Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by author Dan Heath. Dan is a senior fellow at Duke University's Case Center, which focuses on social justice entrepreneurship. And he is, of course, the author of four New York Times bestselling books, including Made to Stick, Switch, Decisive, and The Power of Moments. And we're here today to talk about his new book, Upstream, the quest to solve problems before they happen.

[00:41] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:43] SPEAKER_01:

Dan, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:45] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you, Justin. Great to be here.

[00:46] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I'm so excited to talk about this concept of dealing with upstream problems, because I think particularly in education, as well as in other sectors like healthcare, often we're dealing with the downstream consequences of problems that we know have upstream routes. I wonder if you could take us into that upstream kind of metaphor and what some of the dimensions of the challenge of solving problems upstream are.

[01:13] SPEAKER_00:

So this is a parable that's often attributed to a guy named Irving Zola, a sociologist, and it goes like this. You and a friend are having a picnic on the bank of a river and you've laid out your picnic blanket. You're just about to start your meal when you hear a shout from the direction of the river. And you turn around, you look over your shoulder and it's a child thrashing about in the water, apparently drowning. So you instinctively dive in, you grab the child, you swim to shore and no sooner have you saved them and your adrenaline starting to recede, then you hear another shout. You look back, it's a second child also seeming to be drowning.

[01:50]

So back in the water you go, you fish them out. No sooner have you gotten them to the shore than you hear two shouts. There's two kids in the river now and so begins a kind of revolving door of rescue and it's making you increasingly fatigued and just as you're starting to lose hope, you see your friend swimming toward the shore and steps out as though to leave you alone and you say, hey, where are you going? I can't keep up with this by myself. And your friend says, I'm going upstream to tackle the guy who's throwing all these kids in the river. And I think that in a nutshell, is what this book is about.

[02:26]

That so many times in our work, in our lives, even in the nation as a whole, and I say this right in the thick of the coronavirus scare, we find ourselves in this cycle of reaction. We respond to emergencies, we put out fires, we fish those kids out of the drowning river every day, but we never go upstream to address the sources of the problems we find ourselves fighting. And in the book, Upstream, what I'm doing is making a case that we need to shift more of our focus, more of our time, more of our resources upstream for the sake of preventing problems before they happen.

[03:06] SPEAKER_01:

And so often in education, as you said, we do get focused on solving that downstream problem because it's the one right in front of us, right? We see the kid floating by, we jump in, there's an immediate benefit to that swift action. And that swift action is so all consuming that often we don't feel like we really have the bandwidth to go upstream. And especially in education where the upstream causes of some of the biggest challenges we face quickly start to move outside of what we perceive as our scope or our realm. And I was making a connection to the Expedia story that you share in the book where the customer service department had gotten really good at dealing with customer calls. You know, customer calls, they have a problem, the customer gets help quickly, the call is ended quickly, the customer is satisfied.

[03:59]

So everybody feels great about that. And yet somebody did something that identified a problem and really started to fix that problem. Take us into the Expedia story, if you would. How did leaders at Expedia realize they had a problem?

[04:14] SPEAKER_00:

They realized they had a problem when a guy named Ryan O'Neill went through the data and discovered a jaw-dropping statistic, which is that for every hundred customers, this is back in 2012, by the way, for every hundred customers who booked a flight or a hotel or a car, Fifty-eight of them ended up calling the call center for some kind of help. I mean almost six out of ten people, which of course nullifies the whole point of having an online self-serve travel site. So Ryan and his colleagues are like, what the hell is going on here? And they dig into the data. What they find is that the number one reason people are calling is to get a copy of their itinerary. That's it.

[04:54]

To get a copy of their itinerary. 20 million calls were logged in 2012. That's like every man, woman, and child in Florida calling Expedia in one year to get a copy of their itinerary. And so they convene a war room, a cross functions to work on this. And the solutions are very simple. They range from setting up a provision on the IVR to deal with people.

[05:16]

Press 2 if you're calling for a copy of your itinerary. They can change the way they send the itinerary so so many of them don't end up in people's spam folders and so forth. It's not a difficult technical challenge. But for me, the real import of this story is how do you get in that situation? I mean, as you said, up until that point, they had been measuring their call center folks on how quickly can you resolve customers' issues and how happy are the customers when you're finished? So can you go from three minutes to two and a half minutes to two and a quarter minutes?

[05:48]

Can you nudge up customer satisfaction levels. But they had stopped asking an even more important and basic question, which was, can we stop customers from needing to call us at all? And what they did once this issue was on their radar was they began to work across silos because ultimately this was a problem that was created by organizational structure. And what I mean is you've got the marketing team at Expedia whose job it is to get people to the site, to choose Expedia over hotels.com or Google Travel or whatever. And then you've got the product team whose job it is to create such an easy, fluid experience that people are funneled down to a transaction.

[06:32]

And then you've got the tech team whose job it is to make sure things are humming smoothly. And then you've got the call center people who, as I said, are measured on time to resolution. And if you look across all these silos... And you ask, whose job is it to prevent those calls from ever happening?

[06:48]

The answer is nobody. And in fact, it's even worse than that, that no one even stood to benefit if the calls began to go down. It would not have gotten anyone a raise or anyone a bonus if they had diminished the number of calls. Just to cap off the story, what eventually happened is essentially all 20 million of those calls vanished once they paid attention to this. There were other kinds of calls they received that were a bit more complicated, but those 20 million calls, that's just gravy. I mean, at $5 a piece, that's a $100 million solution.

[07:21]

And to come into the world of education, I mean, every sector in the world has a comparable silo problem. And I imagine some principals listening to this are nodding their heads right now. It's just the way organizations are designed, right? We push people to specialize. We push them into disciplines. We push them into business units and and specialization creates efficiency that's why we do it it makes people faster it makes people more productive but it also defies our ability to solve really thorny problems that require lots of pieces of the puzzle to be assembled at the same time so let's let's get to the villain of our story here and and this is definitely i think going to provoke some nods among listeners uh because i've spent a lot of time with principals over the years and i know uh What I'm about to share with you is a study of nurses, but I think we could just as well pretend it's about principles.

[08:17]

So a woman named Anita Tucker studied nurses for her Harvard dissertation. She shadowed a bunch of nurses for hundreds of hours, just followed them around to see what their day was like. Their day was full of problem solving. As you can imagine, something was always popping up. They ran out of towels. Where do we get towels?

[08:35]

So they went and stole some from the unit down the hall so that their patients would have them. Or the medication wasn't ready when it was supposed to be. And Anita Tucker writes about this one day that a nurse was trying to check out a mother who just had a baby. And the mother and baby were ready to go home. And part of the checkout is to take the security anklet off the baby. But in this case, it was missing.

[08:58]

And that's a pretty big deal. So they started this frantic search and eventually turned up the anklet in the baby's bassinet. So problem solved. Mother was discharged. Three hours later, the same nurse runs into the same problem again. It's a different mother, different baby.

[09:14]

The anklet is missing again. So they start another search. This time, they can't find it at all. And so the nurse has to work around that and figure out some other way to discharge this mother and baby safely. So Anita Tucker paints this portrait of nurses as being very resourceful. They're improvisational.

[09:33]

They're constantly finding ways to work around problems. They don't go cry into the boss every time they hit a barrier. And when I present the story through that lens, it looks admirable. I mean, that's a nice portrait. But if you flip the lens a little bit and look at it from a different perspective, what I'm describing is a system that will never improve, a system that will never learn. Because what these nurses have adopted, in essence, is a culture of workarounds.

[10:06]

You know, that they're so busy, there are so many demands on their times that when they run out of towels, they don't think, why do we run out of towels? They just are like, by God, I need some towels. They run down and steal them from another department, meaning that the other department is likely to have the same problem a couple hours down the line, right? And when you work around problems, it helps you in the moment, but it also dooms you to forever staying in that river fishing kids out of the water, right? Because you're never addressing the root causes, right? And this phenomenon that I'm talking about, constantly being stuck in a cycle of workarounds and reaction, is something that I call tunneling, which is a phrase I stole from another book that's wonderful if you love psychology books.

[10:50]

It's from a book called Scarcity. And the authors use this metaphor of when we have a scarcity of time or a scarcity of resources, what happens is we kind of give up trying to solve all of those things. all of those problems systematically. And instead, it's like we slip into this tunnel vision, you know, picture yourself in a tunnel. And the only direction to go in a tunnel is forwards, you know. And so, you know, the nurses figure out we're out of towels.

[11:19]

What do they do? They figure out some way to keep moving forward. They grab some towels from down the hall. Same thing in education, right? You're kind of pinballing from one problem to the next. You're just trying to survive the day.

[11:31]

You're just trying to deal with the stuff that's on your plate. And tunneling is a great, great trap. And I would say it's maybe the single greatest thing that we fight in trying to get upstream. And I am not aware of any simple solutions. I'm not here with three easy tricks to get out of the tunnel. I think this is really hard.

[11:51]

But I think the saving grace is that a little bit of time out of the tunnel can go a long way. Like I'll give you one example just from health care. A lot of health systems have gone to – a structure they call a safety huddle, where in the morning they might call together all the nurses and doctors in a certain department and they talk about what happened the day prior. You know, were there any near misses yesterday where we almost gave a patient the wrong medication or where, you know, some procedure almost went wrong and what can we learn from that? And a forum like that, this is a quick meeting, maybe 20 minutes, everybody's standing up, You know, it's not one of these laborious staff meeting type meetings. A forum like that would have been the perfect place for that nurse that dealt with the two baby anklets that slipped off to say, hey, this weird thing happened yesterday.

[12:43]

The anklets are slipping off the babies and we're not just putting them on too loose. I know because I put on some myself. We need someone to take charge of this. And so that's an example of where for 20 precious minutes every day, you figured out a way to get people out of those tunnels. And they may go right back in after the meeting is over, but at least you've had a time to kind of take a breath and say, hey, before we get back in the tunnels that we have to for this day, let's at least surface the things that we need to take seriously and start some more proactive problem solving.

[13:18] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and that strikes me as a great informal definition of leadership, right? Of being able to step back and say, okay, we're not just here to put out one fire after another. We're also in the fire prevention business. How can we step back and see the bigger picture and see what's causing these repeated problems? I think about...

[13:40]

with discipline. Often administrators get kind of stuck in the office dealing with discipline issue after discipline issue after discipline issue. And then you got the parents yelling at you from the other side when you call them about their child. And upstream for many issues within schools is of course the classroom. So if we're not able to get into classrooms and see what's going on in terms of teaching and learning, we're only allowing ourselves to solve those downstream problems. We're tunneling on the discipline issue that gets the kid sent to the office.

[14:13] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well said. And I think a guy named Steve Spear had this great quote. He said that the impetus for change in these situations is an insufferable frustration. You know, people, and I think this is the kind of emotional inspiration to get out of the tunnel, is that day when you've just finally had enough. You know, you've been splashing around in the water, saving kids for too many days in a row. And you're like, this has to change.

[14:43]

And I think if any of you listening are feeling like that, like imagine if your days six months or a year from now were the same as they are today, would you be happy or would you be, uh, would you find that intolerable? And if the answer is intolerable, the question is what is going to allow you to be in a different spot? And I would contend that the only solution runs through this notion of upstream thinking.

[15:10] SPEAKER_01:

I was also struck by the statement, I underlined this in my copy of the book, that part of the problem as leaders might be our own addiction to being the hero, to being the fixer, to being the one people call and can count on to show up and fix the problem. There's a certain kind of perverse reward system or incentive to solving the immediate problem when that incentive isn't necessarily there to solve the upstream problem. What's going on with that heroism kind of complex that we can find ourselves trapped in?

[15:43] SPEAKER_00:

Well said. I mean, as you said, it's a perverse reward system that our idea of a hero is somebody who saves the day. You know, the firefighters who put out the flames in a house and the lifeguard who jumps in to rescue the drowning kid and the first responders in an emergency. And it's not that the day doesn't need to be saved sometimes. It does. But We don't pay attention to the people who keep the day from needing to be saved.

[16:09]

And that's a kind of invisible hero that I really hold up in the book. And it's not as dramatic, right? I'll give you a concrete example. So the YMCA, who many of your elementary school principals may work with, the YMCA teaches more swim lessons than any other institution in the country. And the YMCA...

[16:32]

for a while, had a fair number of drowning deaths every year, potentially just because of the sheer volume of kind of swimming hours logged in their pools. But they've taken it very seriously. And if you save a kid from drowning, you're a hero instantly. If you prevent a kid from drowning, well, A, how do you ever prove that that happened? You know, which kid would you point to and say, that's the life I saved? B, if you have really sophisticated data and you're able to establish in the data, hey, there was a downtick from time A to time B, and we're going to claim credit for that.

[17:10]

Even in that situation, it's not clear who gets the blue ribbon, like who's the hero? Because these are often really boring incremental changes that happen. Like at the Y, it involved learning to push the lifeguard's chair closer to the pool to eliminate blind spots. And teaching scanning techniques where the lifeguards are taught to scan the pool every 10 seconds, top to bottom, left to right. They're forbidden to bring cell phones up on the chair just to prevent distractions. They rotate a lot because it's hard to maintain that level of focus for a long time, just like TSA agents at the airport.

[17:48]

And on and on, these kind of incremental improvements. And those are rolled out. you know, boring training session after session where half of the teenage lifeguards are rolling their eyes because it all seems like too much. But the net effect of all that work is kids' lives really are saved. I mean, heroism happened. And part of the reason that I write this book, that I wrote this book, is I wanted to teach us to pay more attention to these folks who were doing the boring work of keeping the day from needing to be saved.

[18:22]

And I think there's so much potential for that in schools. It's like some of these perpetual problems that we fight, if we just changed our headspace a little bit, could we learn to stop these problems before they happen?

[18:34] SPEAKER_01:

Dan, can you give us an example of that approach to upstream thinking within the K-12 setting?

[18:41] SPEAKER_00:

Yes. One of my favorite stories in the book is about the Chicago public school system. And hang with me here. It's going to take a little bit to tell the story, but I think this story, maybe more than any other in the book, captures so many of the themes of upstream work. So I think it's worth the investment here. So let me start with the bleak news.

[19:03]

About 20 years ago, CPS had a graduation rate of about 52%. I mean, you had a coin flips chance of graduating as a teenager in CPS. The amazing thing about situations like that is when you've been living in a world like that for a long time, you know, imagine you're a junior history teacher and every year you see the graduate rate about 50 percent. It's not that you think that's a good thing. I mean, you're appalled by it, I suspect. But it's like you come to take it for granted.

[19:39]

You just think, well, that's the way the world is. You know, these kids have difficult lives and Maybe they haven't been well served by their K through eight education and their parents don't have a lot of resources and there's a lot of crime in their neighborhoods. Whatever the reasons are that you come up with, you sort of just shrug your shoulders and you say, I can't do anything about that. Well, the good news is at CPS, there were a bunch of school leaders who decided we are going to do something about this and no, this is not natural and this is not inevitable and we can, we can alter this. I think the first realization you've got to have is in big systems like CPS, one of my favorite quotes that I came across in researching this book is from Paul Batalda, a healthcare expert. And he said, every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.

[20:29]

And I think that's so true. And when you've got a district that's failing half of your students, that means there are huge systemic forces that are engineered to fail students. I'll give you one example in this case. One thing they figured out was that their own discipline policies were sabotaging students. Like in that time, this was the era of zero tolerance and tough on discipline. As somebody told me, kids were suspended not for bringing like a knife to school.

[21:01]

They were suspended because a couple of kids shoved each other in the hallway and boom, both were slapped with a two-week suspension. And what we know now, based on a lot of data, is if you take a kid who's at risk, you kick them out of school for two weeks, I mean, guess what happens? They're sunk. They come back to school. They're lost. They end up failing.

[21:21]

When you fail in the ninth grade, you can doom yourself really for all of high school. And I'm not being overdramatic there. In fact, one of the key turning points in the story at CPS was when some academics discovered that there was a simple way to predict in the ninth grade with 80% accuracy who was going to graduate and who wasn't. It was a metric called freshman on track. Many of you may be familiar with it. It had two simple components.

[21:51]

Did the freshman complete five full-year course credits? And did they avoid failing more than one core course, math, English, history sort of thing? failing one semester was okay, but if you failed two, that really puts you at unique risk because that was freshmen on track. And notice what's missing, right? There's no racial component of that metric. There's no family income component.

[22:16]

There's not even a past performance component. In fact, they found that eighth graders that were in the top quartile of performance, the best students who were off track as freshmen, were way less likely to graduate than the worst students performers in eighth grade who were on track as freshmen. So all of a sudden, this metric gives you a kind of smoke detector, right, for early warning of potential dropout rates, and that opened the door for them to do something about it. So I mentioned the discipline policies that they changed. One of the coolest things that they did, and I think this is something we could talk about in other contexts too, is they changed the way that the faculty worked together they organize what they call freshmen success teams where the ninth grade faculty started meeting across disciplines.

[23:07]

You know, they'd have a meeting of a couple of biology teachers, a couple of English, a couple of math, the counselor. And when they had these meetings, what they were doing is going name by name down a list of freshmen organized by who was most likely to be off track. Because keep in mind that Off-track is something that you can declare once a year after the freshman year is over, and that's too late. In May, you figure out Dan's off-track. Well, guess what? The damage has been done.

[23:39]

You've got to have more proximate metrics. And so part of the work was when they organized these freshman success teams, they figured out ways to arm them with fresh, relevant data. Okay, was Dan in school every day last week? Okay, check. Yeah, his attendance was good. How's he doing in math?

[23:57]

Last week, it looked like his grades were trending down. How did he do on his last midterm exam and so forth? So just as an asterisk, I know a lot of principals listening to this can imagine just the sheer volume of work that went into arming people with that level of data. I mean, imagine it. Data on 100 kids from last week based on attendance in every course. Their grades up to that moment There are some Herculean IT efforts that went into this story.

[24:30]

Anyway, what you figure out is when you have the right data, when you have the right direction, and when you have a motivation to care, things change. And meeting by meeting, school by school, month by month, they start budging these numbers. They get attendance up. They start boosting their grades. They give the students extra help when they need it. And the freshman on-track numbers start to go up.

[24:55]

And what happens four years later is just as the metric predicted, they start graduating in greater and greater numbers. And fast forward to the last few years, the graduation rate has been more like 78%. I mean, 25 plus points added to the graduation rate, which is the equivalent of graduating tens of thousands of more students who will now have a radically different life as a result of this work. And so if you're in the midst of some kind of despair about how hard it is to get things done in your school or in your district, I'm not saying it's not hard. It is hard. But I want you to take hope from a district like CPS, a $6 billion district with over 300,000 students.

[25:45]

They managed to execute a change this big. It is possible. But it takes a lot of upstream thinking and a lot of upstream work.

[25:53] SPEAKER_01:

Let's zoom in on a couple of the key elements of that upstream work there. One thing that really strikes me about their use of data was that we use tons of data, we have tons of data, we collect probably more than we need, but they were very selective about what they focused on. they really zoomed in on some metrics that were predictive and that were simple. Like, are we seeing this kid in school or is this kid absent a lot? Are they failing a certain number of courses? Are they passing all of their core courses?

[26:25]

And, you know, really prioritizing helping individual kids succeed on those metrics. Why do you think that kind of case by case, you know, for a school that has 1,400 students or 2,000 students, it might seem like the stupidest idea ever to say, we're going to solve this problem one kid at a time, because we want to be systems thinkers, right? We want to say, okay, we're going to do something school-wide that's going to work for everyone. But in Example after example in Upstream, there's a case-by-case approach that really led people to the solutions.

[27:02] SPEAKER_00:

A critical lesson here, because you're right, there's a seeming paradox here that, you know, I started the story with the notion that CPS was a system designed to fail half its students, and it's a $6 billion system. And so that makes you think, gosh, this is going to have to happen at the 50,000-foot level, and there's going to have to be vast changes in policies. And the reality was the actual... progress was made at the micro level, that macro starts with micro.

[27:28]

And I think the reason that makes sense is because you don't really understand a system until you've gotten right up close to it, until you've immersed yourself in it. And so the way this would work is in the course of talking about the case of Michael, a potentially off-track ninth grader in November of his freshman year, you start to notice the texture of these stories and you start to come across things like, oh my God, this suspension thing is crazy because we know from our own data, if a kid's out of school for two weeks, they're virtually certain to be off track as a freshman. So we need to fix that. The texture leads you to the systemic policy. And then you notice things like, well, we're having a bunch of students who are failing math in one teacher's class, but not in another teacher's class. Well, that's as maybe there's something going on with, with the second teacher's curriculum.

[28:21]

Maybe they figured out a better way to teach this. Let's go investigate that, that, that the way you, you understand the plumbing of a system is to get that close to it, that, that macro starts with micro. And that's a theme I never saw coming before I started this research. And then it started popping up again and again and again in, in very different contexts. Like, uh, another one that you, that you alluded to was there is, uh, a group in Newburyport, Massachusetts, it's about a 45 minute drive outside of Boston, that's focused on domestic violence. And in particular, the risk that domestic violence will escalate to homicide.

[29:01]

And so notice the parallels here between the CPS story and this one. One of the first things they discovered that helped them was they discovered a predictive tool, a risk assessment tool where If women who had been the victim of domestic violence filled out a certain questionnaire, it had things like, does your abuser try to control your activities? Do they monitor your spending? Do they tell you who you can hang out with? Has your abuser lost a job recently? Does your abuser have an alcohol problem?

[29:34]

These kind of diagnostic questions. And then they would rank women in the community based on the risk assessment. just as at CPS, they were essentially prioritizing students who were most likely to be off track. So that was the start, just as they did in CPS, where they assembled this team that composed biology teachers and counselors and math. In Newburyport, they organized all the people with a stake in domestic violence. So you had domestic violence advocates, you had people from the health system, you had the police, you had parole officers, you had people from the DA's office.

[30:11]

And for the first time, I mean, I can't tell you how rare this kind of structure is. They're all getting together in what they call the domestic violence high risk team. And just as a CPS, the nature of their meetings is to go woman by woman, name by name, and talk about the particulars. You know, okay, who's seen Darcy in the last week? And Do we have an emergency plan ready for her? If something happens, do we know where she's going to go?

[30:41]

Who needs to get called? Where is she going to get the money if she needs a hotel or a taxi? And they would make these plans. They would work with the police to do more drive-bys of the woman's home or the abuser's home just to send a message that they were paying attention. And in the year since they began this work, in about the eight years before they started the work, there had been if memory serves, about 10 or 12 homicides in the area. And in the decades since they've started this work, there have been zero, not one.

[31:16]

And that's what happens when you get close enough to a problem to understand it. The lesson here, I think, is you can't help 100 people or 1,000 or a million until you really understand how to help one person.

[31:30] SPEAKER_01:

Those personal stories, those personal kind of backstories to the problems that manifest themselves in particular ways within our context of school often have solutions or long-term needs that we may have to partner with people outside of the walls of our school to address. I think about some of the community partnerships around supporting low-income students that many people in our profession are pursuing right now. And one of the challenges that they've identified for attendance, especially at the elementary level, is simply around laundry. that if you don't have a washer and dryer in your apartment, you have to go somewhere, you have to put quarters in the machine, you have to sit there for hours while it gets washed and dried, you have to get transportation home again. Something that most of us who have washer and dryer in our home don't even have to think about

[32:25]

constitutes this enormous, you know, and we're worried about reading scores and not looking a little bit upstream to see, okay, reading scores have a lot to do with attendance. What's behind the attendance pattern that we're seeing? Sometimes it's something as simple as laundry. And we turn around and we say, you know what? We already have a washer and dryer here in the office because this is an elementary school and we do that.

[32:48] SPEAKER_00:

That's a great example. I think that's a wonderful example of upstream thinking. And And the kind of thing that is never going to pop out of like a policy discussion. You know what I mean? If you're thinking at the policy level about attendance and third grade reading and what have you, laundry is never going to pop out. That's something that popped out when people got really close up to the problem and they understood it.

[33:13]

They were trying to help one kid and they realized, hey, what's keeping this kid out of school some days is he doesn't have clean clothes. And that's when the light bulb goes off. And that's another example of that micro leads to macro reality. The other thing I would say is this is hard stuff. I mean, CPS, their timeline was 15, 20 years. I mean, this stuff does not happen fast.

[33:41]

But you can see progress a lot faster than that. And in your shoes as a principal, I would be thinking about what's one thing recurring problem that you're dealing with year after year. And it might be different depending on what's the nature of your school. For you, it might be the dropout rate like CPS. It might be teacher retention. Some of the charter schools just have terrible teacher retention because they work them so hard.

[34:08]

And so the schools are great, but the teachers churn so often it becomes a big problem. And if you take a problem, let's just use teacher retention as like a hypothetical what are your levers in that situation? What can you do to move that? And a couple of levers that I just want to plant in your head are, number one, it's always easier to fix a problem when you can detect it coming early. And so notice, you know, at CPS, they had the freshman on track metric at the ninth grade year with a high risk domestic violence team. They had the risk assessment tool.

[34:43]

And so the first question would be, can you figure out ways to see it coming when a teacher is going to leave. And I'll give you one example just from personal experience. I was working with a well-known charter school who was dealing with this problem of teacher churn. And what I did to understand it was I just interviewed five or 10 teachers who had left. I wanted to hear from them what the responsible causes were. And there was some difference of opinions, as you would expect.

[35:14]

But one surprising commonality was that they probably two-thirds of them said that they had surfaced their dissatisfactions at their kind of, what did they call it? It was basically a meeting halfway through the year with their supervisor, like a one-on-one. That may be specific to this charter school, that tradition, but they would have a meeting January-ish just to kind of review where they were to get performance feedback and so forth. And these teachers were telling me, like, I surfaced these things And apparently like the boss's temptation was just to sweep it under the rug. You know, they were probably tunneling and they didn't want to have to deal with it at that moment. So they just kind of made nice noises in the meeting and didn't do anything.

[35:59]

And then six months later, the teachers were gone. But that tells you something, right? When you get up close to these cases and you realize, hey, that was an early warning possibility. It changes your mindset. Now, all of a sudden, these January meetings become very important because they're early warning signs and they buy you six months. do something different as you get closer to the problems you also come to understand the leverage points better so you know in a complicated system it can feel paralyzing because there's so many different variables there's so many different things going on you've got to find a couple of places to push and so like at cps they figured out attendance was a great place to push because attendance is highly correlated to performance and you can do something about attendance you know you can You can be calling the morning when the students are out and you can be hounding them and let them know they're being watched.

[36:50]

So that's a kind of basic game plan. Whatever the problem is that you're facing that you're finding increasingly intolerable, get close to it. Look at the specific cases, not the big picture. Look at the little picture. Look for early warning signals and look for leverage points.

[37:06] SPEAKER_01:

So Dan, I really appreciate the kind of case by case and the cross-functional nature of some of this work. And I can certainly think about some great conversations that I had with our school nurse or even people outside of our staff who helped us really get our heads around a problem. But I also want to look at how we often make changes from the opposite direction, where sometimes instead of doing that detective work to find the root causes of an upstream problem, we instead start with a solution. And I think this is kind of an endemic problem in education where we say, OK, you know what? We're going to do that thing over there. We're going to bring it here, and that's going to fix all of our problems.

[37:46]

Why do we default to that kind of import the solution thinking? And what wrong roads does that lead us down sometimes?

[37:56] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think it comes out of a good instinct. I mean, we want to fix a problem, so we're combing the world for solutions. But what we have to understand is when you intervene in complex systems, you often get surprised. So one of my favorite examples of this is in many companies, in many organizations, there's been a push toward open floor plans. And what's the motivation? The motivation is we want to get people collaborating more.

[38:22]

People are stuck in their silos. We want to get them talking. We're going to physically put them closer together, and we're going to take down the barriers. No more cubicle walls and so forth.

[38:32] SPEAKER_01:

We had open concept schools. We're a big fad. My wife taught in one of those. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

[38:39] SPEAKER_00:

No classroom walls. That's interesting. So you've been through the fad, too. So I'll be curious if the punchline is the same. What happened was a couple of Harvard researchers tracked two Fortune 500 companies that were just about to move from their old model, which was more kind of siloed, cubicle to the open office floor plan. And the question was, would they boost face to face interactions?

[39:02]

And they use this kind of sci fi technology called a sociometric badge, which people wore around their neck like a like a lanyard. And and what it did was it tracked who they talked to and how often they were talking. It wasn't recording their conversation, so it wasn't something creepy, but it was just like, who are you talking to and how often? So they had really good data on the before and after here. And at the end of the study, what they figured out was once they moved to an open office floor plan, face-to-face interactions went down by about 70%. I mean, it wasn't even close.

[39:39]

They had almost ended face-to-face interactions by going to open offices. And so you scratch your head and you say, wait a second, how could it possibly go down when you move people closer together, when you take down the walls between them? And I think the best way I can give you intuition about the answer is to say, look at an airplane. You know, when you when you get on an airplane, you know, yes, there's a there's always a chatty Kathy on the plane somewhere or chatty Charlie and more experience is more common. But what most people do is they create little bubbles around themselves. You put on headphones or you look really intently at your computer like you don't want to be disturbed or you just send some – you give some monosyllabic answers if someone tries to talk to you.

[40:26]

People find a way to fight against these tendencies. And so what's the moral of the story? I mean the moral on one hand is a little depressing because it says there's a lot of unintended consequences that come with our plans and systems are very hard to think our way through. I think the practical moral of this story is when you got a big idea, something as big as, you know, reorganizing the whole way your company is laid out, you got to test it first because you can't think your way through to all the conclusions. You can only test your way to the conclusions. And so, you know, if you're going to an open office floor plan, you sure are going to want to start with one department first or one team on one floor to try to feel out some of these dynamics.

[41:13]

So in schools, was it a similar thing?

[41:16] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think we kind of concluded as a profession that just the noise level and the distraction and the, you know, the constant sound of everybody else's classroom around you, just, you know, people learn to work with it. You know, I think educators are generally not complainers, and made it work. And often these were very long-term decisions. You know, schools had been built without classroom walls, and in many cases still exist that way because they haven't been renovated. And we haven't really been able to adapt as quickly as we'd like because those were such bold decisions. So...

[41:50]

it almost strikes me as a case where we have to do the qualitative research as well as look at the numbers. Like we have to look at the people and listen to the people.

[42:02] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Sometimes I wonder if any of the people planning these open office floor plans actually talk to people to ask if they wanted that or thought it would be a good idea. Like I know I would have said no. I mean, I'm, I'm a card-carrying introvert, so maybe I'm different. But I would have fully foreseen the horror of that situation if someone had asked me as an employee.

[42:22] SPEAKER_01:

Dan, let me just ask one last question then. If you could wave a magic wand and get school leaders everywhere to make one shift in their thinking or one shift in their behavior, what would you have us do based on the research that went into Upstream?

[42:38] SPEAKER_00:

I would have you find some way in your week to step out of the tunnel Even if it's for an hour, you know, a walk outside. And I would start engaging in that thought that we talked about earlier of what could I do to ensure that this problem that I'm burning a lot of time dealing with that recurs again and again that I've seen in my career, it's always going to be with me. What could I do to make sure next year I'm not facing as many instances of this problem as I do now? And begin those explorations. Could I get early warning of this problem? How could I get closer to the problem so I really see how it's assembled and where the leverage points might be?

[43:23]

How could I get together a team that has different facets of this problem and get them collaborating in new ways? Because the only way to ensure that we're not forever stuck fishing drowning kids out of the river is to start taking some steps upstream.

[43:39] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Upstream, The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. And Dan, I really hope that senior leadership teams, I'm thinking especially of district administrators, superintendents and their cabinets, will take this challenge seriously and see your book as a guide to investigating and working together to go upstream and to solve some of those pervasive problems. So Dan Heath, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. Thank you. It's been fun.

[44:10] Announcer:

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