The recent UK riots in London and other UK cities have provided yet another tragically typical illustration of how we collectively fail to make sense of complex situations. Anyone living in the UK during August will have faced a bombardment of media-driven hand-wringing by politicians, sociologists and, as is increasingly the trend these days, any member of the public fame-hungry enough to force their way to the front of the camera lens.  All follow the usual frustrating patterns of Socratic debate: someone puts forward a theory – ‘it was pure criminality’ to take one of the more facile political comments – so that a panel of so-called experts can all debate it, no doubt concluding some time later that, well, actually that’s where the whole shebang falls dead on its knees, because there is no conclusion. The person still proposing their theory sticks by it, and those with their opposing theory stick by theirs. And likewise the poor punter watching at home doesn’t change theirs and probably spends the remainder of the evening either quietly seething at the ‘inadequacy of our politicians’ or writing them yet another strongly worded and utterly futile letter.

A big problem with any of these kinds of either/or debate is that invariably the answer turns out to be ‘neither’. Or ‘a bit of both’. To put it another way, every time we debate an either/or question, we’ve asked the wrong question. And because we’ve asked the wrong question, we will inevitably find ourselves crumbling into incoherence and, usually, more conflict than we started with, because unfortunately another sad human trait in these kinds of complex situations is we use debate to merely confirm our already existing views and prejudices.

We can thank Socrates and Plato for this. Not that the style of debating they formulated was necessarily a bad thing. Merely incomplete. Their big omission was a failure to recognise the characteristics of complex systems.

In the Socratic world of the societal commentators, we are encouraged to find ‘the’ root cause of a problem. Because we get this drive for root cause analysis drummed into us all the time, we tend to allow ourselves to believe it is a good thing to go and find. Indeed a whole industry of ‘root cause analysts’ earn a living from the assumption we’ve all made.

What we lay-people and those professionals all – alas – do when we go in search of ‘the’ root cause is make a key unwritten assumption: the assumption that if we dig far enough, we will find this single, beautifully formed problem statement. The belief is a fallacy. Particularly so when we are dealing with a complex system. And any system involving more than one human being is inherently complex. It is a fallacy because:

1. By seeking out one definitive root cause we fundamentally eliminate all of the other ‘non-root-cause’ candidates. By doing that we then fail to recognise that simplifying a problem by merely eliminating a bunch of inconvenient stuff means we fail to understand the relationships between one potential reason and each other. Physicist Niels Bohr famously said, ‘every complex problem has a simple wrong answer’. What he meant by this was that it is simply invalid to look at a problem like the August Riots and simply reject a statement like ‘pure criminality’ because you don’t think it’s the root cause. Pure criminality may well not be (actually ‘isn’t’ as we’ll see later) the root cause of this particular problem, but that doesn’t mean you can simply ignore it as a factor in defining the real problem. At least, not if you genuinely wish to find a way forward.
2. The second evil of root cause analysisis that we will often find ourselves conducting a lot of work to find our root cause only to realise we either cannot solve it, or (usually worse) we discover it is beyond our gift to solve it.

As if this first root-cause fallacy is bad enough, there is a second even more difficult one we ought to worry about. This second one is more insidious than the first because it is so often never even considered, it being something so ‘obvious’ we assume it almost completely subconsciously. The unwritten fallacious assumption in this case is that, having found our golden root cause, if we’re smart we will be able to solve it and deliver a magical, silver-bullet solution. This search for ‘the’ solution fallacy inevitably also ends in disappointment when we’re dealing with complex systems. There is no such thing as ‘the’ solution in any complex system in fact. No sooner have you mouthed your own ‘the solution’ to a complex problem, someone else will invariably come back with one or a list of ‘yes, but’ rebuttals. So we hear on the news from, invariably in this case, the Conservative side of the political spectrum that ‘making an example of the looters’ will solve the riot problem. A statement that will immediately have the Left of the house shaking their heads and crying, ‘yes, but that’s simply solving a symptom’ or ‘the looters will turn criminalisation into a badge of gang-pride’. Or indeed a hundred other reasons. And so we all get confused and end up keeping on doing what we’ve always done… which in the UK tends to mean ‘nothing’.

A well known management aphorism, supposedly to help people change, is ‘if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got’. It sounds really neat and utterly common-sensical. But again the statement is a complete fallacy in a complex system. In a complex system if you keep doing what you’ve been doing you might get the answer you’ve always got, but one day you definitely won’t.

So?

Well, so far, this might have sounded like the same sort of blitherings we hear on the news. It could be read as merely another lay person’s pointless ‘yes, but’ on the whole Riot story.

Fortunately it isn’t. It isn’t because for the last 16 years this lay-person has been running a research team that spends pretty much all of their time looking at these kinds of ‘yes, but’ problems and seeing how people set about solving them. As in really solving them. 3.5 million data-points later, here’s what we’ve learned about complex problems:

Define the problem you’d like to understand better.

In this case, we defined the problem statement as ‘the August Riots escalated because…’ We don’t at this stage know whether this is the ‘right’ question, but we at least know it is an interesting one, it is a better question that ‘what triggered the riots?’ – that was quite clearly the tragic shooting of Mike Duggan by the police. Lots of events like this don’t end up in thousands of people being arrested – hence why did the rioting escalate seems the more pertinent from a societal perspective – for the family of Mr Duggan, an even more interesting question might be ‘the police shot Mike because…’ (in which case exactly the same process we’re about to go through would apply just as well).

Having formulated the question, the next thing we need to do is go and get peoples’ opinion about the answer to the problem.