Returning to Australia after nearly 20 years overseas, I am struck by the unrelenting focus on short-term gain as opposed to long-term strategy. In Australia we are experiencing the consequences of a focus on what Dan Heath (2020) refers to as “downstream thinking”. These consequences include a broken medical system, especially in regional Australia; a worrying teacher shortage in public education; soaring energy prices on the east coast of Australia as a result of a shortage that does not reflect production but the pursuit of profit by big business; and weather events indicative of a climate crisis.
Dan Heath (2020) in his book Upstream gets to the heart of what drives our short-term thinking and I think it is a must read for all leaders. It is incumbent on leaders in schools to model this way of thinking for the sake of our students now and into the future.
Upstream thinking is really quite a simple process and it makes sense. However, it takes incredible courage to embark on this path. Heath describes upstream efforts in the following way: “as those intended to prevent problems before they happen or, alternatively, to systematically reduce the harm caused by those problems.” (Heath, 6) He goes on to say that “a tell-tale sign of upstream work is that it involves systems thinking.” (7) Heath prefers the “word upstream to preventative and proactive because … you don’t head Upstream, as in a specific destination. You head Upstream as in a direction.” (7) In this sense, working upstream means that we focus on the process and a constant analysis of the problem to identify the optimal point of intervention. By contrast, downstream work, by its very nature, tends to be reactive: we see a problem and we deal with it. It is much more destination focused: I am working towards a specific solution that works at this point in time. Whereas upstream work involves both a close analysis of the immediate problem as well as a deeper look into the causes of the problem to get to the root of the issue within the system itself.
An example within education would be discipline in relation to work that is not completed by a student. The downstream work is the immediate consequence: a detention, the docking of marks for lateness or the refusal to mark the late work when it is submitted. Here the problem is the late submission of work and the downstream solution is to ensure an immediate punishment to deter the student, and others, from submitting late work again. It becomes about upholding standards and not letting students get away with missing deadlines.
An upstream approach might instead look like this: a student submits an assignment late (or not at all) so the teacher sets up a time to have a “prevention interview” with the student (source). This interview involves “listening with intention” so that the teacher can better understand the barriers the student was facing which may have led to the late/non submission. The interview begins with building rapport with the student and taking the time to get to know him/her/them beyond the subject outcomes and the assignment itself. The first half of the interview involves the teacher understanding when and where the student feels most successful, particularly with organisation and meeting deadlines. The goal is to ask the right questions that create safety, openness and deep reflection on the part of the student. The last part of the interview tackles the problem at hand: the non-submission of work. The time invested in relationship building and reflective prompts reap huge rewards as the student reflects on what didn’t work this time round. It could be that the student didn’t really understand the task or that the student has executive functioning challenges and so time management and prioritisation are a real struggle. It could be that at home things are hard and the student just found it difficult to have the time and space to focus.
In this scenario, the teacher might still need to follow school policy and not accept the late work, but the teacher can agree to reviewing the work that has been completed and giving feedback. More importantly, the teacher has a deeper understanding of this student and the problem itself so upstream work now become a possibility. The teacher can now work with this student – and a broader team of educators – to put upstream strategies in place to help the student tackle the challenges he/she/they are facing. It won’t be a quick fix – upstream work never is – but now the teacher is working alongside the student as an ally. It might be that the student needs interventions that help with time management or it might be that more flexibility is needed because of what is happening at home. With clear goals for learning and concrete strategies in place that get to the heart of the issue, the student can see a way forward and knows that the adults want to understand who they are and how they learn to help them fulfil their responsibilities as a learner.
Reading through that scenario, it all seems so simple and the outcomes are undeniably positive. So why is it that upstream work (getting the to the heart of the problem) is so hard? Why is is that as educators we often turn to the quick fix solutions (e.g. detention or deducting marks for late work)?
Heath (2020, 19) identifies the three barriers to upstream work:
- Problem blindness
- A Lack of Ownership
- Tunnelling
Problem blindness occurs when we have become so used to a problem that we no longer see it as one: it is an inevitable part of life. It involves perceiving the problem as ” a regrettable but inevitable condition of life” (29). If we return to the problem with the student who submits work late, in schools we often accept late submission of work as an inevitable condition of school life. We expect it will happen, put rules in place to deal with it when it happens, but don’t always invest the time in understanding why it is happening (for individuals and cohorts) and intervening in the system. As Heath says, “To succeed upstream, leaders must: detect the problem early, target leverage points in complex systems, find reliable ways to measure success, pioneer new ways of working together, and embed their successes in to systems to give them permanence.” (29)
A lack of ownership comes when nobody sees the problem as theirs to solve. In the example of late work, it might be that the teacher sees it as his/her/their responsibility to clearly communicate deadlines for work and the student’s responsibility to meet those deadlines. If the student is struggling to do so, then another teacher picks that up or the parents have to help their child get organised. Understanding the why is not the teacher’s role; clear communication about what is due is the role of the teacher as well as letting the parents know when a deadline is not met.
In this case, nobody is owning the work of understanding the student. Heath (41) writes that “upstream work is chosen, not demanded. … if the work is not chosen by someone, the underlying problem won’t get solved”. The immediate problem of late work demands a response from the teacher, which occurs as an email home and the docking of marks or the refusal to assess the work. The teacher has to make a conscious choice to work upstream with the student and if he/she/they don’t see this as their work, it won’t happen. The teacher might think: “this is not my problem to fix. I communicated the deadline, contacted the parents and my immediate line manager, so I have done my job”.
Problem blindness comes because we are habituated to the problem and accept it as inevitable. Lack of ownership occurs because we don’t feel empowered to solve the problem because we don’t see ourselves as part of the problem itself and having the skills to plot a way forward.
We move into tunnelling when our time, energy and resources are scarce. Tunnelling is adopting a narrow rather than expansive perspective and focusing on short-term, reactive thinking rather than longer-term strategic and systems thinking. When we are overwhelmed, we drown out the myriad of problems facing us and narrow in on those we can solve in the here and now. The problem with this as a pattern of behaviour is that we bounce from one problem to the next, looking only forward, and don’t take the time to breath and look beyond the immediate to longer-term, sustainable solutions.
In the case of late work, it might be that there is a reporting deadline around the corner for the teacher. There is no time to mark late work and write reports, let alone find time to do preventative interviews with students. It is all systems go towards the end of term and it is about survival! Tunnelling involves focusing on solving a discrete issue and not looking beyond the immediate problem.
The challenge with tunnelling is that the problem doesn’t go away. Next time a piece of assessment is due, the student might once again miss the deadline. The teacher will once again enforce the rules, inform the parents and the cycle continues. The bigger issue remains and intensifies. The teacher is now not certain if the student has a sound grasp of the key concepts and skills. The student is falling behind and not learning. Gaps could emerge in the students core skills, and frustrations will arise on all sides. The problem just gets bigger and bigger.
Tunnelling is a systemic problem in schools. As Heath writes, “escaping the tunnel can be difficult, because organisational structure resists it.” (63) In schools we are often driven by cycles of accountability in terms of reporting on results and completing standardised tests. We encourage a laser like focus on “getting good results” and less on the time it takes to build relationships with students and have the conversations that matter (such as prevention interviews). If we are constantly looking ahead to ensuring our students get the best NAPLAN, HSC or IB results “we never stop to ask whether we are going in the right direction.” (Heath, 63)
The antidote to these barriers to Upstream Thinking? It is really quite simple and involves us asking ourselves the right questions:
- How will we bring the right people together and build a shared sense of purpose? In essence “To succeed in upstream efforts, you need to surround the problem. Meaning you need to attract people who can address all the key dimensions of the issue. …. then you need to organise all those people’s efforts. And you need an aim that’s compelling and important – a shared goal that keeps them contributing even in stressful situations…” (82) To get this group moving upstream, we need to ensure they are asking the right questions and engaging with the right data. This is data focused on what is happening upstream, not short-term downstream data. Interrogating the data and using it to evaluate the progress of the team becomes part of the meaningful collaboration the team needs to do to drive upstream work. To return to the student referenced above, this means a multidisciplinary team seeking to understand the student holistically and working with carers/parents to build a complete picture of what is happening at an individual level. It also means looking at what is happening across the grade level and interrogating the systems itself (the policies, practices and procedures) to ensure they are fit for purpose and centring student learning and agency, not just meeting a pragmatic need to provide student achievement data for reports.
- How will we change the system? Heath writes that “every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets”(100). Upstream efforts are ultimately about changing the system. If we go back to the student and the late assessment issue, the system is all the structures around the student, including the school’s approach to late assessment as well as the student’s home life which may (or may not) be contributing to the student’s struggle to meet deadlines.
- How will we get early warning of the problem? This is an obvious one: we need to know when an upstream issue is emerging before it becomes a major issue. This is where downstream problems are helpful – they can be early warning indicators. But we need to see the problem sooner than an assessment being submitted late. What are the early warning indictors for a teachers that a student won’t meet the deadline and what interventions can be put in place early on to prevent the problem from emerging in the first place? This circles back to changes in the system. It might be that the system itself is flawed and doesn’t enable those early interventions and so the cycle of downstream effort continues because the system itself is perpetuating the problem. Hence, the student continues to submit late work and a punitive approach to late assessment continues to be enforced. There is a learned helplessness that the teacher experiences as this point because the system is not supporting sustained and meaningful change.
- How will we know we are succeeding? What will be our indicators of success? To know we have succeeded we have to be using the right data and that multidisciplinary team is key to defining what this data might look like. Solutions to upstream problems are complex and so “the solutions are systemic not personal” (Heath, 109). As a result, “success happens when the right things happen by default – not because of individual passion or heroism”. This means that the evidence of success needs to be equally complex, systemic in nature and multidimensional. For instance, if we only use standardised testing to determine that student-based interventions are working, we’ll invite downstream thinking and solutions. It takes courage to have indicators of success that are not easily quantifiable.
- How will we avoid doing harm? This is key and involves reflecting on upstream interventions that have been been tried before, piloting ideas and generating effective feedback loops and then being agile enough to change and shift direction. Upstream work requires humility because of its complexity, the lack of immediate and tangible results in the short-term, and because there are always unintended consequences. The latter exists for downstream work as well of course, and the key to focusing upstream is anticipating issues and having the courage to apply early interventions to re-direct the change process itself if the success we intend is not happening. This will help minimise any potential harm.
- How will we pay for what does not happen? This is crucial because to focus on upstream work we have to put aside some reactive, downstream work that can feel urgent. Asking for money for upstream work can be tricky because the benefits are not always apparent. Downstream work, by contrast, can see immediate benefits. A different school example could be asking for professional learning money to send staff on an IB Diploma training course so they understand the assessment task better. For most leaders in IB schools this is a “no brainer” because if a teacher doesn’t understand the IB assessment task, the risk is immediate and high. By contrast, as educational leaders we will equivocate about sending a group of middle level leaders on a training course about upstream thinking in schools. We know it will generate great ideas, but little in the way of immediate change. Instead it might well lead to difficult systemic questions and requests for more time release to do upstream work! In schools we need to be ready to make this investment if we want deep, systemic change that will transform the experience of our students.
One reason we find it so hard to live in the space of upstream thinking is because it takes time and the results are not immediate or always tangible. As human beings we have learnt to be results and short-term focused – technology and most especially social media exacerbates this. Therefore we need to deliberately and systematically slow down our thinking, ask the questions that need to be asked, seek out allies in our upstream journey, and create the time and space (physical, psychological and emotional) to focus upstream in our organisations. We also need to empower our allies on the journey and give them the time they need to make the interventions that will matter now and into the future, such as prevention interviews. To paraphrase Greta Thunberg, we need to stop stealing the dreams and childhoods of the young people we serve with our “empty words” and instead model upstream thinking and action.
Works Cited:
Benson, J. 2021. “Prevention interviews: Listening with Intention“. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/prevention-interviews-listening-with-intention
Heath, D. 2020. Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before they Happen. New York: Avid Reader.
Thunberg, G. 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-u-n-climate-action-summit
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