Attending to Cause and Effect in Complex Systems

 

(These are some notes from the Disciplined Agile FLEX alpha workshop under development)

When looking for cause and effect one must remember there may be multiple causes. Hence, if you fix one thing you may not get the result you want because other things may be going wrong. Consider building a bridge. It requires attending to compression strength (think concrete) and tensile strength (think support cables). Failure in either one will result in failure. Hence, doing one right thing doesn’t guarantee success, but doing one wrong thing often guarantees failure.

The trick is to look at things as a system, and improve something that either leads to improvement or leads to the discovery of something else required.

Root cause analysis is not to get to the root causes, it’s to learn what’s going on. If multiple causes are in play you can pick which one will most likely improve things or lead to learning which can lead to improvement. Or which may get improvement at low cost. 

Also, consider which actions to take on how they affect others. In solution development actions upstream often have an effect on downstream work. MBIs can lead to less work hitting downstream teams which increases efficiency in and of itself. It also creates space for learning.