When tackling complex problems, bring together cross-functional teams with different cognitive styles and varying experiences and perspectives. Photo: Freedomsession.com.
When things go wrong in the workplace, the temptation is to find a quick solution and move on. Michelle Gibbings says this is almost always the wrong approach and can lead to more problems later.
You’re in the middle of a workplace crisis. 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; 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 project launch, declining employee engagement, or a public scandal, the instinct to simplify often results in one reason brought forward.
For example: Poor execution; a communication breakdown; a rogue employee.
Identifying one clear culprit can feel like progress, yet such oversimplification risks masking the more profound, systemic issues that must be addressed.
For sustainable and influential progress, you should reject the myth of a single cause and embrace a mindset of multi-causal thinking, systemic inquiry, and adaptive decision-making.
So, where do you start?
The single-cause fallacy: This is where complex outcomes are mistakenly attributed to a single cause while ignoring other contributing factors.
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. As in these examples.
A public official blames a health crisis on individual behaviour, overlooking structural inequalities and policy failures.
A board pins a failed merger on the chief executive’s misjudgment, bypassing due diligence failures and cultural incompatibility.
These narratives miss the interdependencies, interactions, and contradictions that characterise real-world problems. They substitute control for curiosity.
Why we default to simplicity: 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 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: When you face a setback, resist the urge to single out one person, mistake, or poor judgment 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?
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.
Focus on practice, not perfection: 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.
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 judgment. It demands humility.
So, how can you move beyond single-cause thinking? Here are several strategies to apply.
Adopt systems thinking: This 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.
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.
Create safe-to-fail environments: 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.
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.
Consider the ethical dimension: 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.
Michelle Gibbings is a Melbourne-based workplace expert and an award-winning author. She’s on a mission to help leaders, teams and organisations create successful workplaces – where people thrive and progress is accelerated. Contact her at [email protected].
