Upstream: HOW TO SOLVE PROBLEMS BEFORE THEY HAPPEN
Dan Heath has written the book that anyone serious about bringing about change should read.
I’d hope that every Commissioner, official, Politicians, NGO, and Foundation would read it.
You’d think that we would focus our resources on preventing problems, rather than cleaning up the impacts. It seems that as a species we mainly.
We spend a lot more money on medical treatment than is spent on public health and preventing getting ill in the first place.
There are some exceptions. We brush our teeth twice a day to prevent tooth decay!
Over 250 pages and 13 chapters, Dan Heath, helps explain why not only most public policy intervention is bound to fail, but that often it is going after the wrong thing.
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This is a tough message for me. I’ve spent many years working on new legislation to change things for the better. This book explains why a lot of those laws do not deliver on their promises. We focus on firefighting. Treating the symptoms, and not the cause.
Dan Heath shows that are few incentives to deal with prevention (root causes), so few people (organisations, agencies, governments, NGOs or academic) focus on it.
It seems that most organisations just deal with solving their small part of the problem, but they find it hard to nigh impossible to work together to solve the “real problem”.
If you want to bring about lasting, real and positive policy change, it takes around 10 years, give or take two years. Few funders have that bandwidth to support that prolonged effort. Many look for a three-year window of change. Politicians and officials will bulk at the idea of the 10-year commitment. Ecosystem improvement takes around 50 years.
Heath provides some helpful checklists on how to bring about lasting change
How change happens
The book provides solutions. The case of the campaign to deal with the ozone hole caused by CFCs is useful:
- ” Creating urgency
- Deadline supplies artificial urgency to a task. Note with Love all 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 data for the bus. If you don’t do these things, don’t get done.
- He became a vocal advocate for action, against his training and instincts, stressing the human consequences of ozone depletion, even to our audiences who were hostile to their findings.
- Get it in front of public consciousness. TV show ‘all in the family’ in 1975 covered it.
- What also helps spread urgency was the term ozone hole, which is familiar today but actually was not embraced until the mid-1980s decade after nature publication. It made it easier to reach out to the public. Using a simple keyword that you could describe it by.
- Handling potential opponents to international action.
- No one lost out. DuPont supported it if all global competitors face the same ban would not feel disadvantaged.
- Secure political support. Margaret Thatcher supported the move.
- Get the rich to lead. Margaret Thatcher got the industrialised countries to contribute most to that of the necessary resources.
- International negotiators were accomplishing was a kind of orchestration of urgency: supporters needed to feel more urgency and opponents needed to feel less loss.
- Opposition came from the US interior Sec Donald hurdle was quoted as critically internal debates about the proposals, suggesting instead of the CSC ban, people could start wearing hats, suntan lotion and sunglasses. The leaking of his remarks was important.
- A media firestorm followed. The secretary recanted. Reagan supported,
- Political support. President Reagan, initially a sceptic, eventually became a believer in the work. 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 it does happen, going to be a catastrophe, so let’s take out an insurance policy.
- I think it helps to contemplate the world we have avoided. By 2030 we will have avoided millions of new skin cancer cases per year, with a number that could only grow.
- The world avoided is an evocative phrase. The part of the world avoids it is a difficult one because of the barriers with same: problem buying blindness (I don’t see the problem), lack of ownership (the problem is not mine to fix), and tunnelling (I can’t deal with that right now).”
Leaders for the ‘world avoided’
There are leaders who fought for the ‘world avoided’. They ask the following questions:
- How we unite the right people?
- How will you change the system?
- Where can you find a point of leverage?
- How will you get early warning of the problem?
- How will you know you’re succeeding?
- How will you avoid doing harm?
- Who will pay for what does not happen?
How to Avoid Gaming the System
When people are asked to solve problems, they often look to game, that is cheat, the system.
There are five tests to run to know if you are pre-gaming:
- “Test 1: The rising tides test: Imagine that we succeed on our short-term measures w. What else might explain the success, other than our own efforts, and are we tracking those factors?
- Test 2: The misalignment test: Imagine that we’ve eventually w learned that our short-term measures to not reliably predict success on our ultimate mission. What would allow us to sniff out that this alignment as early as possible, and alternative short-term measures might provide potential replacements?
- Test 3: lazy bureaucrat test: if someone wanted to succeed on these measures with the least effort possible, what would they do?
- Test 4: The defining the mission test: imagine that years from now, have succeeded brilliantly according to our short-term measures, yet we have actually undermined our long-term mission. What happened?
- Test 5: The unintended consequences test: what if we succeed at our mission – not just the short-term measures but the mission itself – it causes negative unintended consequences that outweigh the valuable work?
Making the World a better Place
There is a useful section on the need for humility and some questions to ask yourself before you look to improve things.
“You just need to be aware that whatever the plan you have this, it’s going to be wrong. So, if you’re designing systems to make the world better, the advice is the only way you’re going to know its wrong is by having these feedback mechanisms and these measurement systems in place.”
Four Questions Before You Start
Some questions to guide a decision about whether or not to stage an upstream intervention are:
- ” Has an intervention been tried before that similar to one we are contemplating, so that we can learn from its results in second-order effects?
- It is our intervention triable -can we experiment in a small way first, so negative, consequences would be limited if our ideas are wrong?
- Can we create closed feedback loops so that we can improve quickly?
- Is it easy to reverse or undo our intervention if it turns out we’ve unwittingly done harm?
If the answer to any of these questions is no, we should think very carefully before proceeding”
I doubt that there are many proposals coming out from governments that pass that threshold.
The Cobra Effect – Plastic Bags
The cobra effect is when an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse. These 2nd and 3rd order consequences are common.
Heath contends that upstream work hinges on humility. He points out that the action trying to rid the environment of plastic led to more plastic.
He contends that experimentation leads to learning, which leads to better experiments. Bruno Leoni, in Freedom and the Law, made a similar point.
He calls for a brave approach, one where there is “the need not to bluff and not to freeze but to learn…. it is hard, the way learning. Society, where learning all stop think of all the ingredients required even to analyse a policy like the plastic bag bear: computer systems, data collection, the network infrastructure, not to mention ecosystems people know how to structure experiments that can shed light on the city and statewide policies. This infrastructure of evidence existed for a mere blip in human history. When it comes to upstream thinking which is starting to get in a game.”
Chicago banning Plastics Bags- A Case study
Heath outlines how Chicago refined their approach to dealing with plastic bags.
“In 2016, Chicago scrapped the plastic bag ban that had led to the cobra effect. The city council replaced it with a 7% tax on all paper and plastic checkout bags that started in early 2017. You know what? It’s working pretty well. The research team lead by economist Tatiana Homonoff collected data from several large grocery stores. Before the tax, about 8 out of 10 customers used a paper or plastic bag. After the tax, that dropped to roughly 5 out of 10”.
He concludes ” Chicago’s leaders tried an experiment by banning lightweight plastic bags; it failed at first, but they knew why it failed, so they tried a different experiment, which worked better, and hopefully no city on earth has to repeat the dumb version of the ban again. It’s slow and tedious and frustrating, but we collectively getting smarter about systems.”
Dan Heath has provided a framework and checklists to prevent problems, not just deal with cleaning up. We can only hope that Commissioners, officials, politicians, NGOs, and Foundations read this book and take on board the lessons.