Upstream

Dan Heath's book Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen begins with a parable: A couple of guys picknicking next to a river notice a young child floating down the river about to drown. They jump in and rescue the child, but then see another child coming down the river. They rescue this child as well, but then notice a long line of additional children approaching. One of the guys gets out of the river and runs upstream. "Where are you going?" shouts his friend. "There are still kids here who need rescuing." He replies: "I'm going upstream to stop the person throwing all these kids into the river in the first place!"

As one might guess from this introduction, Heath believes solving problems upstream - at their roots - is a far more effective (and less costly) means to truly improve a situation. Think "low cost of a better diet today" compared to the "high cost of a hospital bill later" thanks to the consequences of a bad diet. He brings many examples, all of which are worth exploring, but for time purposes I will mention just one.

Expedia. When this travel website based company first started, the majority of its customers would call the service lines after already purchasing their itineraries, with each call costing the company roughly $5. This added up to a $100 million expense. This fact inspired the company to initially focus on how they could make these calls more efficient. An automated system to better streamline intake. Fewer minutes per call. Outsourcing the operators. Etc. Making these calls more efficient, they estimated, could save nearly $10 million.

But then the CEO decided to go a little upstream from the problem. What are these customers actually calling about in the first place? An analysis of the data suggested the vast majority of the calls were simply to ask the operators to re-print their itineraries, something the customer had already received but no longer had for a variety of reasons - perhaps the customer inputed his e-mail address incorrectly, maybe she deleted the company's initial e-mail assuming it was spam. "What if we simply put a button on the website itself?" the CEO mused, thereby offering the customer self-remedy without ever having to make a call at all. It worked, saving not the estimated $10 million windfall if the calls became more efficient, but rather the entire $100 million cost of fielding all those unneccessary calls in the first place.  

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