January 21, 2025
Any time I have the opportunity to hear Dan Heath present, I am reminded of the impact his concepts have had and will continue to have on K-12 education. Most recently I heard him speak on his book Upstream: How to Solve Problems Before They Happen, and while feverishly taking notes in the audience, I realized that while this concept is vitally important for school leaders, it is even more important to teach to our students.
Most schools stress the importance of teaching problem-solving alongside critical thinking and there is certainly nothing wrong with this approach if it is coupled with teaching problem prevention. If all we are doing is presenting issues for students to solve, then we may just be encouraging a firefighter approach where they simply learn to be reactive by putting out the most pressing fires.
I won’t belabor some of the key points Heath makes in his book about the need for a societal shift from the reactive putting out of fires to the proactive prevention of fires in the first place, but suffice to say the idea of being proactive rather than reactive traces its roots back to Stephen Covey’s famous work, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (it is, in fact, habit number one). If we can truly teach our students to be proactive about problem prevention, then we are teaching them a systems-based approach to avoiding future issues.
Being proactive about problem prevention is directly connected to root cause analysis—the more we journey “upstream” as Heath calls it, the more we encounter the true “why” behind the problem in the first place. Often what this reveals is that the current problem we are facing is downstream of the larger problem and if we want to avoid the current problem on an ongoing basis, we are going to have to tackle the larger problem upstream.
The real impact of this comes when we create a laboratory for our students to work through this in real time. Regular readers of my articles know my ardent desire for all students to experience entrepreneurship education and the best way to teach problem-solving from the entrepreneurial mindset perspective is through a student-run business on the school campus—this may take the form of a school store or a coffee bar or a snack stand, or any other venture students are actively involved in running.
In addition to all of the skills of collaboration, effective communication, and emotional intelligence that students develop through this experience, the business affords a multitude of problems for students to solve. And with gentle nudges (along with the “five whys”), we can help students begin to think proactively rather than reactively.
Consider the following scenario at the school’s coffee bar, managed and run by students (and overseen by a faculty business mentor):
Students: “We’re out of cups! We need to get more cups or we have to close down!”
Mentor: “Okay, I’ll run to the store and get more ASAP.”
-The mentor rushes to the store and buys a sleeve of cups, returning to the coffee bar just as a line of customers is forming. The “fire” is put out and this is where most reactive problem-solving stops. The problem, of course, is that this sort of “fire” will occur again and again if a proactive approach is not taken. The mentor calls a 10-minute meeting for after school that day.
Mentor: “So what happened today? Why did we run out of cups?”
Opening Shift Students: “We ran out because the closers didn’t tell us we were low on the supply.”
Closing Shift Students: “No one told us to do that—we are already busy with cleaning up the mess you all make during your shift so the coffee bar is clean.”
Mentor: “Let’s try to keep this productive—we obviously ran out of cups, but let’s dig a little deeper. Why today? What made today different? Don’t we order cups regularly?”
Closing Shift Students: “Well we launched the new drink yesterday and it was super popular and we sold like 40 of them in our shift alone.”
Opening Shift Students: “Yeah, and we had people lined up to get the drink during our shift which is why we were panicking about not having enough cups.”
Mentor: “So we launched a new drink and it was really popular—which is a good thing. But the downside is we ran out of cups prematurely. How can we prevent this in the future?”
Closing Shift Students: “We can count the cups at the end of our shift.”
Opening Shift Students: “Well, that would be helpful, but we might need more than that. Maybe we should order more cups when we know a new drink is being released?”
Closing Shift Students: “Yeah, like in addition to buying the ingredients for the drink, we should double up on the cups.”
Mentor: “It sounds like we are going to track the inventory, which is a good solution, but what I really love is hearing the proactive approach of planning ahead for new drink launches so we avoid this happening in the future. Who is going to own that responsibility?”
Opening Shift Students: “Since the closers are counting inventory, we can take care of ordering and we can order more based on how many we think will sell.”
Closing Shift Students: “You can probably estimate how many will sell if you look back at past sales days when we launched new drinks.”
Mentor: “So to clarify, closing bell will track inventory and opening bell will order proactively. I love it—thanks everyone. The biggest win is I won’t have to rush to the store to buy more cups!”
This example was taken almost verbatim from our own coffee bar here in Cincinnati a few years back. This business, now in its eleventh year of growth, has afforded more opportunities for proactive problem prevention than any classroom assignment I could have conjured. From leaky sinks and dirty refrigerators to inconsistent drink quality and students not showing up for shifts, problems at student-run businesses abound.
The key learning comes in when the business mentor allows the students the opportunities to both put out the immediate fire (stick a bucket under the leaky sink) while also thinking proactively about future fires (fill out a maintenance request with the front office). So often our students go through their elementary and high school experience learning only to be reactive—being proactive takes effort and consideration (as well as time). But it is time well invested and ultimately leads to upstream thinking.
Interested in starting a student-run business on your campus? Reach out to learn more.
You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Stephen Carter for Intrepid Ed News.
