If you hear a dripping sound and you look up to see a wet stain on the ceiling, it’s natural to think there’s a leak in the room above.

Possible, but not a guarantee.

Water travels. Water entering a roof on one side of a building may travel down the interior of the walls and across the spaces between floor and ceiling before dripping into a room. A leak on the east side may turn into a drip on the north side.

Lots of problems are like this; the source isn’t what we immediately see, and it’s not even on the other side of what’s in front of us.

Sometimes problems have distant sources. That’s useful to remember whether we’re considering a water ring on the ceiling ... or a power outage, or a drought in the American west, or a manager in the next office.

To find the source, we sometimes have to look far and deep.