#54 - Positioning like Steph Curry

Plus: Upstream thinking, Minority Report style

Welcome to Issue #54 of Curiosity > Certainty! 👏

We all know how to win when the odds are with us. How can we succeed when the odds are against us? Here’s something from a few nights ago that we can learn from.

Positioning to win, no matter what

On June 14th, Game 5 of the NBA finals against the Boston Celtics, Steph Curry–one of the greatest three-point shooters in NBA history–missed all nine of his attempted three-pointers. And this happened on a night when his team, the Warriors, were chasing a lead over the Celtics with just two more games after that in the playoffs.

You’ve been where Curry found himself on June 14. You’ve been in that hole. You’ve made a shaky start to your presentation when setting the context is your forte, you’ve made a knee-jerk response to a question from investors that everyone expected you to have sailed through. There are a hundred ways things can go wrong. 

What can you learn from how Curry got himself out of a hole with millions watching?

#1: The best decision-makers position themselves to pivot when circumstances change. They don’t predict what’s going to happen. Curry turned playmaker when his shooting failed him. He made eight assists.

#2: They work to reduce their exposure to risk even if it is short-term painful. Why does Steph Curry with his superstar shooting chops need to learn anything else? Well, now you know.

#3: They are more than their what Indira Nooyi calls hip pocket skill. They have a broader skillset. When his hip pocket skill deserted him, Curry leaned in on other lesser known tricks of his trade.

The very best find a way to win even on their bad days, just like Steph Curry found a way out for his team on a rough night. Position, don’t predict, if you want to succeed all the time.

When adding people won’t solve a problem faster

In the movie Minority Report, a group of Precrime cops led by Tom Cruise foresee crimes before they happen and nab future criminals.

This superpower to stop bad things from happening is called upstream thinking. We already have it. But we let it rot.

Here’s a true story.

In 2012 an online travel company receives 20 million customer calls. The main reason: to ask for a copy of the itinerary.  

Imagine you are heading the customer service team. What would you do? Request your boss to staff up to handle the call load and ensure customers have a good experience. 

Now, the customer calls have been shooting up for years. But it is no one’s job to ensure customers don’t have to call for support. That’s why as head of the team, you’re less likely to ask, Why are so many customers calling for an itinerary? But you do ask in the story. Miraculously.

Turns out customers are mistyping their email address. Or itineraries are languishing in spam. Or they are being accidentally deleted. And there’s no way for customers to retrieve a copy from anywhere.

Would staffing up help solve this problem? You wish. 

So what caused the problem to become this big? It happened because every department was working well. Too well perhaps. Marketing was bringing a ton of high-quality traffic; product had designed a frictionless experience so that the customer didn’t have to retype their email; and customer service met every request for a copy of the itinerary diligently. 

Remember what I said earlier. This is a true story. All of this happened at Expedia the book Upstream recounts it well.

Now, once the Expedia folks identified the root cause, they solved it upstream, Minority-Report style. Instead of adding customer support folks, they added an option to their IVR system for the itinerary, built a self-service tool for customers to download the itinerary themselves; and so on. Customers calling for support dropped from 58% to 15%. 

As leaders, we reward focus. But this strength is also our weakness. No one’s looking at the full picture. As a leader, our job’s to ask: Who’s thinking upstream?

Let me clarify. I’m not saying we should not bother solving problems. I’m saying we should also think about stopping them from happening. Let’s think about how we’ve set up our teams and functions. Have people look upstream for root problems just as you have people fix the symptoms.

Once we do this, we may see that a lot of things we think we need immediately, like more customer service reps, we may not need at all.

Knowing the right problem to solve

Across February and March I interviewed a bunch of people from my Linkedin network to understand their work lives. A refrain I heard more than once:

‘I often need to respond to problems quickly at work. The urgency of the situation forces me to provide the best possible solution within that time frame, which often turns out suboptimal. Because I end up staring at the same problem in a couple of months’ time.’

Time pressure is real. It can make you think that you need to improve your response to problems when what you need is to improve your identification of the problem. Let’s back up a bit.

Here’s a scene from your work day: Someone approaches you with a problem. You hear it, accept it, and start solving it. You come up with a plan quickly enough, depending on the complexity of the problem. Only a few months down the line the problem recurs, bigger and badder. 

How you define the problem decides the solutions you see. So, before you try and solve a problem, make sure it’s the root problem. The root problem’s the one to solve. Everything else is a symptom of it. 

How do you arrive at the root problem?

✔Step 1: Reject the problem definition presented to you.

What? Why? The problem presented tends to capture only what is visible. 

Your customer experience team untiringly fields customer calls day in, day out. But that doesn’t seem to be enough. What do you do? The obvious response would be to hire more in the team. Improve onboarding. Offer more hours of on-the-job training. And so on. But something in you says hang on. Let me first understand why this is happening. 

✔Step 2: Separate the act of identifying the problem from the process of solving it

This is an intervention to stop you from jumping into problem-solving. Define the problem in a separate session (if you’re doing this with your team).

Tell your team that until you find out why you’re being flooded with calls, you’re not going to worry about how to solve the problem.

✔Step 3: Ask ‘what has to be true for this problem to not exist in the first place?’ 

You’re now thinking of how to prevent future problems, not the best way to solve them. 

Why are customers calling you so often? You realize the top reason is they cannot find a document–an invoice, a service completion certificate, et cetera. Ooh, why is that happening? Because they have entered their email wrong in the service form. Or your emails are going into their spam. Or the emails landed right but customers couldn’t find them.
 
Now imagine you had hired more in the team. Would it have helped solve the problem?

Under time and resource pressure, we tend to deal with problems, not fix them. That’s understandable. But that’s also like treating the symptoms of a virus instead of finding a vaccine for it. 

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Thank you, dear reader, for adding Curiosity > Certainty to your inbox. This issue covers my exploration into learning from the best about how to solve problems before they happen. This is a topic I intend to dive deeper into, so leave me a comment. I would love to hear from you.