Multiple causes, multiple consequences - Part 1

“What is Fate?” Mulla Nasrudin was once asked by a scholar.

“An endless succession of intertwined events, each influencing the other”, he replied.

The scholar raised a sceptical eyebrow: “I can’t accept that. I believe in cause and effect”.

“Very well”, said the Mulla and drew his attention to a procession of people, leading a man to be hanged. “Is that man going to die because someone gave him the money that let him buy the knife he used for murder, or because someone saw him do it, or because nobody stopped him?”

~Idries Shah

As the above story shows causality isn't a simple concept. There may be factors that contributed to the particular event but which could equally have resulted in no serious consequences. There may have been inhibiting factors that ceased to act. There may have been a confluence of factors that each had little or no impact but which together were disastrous. A situation may have been in a delicate balance that was tipped by something of comparatively minor importance (the straw that broke the camel's back, the butterfly effect)

Sometimes responsibility can be muddied by questions about causality:

Three people Alfred, Bob and Charlie were crossing a desert and they stopped at an oasis when night fell.. Alfred hated Charlie and decided to kill him, so in the middle of the night wile the others slept, he got up and poisoned the water in Charlie's canteen. Bob also wanted to kill Charlie and, not knowing that Charlie's canteen had been already poisoned, and got up in the early hours of the morning while the others slept and made a hole in Charlie's canteen, so that the water slowly leaked out. The next morning the three went their separate ways and a few days later Charlie died of thirst. Who was the murderer - Alfred or Bob? Or to put it another way: who caused Charlie's death?

In a case like this, it is clear that if neither had acted then Charlie may still have been alive. Yet neither individually caused his death. He didn't die of poisoning so Alfred is not individually responsible, yet if Bob had not acted Charlie would have died anyway as a result of Alfred's actions.

This kind of thing happens all the time in organisations. One person fails to act to prevent the problem or to put controls in place that would have identified it early enough to ameliorate it, another person acts in a way that would have been harmful to the organisation, except that a third person's action neutralised their contribution without preventing the final disastrous outcome. So who is responsible? In the end what purpose is served by assigning blame? Perhaps it is better to work out what factors facilitated and inhibited the final outcome and how the balance changed so that that outcome occurred.

There are a lot of questions we can ask ourselves to try and determine what happened:

• Why did this problem occur?
• Why did it happen now?
• What previously prevented it from happening?
• What occurred that hadn't previously occurred?
• What didn't happen that would usually have happened? (e.g. maybe a person was absent whose actions would normally have prevented the problem)
• Was there a catalyst (i.e. something that either promoted or inhibited what occurred while not being directly involved)
• What near misses previously occurred?
• What did we do about them, if anything?
• How much of this was wishful thinking? For instance, did we put controls in place when we really had no idea of what the causes were in the hope that doing something was better than doing nothing?

But essentially, we need to move away from a simplistic:

A caused H

towards a more nuanced understanding of causality:

{A,B and C} plus {the presence of D} plus {the absence of E,F and G} caused H.

It is only when we can understand a situation in this way that we can effectively deal with it and deal with its deepest roots rather than its superficial symptoms.

One of the most difficult aspects of this is recognising what didn't happen. This will be the subject of Part 2 of this article.

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• A film worth watching to see how complex and difficult to trace causality can be is the French film Happenstance where the circumstances under which two of the protagonists meet at the end of the film are the result of a complex chain of random events.
• There are many many episodes of the TV series Seinfeld where a final outcome occurs as a result of a convergence of unrelated events in different characters lives. (e.g the episode where Kramer hitting golf balls out to sea results in George's deception about being a marine biologist being exposed.)
• Also of interest: "Accidents at sea: Multiple Causes and Impossible Consequences"