Teamwork: Stop Looking for the Root Cause and Move Forward

The team

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I teach management skills at a university business school in Toronto. My students and I were looking at some common leadership challenges in teams, and one story really got us thinking.

This is a common story that I have heard many times from organizational leaders: A team member is late with a deliverable, and the leader asks, “Why?” The answer refers to another team member, and another “why?" leads to a third employee, etc. Every attempt to look back in time leads to an additional, ineffectual “why?”

Soon, it becomes clear that a search for "why" is a dead end. An organizational team exists in a system, and in systems, there cannot be a single answer to "why." There cannot be a single root cause.

A team leader who asks, “Why are you late with the stuff?” can never really get a correct or useful answer. How far back in a story can one go? Will "whys" provide the leader with the late stuff? Is there a place in the stream of "whys" where we can stop, see the cause, and then be able to address it?

Let’s say a team did not complete a deliverable. After asking “why?” it is revealed that an interruption regarding another priority explains the late deliverable. Now what?

Unfortunately, when attempts to address issues like this one tend to follow this backward-gazing pattern, there will inevitably be frustration, blame, and wasted time.

There are better ways to approach a "late delivery of a task" problem. They begin with understanding and seeing "systems" and how they work.

Seeing Systems

Fortunately, some insight lies in seeing and understanding the workplace’s complex "social" system.

A workplace is an ever-changing collection of interconnections. Small actions in one part have unpredictable impacts on the whole. The consequences may seem like they have one single ‘root’ cause, but they don't.

Imagine a flock of starlings flying in a synchronized pattern. The individual birds make decisions based on simple rules without any central leadership. This produces a pattern that seems organized and understandable, even though technically it is not.

The outputs of a complex system—whether a late deliverable or the complex flocking of birds—are what behavioural scientists call emergence. This is a set of outcomes, patterns, or processes that are unpredictable based solely on the components that created them. (See this video for an excellent explanation of emergence.)

Management consultant and researcher Dave Snowdon refers to emergence as an outcome that is "dynamic, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and solutions can’t be imposed; rather, they arise from the circumstances.”

Understanding the emergence of a system can help leaders see systems. It can highlight that not always one thing causes an outcome, but many.

Complex systems in workplaces make many problems—like team problems—impossible to understand, predict, or control. Instead, they demand a different approach—one that is not based on causal, linear, hierarchal, command-and-control solutions. So, where can leaders begin with a problem like this?

Challenging Assumptions

An assumption is something we take for granted as true or important without a lot of certainty. When other problem-solving approaches fail, challenging our assumptions can help us develop insightful solutions. It can help us "get out of our own heads."

This approach is an alternative way to look at a problem when we simply cannot see all the parts. Of course, in a social system, we can never see all the parts.

Here are a few assumptions to challenge about teams and teamwork:

1. When things go wrong in the workplace, it’s usually because of one single thing done wrong. If we just find it, we can fix it, and all will be well.
2. Employees can always discover why things go wrong (or right) because there is always one root cause.
3. Every problem or unexpected outcome has one correct solution waiting to be discovered.

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Looking at these assumptions and asking, “Is this necessarily true?” can provide some insight beyond our untested assumptions. We might realize that asking “why?” in a team task is not a fruitful approach and that we should try something else. For example, we may discover that:

1. If finding one cause is not possible, we can try to focus on the present circumstances—a late deliverable—and try to discover how to make it less late.
2. A leader can save time, effort, and even frustration by asking “How can we…?” questions.
3. We could discover that causes don’t necessarily point to solutions.

Ease Up on Asking “Why”

Asking “why” in a complex social system leads to cognitive distortions. These are characterized by oversimplified thinking, overgeneralization, or conclusions based not on facts but on untested assumptions. They are adaptive, emotional, automatic reactions to events that we do not totally understand. But they can lead to systematic errors when applied to complex systems like organizations.

We get even deeper into assumptions when we try to find out whose "fault" it is. We fool ourselves by calling it a “root cause analysis.” We create further problems if we point out what “should have” been done or what we claim we “would have” done.

These kinds of reactions are common among otherwise good leaders, but they are irrelevant and useless. You can’t go back in time. You can’t become someone else. Instead, leaders need to change the questions.

Moving forward comes from questions that directly challenge cognitive distortions, like:

• “What is the evidence that this automatic thought is true, and what evidence is there that it is not?”
• “I have assumed the worst, but what’s the best that could happen?”
• “Is this thought based on opinion or fact?”
• “If I answer this (why) question, will anything change?”

Some questions leaders and team members can ask questions within the team:

• “What can we do now, and how can we do it?”
• “That sucks. How can I help?”
• “Is there a way to delay this deliverable deadline?”

Or the leader could switch to more specific questions, like:

• “How much time is there before the deadline? Maybe we can find another way.”
• “Is there data that could suffice in the short term?”

Systems thinking can be exceptionally helpful in the leadership and management of teams.

Leaders would benefit from eliminating the habit of causal thinking, root causes, and linear, simplified tales of blame and fault, especially when they don’t move us forward, which is most of the time.