Time to switch to upstream thinking

There’s a well-known parable for upstream thinking:

Two friends are sitting by a river when suddenly they see a child drowning.

They react immediately, diving in and hauling the child to safety.

Just then another struggling child appears, so back in they jump to repeat the rescue.

Then another child appears, and another, and another…

Suddenly one of the friends jumps out of the river and runs off.

The other friend keeps working away, rescuing child after child and getting angrier and angrier at their friend.

Then finally the flow of children relents and there no more for the exhausted rescuer to save.

A few minutes later the first friend comes sauntering back.

“Where have you been!? I’ve been saving children all on my own here!”

And the friend replied, “I went to find out why all these children were falling in. Eventually, I found a broken safety barrier and fixed it.”

While the first friend was busy reacting to the symptoms of the problem the second friend solved the cause.

They were literally thinking upstream.

“How do I save drowning children?”

This is a downstream question.

Downstream thinking happens after the problem has already materialised.

Our brains are wired to react to immediate threats and issues, and our attention is extremely asymmetrical.

So we naturally prioritise thinking and acting downstream.

Downstream problems are direct, simple to measure and clear to manage, and it rewards us with clear, tangible results:

“I saved 5 children today.”

But what happens if you go upstream?

“How do we prevent children drowning in rivers?”

Upstream thinking is anticipating .and preventing problems before they happen.

Humans unique ability is to plan for the future, but it takes us considerable effort and focus.

And the outcomes are more nebulous, harder to measure and delayed.

So in a world of KPIs and targets, upstream thinking will often get pushed aside.

But the upsides can be significantly greater.

How Domino’s Went Upstream to Build an $11 Billion Business.

Domino’s was founded in 1960. Using their 30 minutes delivery promise they quickly became the dominant force in pizza delivery.

For the next half century they were laser-focused on the downstream challenges of running a vast franchise business, and the logistics of rapid pizza delivery.

But by 2007-2008 things started to go very wrong.

Domino’s share price collapsed from $30 a share in 2007, to under $4 in 2008.

To find the problem they needed to go upstream, so they asked their customers.

And the news was not good.

Their pizzas were terrible.

Customers were saying things like: “The crust tastes like cardboard. The sauce tastes like ketchup.” And: “This is an imitation of pizza.”

Patrick Doyle, the CEO said at the time, “When we did consumer tests, if they knew the pizza was Domino’s, they actually liked it less than if they just thought it was a random unbranded pizza. We had somehow created a situation where people liked our pizza less if they knew it was from us. So yeah, that was a problem.”

Domino's had lost sight of the fundamental part of being a pizza company - the pizza.

Acting upstream

Domino's had to make some dramatic upstream interventions to fix the situation.

So the culinary teams started experimenting.

They improved the quality of the mozzarella and flour, added garlic butter to the crust, and gave their marinara more flavour.

18 months of development later they lunched a new and improved pizza.

By February 2010, Domino’s was selling so much more pizza that they almost ran out of pepperoni.

Even with the struggle to handle the surge, sales rose more than 14 percent in the first quarter of 2010.

Since then Domino’s have been on a sustained growth trajectory. The share price is currently running at $400 a share and their market cap has grown from $0.2 billion to $11 billion.

Delivering Continuous Improvement

Just like the results at Domino’s, restaurants that make effective customer experience changes see significant results.

In 2009 it took Domino’s 2 years of falling share prices to highlight the problem, months of customer panels to uncover the reasons, and 1.5 years of development to fix it.

Today with real time guest experience insights, Yumpingo helps highlight and action issues like this in just months or even days.

Yumpingo's insights have shown that that food is 5X more important than service and 8X more important than ambiance in driving customer satisfaction. That’s why collecting customer feedback at a granular level by menu item and their characteristics is essential.

So restaurants can now understand in real-time when food issues are happening across their estate, down to a venue or shift level.

You don’t need to wait for problems to show in your share price or sales data before acting upstream.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ― Buckminster Fuller