask of humanity to figure out how to get out of our tunnels because it’s such a powerful instinct. But if we can even escape them for short periods, we can make much smarter choices.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love that. And so, maybe while we’re just sort of imagining workplaces at large and recurring problems that may have the potential to be solved once and for all, what are a couple of things that just leap to mind for you that we should have our eyes open toward as professionals?

Dan Heath
One thing, I think, has to do with a sense of ownership. So, in the book I talk about what’s curious about downstream actions is that they’re often obligatory. If someone shows up at the hospital having a heart attack, the surgeon can’t opt out of that work. Or if a preschooler has an accident, the daycare worker can’t opt out of the diaper change, right? When there’s a problem that presents, we have to deal with it. Versus, upstream problems, curiously, are sometimes voluntary. People have to step up and say, “This problem, it wasn’t something that I created but I’m going to be the one to fix it.” And that’s something that relates to accountability.

I’ll give you an example from the work world. I talked to an administrator named Jeanie Forrest who works in the Yale Law School. And when I talked with her, she was having this staff issue that she was dealing with. So, there were two staffers, these are disguised for obvious reasons. The boss, let’s call her Barbara, and the director, we’ll call Dawn. So, Dawn had filed a complaint about Barbara, her boss, for belittling her and kind of undermining her in certain situations, and this had landed on Jeanie Forrest’s desk. So, she asked the two women to come in, and Jeanie Forrest said, “You know, this situation is my fault. I had heard rumors that you two weren’t getting along, and I sensed it myself. And you know what I did? I just stuck my head in the sand and I thought, ‘Well, maybe this will go away.’ So, that’s on me. This is my fault.”

And then she turned it around and she said, “I want each of you to tell the story of this situation as if you’re the only one in the world responsible.” And at first, the women had a hard time honoring the spirit of that request, so Barbara, the boss, said, “Well, every time I ask something of you, you shut me down and you give me weird body language.” And Jeanie Forrest said, “Barbara, that sounded awful lot like you’re blaming Dawn. Can you try that again?” And Barbara said, “Well, you know, I could’ve done a better job explaining. I thought that you should just accept what I said and I dismissed your questions. But I could’ve done a better job being patient.”

And Dawn, for her part, said, “Well, I just accepted your huffing and puffing, but the truth was I just really didn’t understand, and I should’ve made it clear. Hey, I‘m not being resistant. I just don’t understand what you want. Can you help me?” And so, they end the meeting on this kind of detente and they tried to change their relationship. And I emailed Jeanie Forrest six weeks later just to see what have happened with this, and she wrote back and said, “They’re working together productively and cheerfully, it’s a little insane.”

And what I want to highlight about this is I think it’s a kind of metaphor that so many times in life, we have the sense that the problems are happening to us, that we are the inheritors or the victims of problems, but this reframing thing that Jeanie Forrest did of telling the story as if we’re the only ones responsible, it helped all three of the people involved realize, “Hey, we have agency here. Like, we could’ve made different choices, and we can make different choices going forward. We have influence here. We have power.” And I think what that means for upstream efforts is, often, we may find ourselves voluntarily taking charge of something that we had nothing to do with causing.

I was talking to some people from a large software company who were organizing a taskforce on sexual harassment. And it wasn’t a problem of their making. They weren’t the harassers, they had nothing to do with the environment. But they said, “This is a problem that needs solving. What if we sign up to be the people who try to solve it?” And that kind of enlightened volunteerism is something I find very, very inspiring about upstream work, and it goes back to that notion of upstream heroes, the people whose work can be invisible even though it has profound impact.

Pete Mockaitis
Dan, this is so much good stuff. Tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Dan Heath
The final thing I might mention is, and this is something I feel you could carry through with you your whole career, is to be cognizant of the downside of measurement and metrics. We live in a measurement-obsessed culture, especially in business these days. And measurement is wonderful, it makes us more efficient, it gives us clear targets, but there’s always a downside to measurement, and much of that downside has to do with gaming and the way that measurement alters our behaviors in ways that are sometimes good and sometimes bad.

So, as a concrete example of the bad side, there was a policy passed in the UK for hospitals where they required hospitals to see patients in emergency rooms within four hours of their arrival, so enlightened intent, “We want to make sure that patients are seen, that these crazy wait times, 12 hours, 16 hours, would go away forever, and that we force hospitals to reinvent their processes.” So, very enlightened. What happens is a lot of hospitals started doing this thing where ambulances would bring patients and stay in the parking lot until they thought the patients were within four hours of being seen, and then they would rush them inside so that they can meet the four-hour rule, right? A perversion of the intent of the policy even though they technically met the statistical definition of it.

And that’s something that you’re going to see in your career again and again and again and again every time there is a sales incentive or a bonus offered. You can bet it’s going to do some good and some bad. But I’ll tell you, most of your colleagues are going to be woefully naïve and think only about the good side, and you can be the one that says, “Hey, let’s kick the tires a little bit here.” One test you can run is what I call the lazy bureaucrat test, and that is if someone wanted to ace the measures or incentives that we’re setting out with the least effort possible, what would that look like?

Or another one you might call the defiling the mission test, which is imagine that we ace all of these measures that we’re setting, and yet our work ends up harming the mission, the reason we’re all here. What would that look like? Like, in the case of the ambulances waiting in the parking lot is a great example of defiling the mission. You’ve aced the measures but defiled the point of healthcare which is to pay attention to patients and their needs. So, I just want to leave that as a provocation that you can be the person whose attention to the dark side of measurement keeps your organization out of a lot of nasty traps.

[39:03]

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, Dan, I can’t resist now. You dropped a couple test on us and those were so good. Do you have more that you can reveal?

Dan Heath
Yeah, actually, there’s another one that I’ll steal from Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, and that is he said, “Any time you’ve got a quantity measurement”’ so you’re paying people, maybe you’re paying the janitorial crew based on square footage cleaned, or you’re paying your data-entry people based on the quantity of documents entered.” He said, “Any time you got a quantity measurement, you’ve got to counterbalance it with a quality measurement,” because what you’ve got to realize is if you incentivized people to clean more floors, what comes part and parcel with that is they’re going to do a worse job per square foot in the service of getting to a larger area.

Or they’re going to go so fast on the data entry that they’re making lots of mistakes for the sake of getting through more documents. So, the way to balance the scales is to combine quantity with quality, where quality might be some kind of spot checking of how good the rooms looked after they’re cleaned, or with data entry, to make sure that there’s some metric that specifies how good the precision was between the entry and the original document.

And ever since I became aware of that test from Andy Grove, I’ve started seeing situations where really smart people put it into place. Like, even in the police force in L.A. For years, police were adopting these metrics of reduce crime, reduce crime, reduce crime, and that leads to things like stop and frisk. Stop and frisk is effective at reducing crime but it has this just grotesque side consequence of subjecting a lot of innocent people to abusive treatment. And so, they’ve learned to counterbalance the focus on reducing crime with a measure of community trust, “How much do you trust the police? Do you feel like they’re doing a good job looking out for safety?” And that’s a beautiful way to kind of restore order or a sense of balance to the work. So, that’s another one I would add to the quiver.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good.
Well, then could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Dan Heath
My favorite quote, this is from a guy named Paul Batalden, who’s a healthcare expert, he said, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” And that quote has become just like a brain worm for me. It’s so enlightening because it tells you in situations like Chicago Public Schools that at one time failed 48% of its students. It tells you the way CPS is setup is designed to fail half its students. So, if we’re going to get different results, we have to change the system.

But I think it’s also true in our own lives. I think that’s what’s so powerful about this quote, is if you find yourself perpetually dealing with the same dissatisfactions or the same frustrations, it’s a sign that the system is setup wrong. How do you change the system? We can’t just hope our way to a different result.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Dan Heath
This is definitely not my favorite book but I thought, in the wake of Clay Christensen’s recent passing, he wrote a wonderful book called “How Will You Measure Your Life?” that I think is a great excuse for all of us, just to be self-referential here in this podcast, to step out of the tunnel and think about the big picture and where we’re headed, and “Are we making the right micro choices to get the kind of macro results we want in our lives?”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Dan Heath
Let me give you a small one. There’s an online tool called Toggl, and it has turned me into a time-tracker, and that’s what it is, it’s a time-tracking software that allows you to just see how you’re spending your time and devoted to categories. And I’ll tell you, I am not like a natural personal productivity person, okay? I am not the kind of person who puts labels on file folders, so this was unnatural for me. So, take heart if you’re a naturally-unorganized person. And it has really changed my day-to-day work. It’s made me much more cognizant of how I spend my time, and I’ve gotten strategic about it. Like, I’ll actually, from time to time, just do a check-in and see, “Am I putting hours against the things that are most important to me?” And that little tool made it a lot easier.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite habit?

Dan Heath
I’m going to throw out my coffee shop habit. And, look, I know everybody’s going to have a different one. But something about going to the same environment really brings out the best work for me, and I think it’s because it’s just like everything in the environment at the coffee shop now is a trigger or a cue to me to get into writing mode. It’s like it helps me get over that hump because I have so many associations with the look of the place, and the smell of the place, and the taste of the coffee, and it’s like my sensory environment is helping me replicate that state of getting into thoughtful writing mode.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget that you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, they quote it back to you often?

Dan Heath
With this new book, what I found that resonates with people is this idea that the need for heroism is usually evidence of systems failure. If you think about we celebrate a lifeguard who jumped into the pool at the YMCA and saved a drowning child, obviously we want to celebrate that lifeguard, he may saved a life, but the need for them to jump in the pool and do the saving, maybe evidence that something was wrong with the way things were operated. Was the lifeguard chair too far from the pool and they have blind spots? Or was the lifeguard on their phone? Or was the lifeguard looking at something interesting happening in the pool and they had dropped their discipline of scanning the pool every 10 seconds? So, I think we should distrust heroics in a way, that if we’re repeatedly relying on heroics to get the job done, then maybe something bigger is at stake.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Dan Heath
Come visit me at UpstreamBook.com and there’s resources on the site that are free, there’s a lot more about the book if you’re interested, so, yeah, come there.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Dan Heath
I would say in the next week, let me challenge you to find a way to get out of the tunnel that you’re in, whether that is just taking an hour off of work and going and sitting in a coffee shop with your phone off and thinking about the big picture. Whatever that looks like for you, escape the tunnel and think about how you might knock down some of those recurring problems and irritants in your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Dan, this has been a treat. Thank you. I wish you tons of luck with “Upstream” and all your adventures.

Dan Heath
Thanks so much, Pete. It’s been a real interesting conversation.