Beyond the Single Cause: Why Influential Leaders Embrace Complexity

You’re in the middle of a crisis or confronting a complex issue. What do you do? Go for the quick solution, or take the time to solve the underlying problem?

Many leaders feel pressure to act swiftly, identify the problem, and offer a clear solution in moments of crisis or complexity.

Stakeholders demand explanations, while senior leaders and boards seek culprits. In this environment, the temptation to reduce problems to a single cause is powerful—and perilous.

Whether it’s a failed product launch, declining employee engagement, or a public scandal, the instinct to simplify can lead leaders to point to one reason. For example: “It was poor execution”, “It was a communication breakdown”, or “It was a rogue employee.”

Identifying one clear culprit—a failed strategy, a non-performing team, or a toxic individual—can feel like progress in these situations.

Yet, such oversimplification risks masking the more profound, systemic issues that must be addressed if an organisation is to learn, recover, and thrive.

For sustainable and influential progress, you should reject the myth of the single cause and embrace a mindset of multi-causal thinking, systemic inquiry, and adaptive decision-making.

Doing so is not just intellectually rigorous—it’s essential.

So, where do you start?

The Single Cause Fallacy

The fallacy of the single cause, also known as causal oversimplification or causal reductionism, is where complex outcomes are mistakenly attributed to a single cause while ignoring other contributing factors.

This concept has been around for centuries, since the time of Aristotle.

It’s a cognitive bias that stems from our natural human preference for simplicity. Complexity taxes our mental resources; simplicity feels manageable and actionable.

However, in organisational settings, this bias can lead to significant blind spots. For example,

• A senior leader attributes falling customer satisfaction to frontline staff performance, ignoring product design flaws, outdated processes, or inadequate training.
• A public official blames a health crisis on individual behaviours, overlooking structural inequalities and policy failures.
• A board pins a failed merger on the CEO’s misjudgement, bypassing due diligence failures and cultural incompatibility.

These narratives provide comfort and clarity—but at a cost.

They miss the interdependencies, interactions, and contradictions that characterise real-world problems. They substitute control for curiosity.

Think deeper: Understand Organisation Bias Before You Make That Strategic Decision

The Case Against Single Cause Thinking

One of the clearest cautionary tales in recent memory is the rise and fall of Theranos.

Once heralded as a revolutionary health-tech startup, the company falsely promised rapid blood testing with just a drop of blood. When the company collapsed under the weight of regulatory scrutiny and internal whistleblowing, its leadership sought to blame isolated issues—technical hurdles, disloyal employees, and external pressures.

Yet, these deflections ignored the systemic dysfunctions that enabled the fraud:

• A culture of secrecy that suppressed dissent.
• Lack of scientific scrutiny and transparency.
• An obsession with image over substance.
• Leadership decisions that consistently prioritised growth over ethics.

By framing the failure as isolated or external, Theranos’ leaders avoided confronting the complex interplay of organisational, technical, and ethical breakdowns. In doing so, they delayed accountability and destroyed trust—internally and externally.

If you want more on this, it’s worth reading John Carreyrou’s fabulous book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.

The tendency to latch onto a singular explanation is not unique to Theranos. It pervades decision-making across industries, sectors and organisations. For example, a dip in customer satisfaction is blamed solely on frontline staff without examining process breakdowns, product issues or leadership communication gaps. A missed innovation opportunity is pinned on a single executive, ignoring cultural aversion to risk, inadequate resources or conflicting incentives. Environmental crises are reduced to one villain while broader systems like supply chains, policies, and industrial behaviour are neglected.

Such an approach results in issues going underground, misdirected solutions and exacerbated problems.

Why We Default to Simplicity

Why is the single cause narrative so appealing?

Firstly, because it’s easier for our brain to process, the less mental effort required, the more persuasive an idea seems.

Secondly, we often seek evidence that aligns with our pre-existing beliefs. Confirmation bias (as I’ve written about before, Progress isn’t a one-way street) is discounting contradictory information because you are already fixated on a likely cause.

Additionally, identifying one cause creates the illusion of control. If there is a single reason, then a single fix must exist. This conclusion is reassuring, particularly in high-stakes scenarios.

Lastly, there is the simplicity of an easy-to-tell story. Narratives with a clear cause-and-effect arc are more straightforward to communicate and more likely to resonate. Complexity doesn’t fit neatly into press releases, internal communication briefings, or board updates.

Yet good leadership demands clarity without distortion.

Strive For Inquiry Over Blame

Influential leaders understand that inquiry trumps blame.

When you face a setback, resist the urge to single out one person, mistake or poor judgement call. Instead, ask yourself and your team:

• What interplay of factors led us here?
• How did our systems enable this outcome?
• What assumptions did we overlook?
• What patterns have we missed?
• What dependencies impacted the outcome?

This kind of reflective questioning is critical. When you attribute failure too narrowly, you not only overlook your accountability but also deprive your team of the opportunity to grow and adapt.

Get unstuck: Stuck in a Rut? 7 Questions to Inspire New Thinking on Your Team

Critical Thinking in a Complex World

Peter Facione, a scholar of critical thinking, offers a framework that helps leaders navigate complexity more effectively.

His model emphasises analysis, interpretation, inference, explanation, evaluation, and self-regulation—each vital to resisting the lure of the single cause.

Applying this framework encourages you to:

• Consider multiple hypotheses
• Ask probing, open-ended questions
• Examine the quality of evidence, not just its convenience
• Recognise personal and organisational biases

Focus on Practice, not Perfection

Remember, practice isn’t about being perfect—it’s about experimentation. This means encouraging your team to test new approaches, make decisions, and reflect on outcomes without fear of blowback.

By treating decision-making as a learning opportunity rather than a test of infallibility, you can better encourage your team to uncover multiple contributing factors to success or failure.

Like scientific inquiry, this iterative process is key to innovation and continuous improvement.

As Theo Dawson suggests in her work on decision-making in VUCA contexts, thinking developmentally is crucial. Leaders must move beyond binary thinking (good vs evil, success vs failure) and instead develop the capacity to navigate ambiguity. This involves recognising that there are often no definitive answers—only better or worse approximations of the truth, refined over time through evidence, dialogue and reflection.

This kind of thinking is uncomfortable. It resists closure. It delays judgement. It demands humility.

Tools for Overcoming Single Cause Bias

So, how can you move beyond single cause thinking? Here are several strategies to apply.

1. Adopt Systems Thinking
Systems thinking encourages you to look at the whole rather than parts. It focuses on patterns, interconnections, and feedback loops. Instead of asking, “What’s the cause?”  ask, “How do these elements interact over time?”

This shift is crucial when dealing with complex problems like cultural change, innovation failure, or stakeholder misalignment.

2. Use Root Cause Analysis (RCA)
RCA is a structured method that digs beneath surface-level symptoms to uncover contributing factors.

Tools like the “5 Whys” or fishbone diagrams can help you and your team explore multiple causes without prematurely settling on a single culprit.

3. Foster Diverse Perspectives
Encourage debate and dissent. Bring together cross-functional teams with different cognitive styles and varying experiences and perspectives. The more lenses you view a problem through, the less likely you are to overlook key causes.

4. Create Safe-to-Fail Environments
Complex systems often defy prediction.

Strive to cultivate a working environment where experimentation is encouraged, failures are learning opportunities, and you replace blame with curiosity. Psychological safety is essential to surfacing hidden problems and systemic insights.

5. Institutionalise Reflection
Regular after-action reviews, pre-mortems, and learning loops embed reflection into organisational routines and team operating rhythms. These processes help teams revisit assumptions, evaluate decisions, and improve continuously.

6. Consider the Ethical Dimension
As mentioned earlier, single-cause narratives can become tools of deflection and denial. When you ignore complexity, you can ignore responsibility, leading to decisions that are not only ineffective but also unethical.

When you embrace complexity, you acknowledge uncertainty not as a weakness but as realism. You build trust by showing stakeholders, colleagues, and team members that you will think deeply rather than go for the quick, easy answer.

Influential leadership is not about eliminating complexity. It’s about engaging with it—courageously, thoughtfully, and systemically.

Single cause explanations are rarely accurate. So, the next time a crisis hits or a decision looms, ask not: “What’s the cause?” Ask instead: “What’s the system at play?” It might just be the most powerful question you ask.

Republished with courtesy from michellegibbings.com.

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