To Make Culture Change Easier, Move Upstream

I’m reading Upstream by Dan Heath (of Switch and Made to Stick fame), and not only is it a really good book, the application to culture change is eye-opening. The core concept in the book is fairly simple. If you really want to solve the tough problems, you must resist the urge to continuously respond “downstream” to the emergencies that are floating by you, and move “upstream” to address the problems where they enter the stream to begin with. Heath provides some very powerful examples in complex systems where upstream interventions solved problems and produced some pretty amazing results:

• Chicago public schools raised the high school graduation rate from 52% to 78%

• The city of Rockford, IL reduced veteran and chronic homelessness to ZERO

• The city of Newburyport, MA brought the number of domestic violence homicides down to zero over a 14 year period

How did they do it? By expanding their efforts to move beyond the downstream, reactive efforts—like suspending students, funding homeless shelters, and responding to 911 domestic violence calls—to embrace upstream, proactive efforts, like ensuring at-risk freshmen complete their core courses, working to avoid evictions, and helping hospitals become better at spotting domestic violence injuries. Note that they didn’t eliminate the downstream work—all of that is still important—but to solve the problem, they needed to get ahead of it with the upstream work.

As I read the stories Heath was telling in the book, I realized that effective culture change is fundamentally upstream work. 

This is why so many people think culture change is hard. In most cases, culture change is reactive. For example, an organization does an engagement survey and realizes that people are frustrated by the organization’s lack of agility. In response, they launch a new agility initiative where employees are expected to report regularly on the quick changes they successfully accomplished. Yet, lo and behold, six months later, people aren’t being any more agile than they were before.

Why? Because the organization didn’t address the challenge upstream. If they looked harder at their culture, they would have realized that there was a pattern of always moving on to the next thing without fixing the existing problems that were slowing people down. So yes, people really did want to be agile, but they couldn’t, because of the time they were spending on the work-arounds forced on them by the broken processes that never got fixed.

So instead of simply demanding new behavior (be more agile), they should have focused more upstream. For example, they could have launched an “after action review” initiative, and then held teams accountable for doing the reviews and identifying and fixing problems an ongoing basis. As more broken processes get fixed, bandwidth is suddenly freed up, which enables the behavior you ultimately wanted: agility. After action reviews would be only one of several upstream efforts that might be necessary—we constantly remind people that “easy” culture change doesn’t mean “no effort”—but as long as you’re devoting enough effort to this kind of upstream work, you will absolutely see the behavior change (i.e., culture change) that you wanted in the first place.

Here are some tips for becoming more upstream in your culture change efforts.

Appoint a “culture czar.” Make culture someone’s job. They won’t be single-handedly responsible for changing culture (by any means), but give someone on your team just a little more bandwidth to think about culture and how to change it, particularly from an upstream perspective (and give them access to our soon-to-be-released digital culture advisor, CultureGenius…sign up here to get advanced info as it becomes available).

Make culture a senior team agenda item. It doesn’t have to be every meeting, but, at the very least, once a quarter the senior team should have an upstream conversation about improving culture. Who should be involved? Where do you see areas of friction? What might be the upstream causes? Don’t look for quick fixes right away, but have the systems-focused conversations on a regular basis.

Up your metrics game. The trick to upstream work is knowing if it’s working. You’ll have to connect the dots (with data) between your upstream interventions and the results you want, so make sure you have a metrics component to all of your culture work.