What if you could increase your capacity for prevention by identifying problems before they happened? It is possible with a process called upstream thinking.

While a global pandemic may not have been the perspective any of us were seeking, living through it shined some welcome light on the issue of burnout, mental health, work-life balance and is helping to reframe thinking on how and where the job gets done.

Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity. In a nutshell, the VUCA age requires new approaches to age-old processes, growth and open mindsets, broader perspectives and thinking on your feet.

Upstream Thinking is the quest to solve problems before they happen. Imagine what an equitable world it could be if we shifted our approach from downstream to upstream.

“We have a strategic plan, that’s not the problem.” However, my experience tells me otherwise.

Organizations, like the human body, also redirect pain away from the underlying source. When people learn I do strategic planning with organizations, the most common response often sounds something like this, “We’ve spent a lot of time and money on strategic planning and nothing changes when it is over.”