When Cause and Effect Can’t Be Seen

This is the third in a series examining the assumptions behind how organisations think about leadership accountability. The first piece looked at what Gallup's data actually shows. The second examined why performance is not the leader's problem to solve alone.

Most accountability frameworks share a quiet assumption: that if you can define what good performance looks like, measure whether it's happening, and identify who is responsible for it, you have what you need. Set the standard, track the gap, hold the right person to account.

In certain kinds of environments, this is a reasonable model. The difficulty is that most organisations are not operating in those environments, and applying ordered-system thinking to complex-system problems doesn't produce incomplete answers. It produces confidently wrong ones.

The terrain most leaders are actually in

David Snowden's Cynefin framework, developed over decades of work on how people make decisions in different problem contexts, distinguishes between four fundamentally different kinds of systems. In clear systems, the relationship between cause and effect is obvious. Best practice applies, and experience is enough to navigate well. In complicated systems, cause and effect exist but require analysis to discern. You need the right people asking the right questions. In complex systems, the relationship between cause and effect is only visible in retrospect. Patterns emerge from interactions. The same action produces different outcomes depending on conditions you can't fully observe in advance. In chaotic situations, there is no discernible cause and effect at all. You act first to restore some order, then make sense of what follows.

The accountability model most organisations rely on was designed for the clear and complicated domains. It assumes that if performance falls short, you can trace a path back to the decisions and behaviours that caused it, and that adjusting those decisions and behaviours will produce different results next time.

In complex systems, this assumption breaks down. Not because accountability stops mattering, but because the causal story is rarely as clean as the model requires.

What gets lost when we apply the wrong frame

Peter Senge, in The Fifth Discipline, identified a recurring pattern he called "shifting the burden." It describes what happens when a system problem is difficult to solve at its root: organisations apply a symptomatic fix that reduces the pressure to find the fundamental solution. The fix works well enough in the short term, which makes the underlying problem harder to see and less urgent to address.

The relevance here is direct. When performance falls short in a complex organisation, locating accountability in the leader is a symptomatic response. It relieves pressure on the system itself: the structures, incentives, cultural patterns, and feedback loops that are actually shaping what happens. Leaders may work harder on the behaviours the accountability framework targets, and some improvement follows, which reinforces the belief that the framework is working. Meanwhile the conditions that make performance genuinely difficult remain unchanged and largely unexamined.

Senge also wrote about what he called "the illusion of taking charge." This is the tendency for forceful, directive action to feel like solving a problem even when it is primarily reorganising or displacing it. Leader-centric accountability, pressed hard enough, can generate exactly this illusion: visible activity, renewed vigour, short-term movement in the numbers, without ever touching the deeper patterns that will reproduce the original problem in a different form.

Emergence and the limits of attribution

Boulton, Allen and Bowman, writing in Embracing Complexity, go further. They argue that complex adaptive systems, which include most organisations of any meaningful size, exhibit properties that make conventional cause-and-effect attribution not just difficult but often actively misleading.

Emergence is one of these properties. In complex systems, outcomes arise from the interaction of many agents, each responding to local conditions, in ways that are not predictable from the behaviour of any single part. What a team produces is not simply the sum of individual contributions directed by a capable leader. It is something that arises from relationships, informal dynamics, organisational history, and external conditions, many of which are invisible to the people inside them.

Path dependency is another. Where a system ends up is shaped by where it has been. A team that struggled to build trust twelve months ago will respond differently to an accountability conversation today than one that hasn't carried that history. The leader entering that room is not working from a blank slate, and the outcome of their intervention is not theirs alone to determine.

When we attribute performance outcomes primarily to the leader's skill and intent, we are selecting the most visible actor in a complex system and assigning them the explanatory weight the whole system actually carries. This can feel satisfying. It creates clear lines of responsibility and obvious intervention points. But it regularly generates confident conclusions about the wrong things, and confident action that misses what matters.

What accountability looks like when you take complexity seriously

None of this makes accountability irrelevant. But it changes what accountability is for, and what it looks like in practice.

In complex systems, the more useful accountability question is rarely who is responsible for this outcome? It sits closer to: what did we learn from this, what conditions shaped it, and what do we need to understand before we act? This is what Snowden describes as the probe-sense-respond logic of complex domains: creating the conditions to learn from what happens rather than designing outcomes in advance and measuring people against them.

It also changes what leaders are accountable for. Not for outcomes they can't fully control, but for the quality of the conditions they create and sustain. The degree of safety in which honest information travels. The capacity within the team to surface patterns and make sense of what is happening. The willingness to pause before attributing outcomes, and to look at what the system is producing before deciding what the individual failed to do.

This is more demanding than it sounds. It requires leaders to develop a different relationship to uncertainty: to stay present to what's happening rather than retreating into the reassurance of clean targets and clear lines of responsibility when things get difficult.

Complexity and uncertainty are outer-world realities, but capacity is built from within. The leaders who navigate complex systems well tend to be the ones who have done the inner work to stay anchored when the picture isn't clear, rather than the ones who push hardest on the frameworks designed for a simpler terrain.

Staying with complexity rather than simplifying it away is not a soft skill. It may be the hardest thing the work asks.

The final piece in this series takes on the paradox that accountability conversations almost never reach: why genuine accountability requires freedom, and what organisations lose when they treat the two as opposites.

Chris Spinks is the director of NOBIS, an executive coaching and leadership development practice working with individuals, teams, and organisations navigating complexity and change.