Why We Don’t Solve Root Causes

Insight

Even when leaders know they’re stuck treating symptoms, they feel trapped. Budgets, timelines, and politics pull them downstream. Root cause work requires a long view, but public delivery rewards short-term performance.

Here’s what social impact leaders are up against:

• Root causes take 5–10 years to solve. Elections turn over every 2–4 years.
• Funding is siloed—education, health, justice—while root causes cut across all of them.
• Success is measured in short-term outputs, not long-term prevention.
• And even when leaders see the path, they face public pressure for quick, visible wins - not upstream investment.

The result is a system optimized for treatment over prevention.

So how do we work around that?

Insight in Practice

Addressing root causes is a two-part challenge.

First, identify the root cause and make the case for tackling it. Clear communication builds support.

Second, design strategies that make space for upstream work - even inside systems built for fire-fighting.

2 Methods for Spotting Root Causes in Complex Systems

• Study what works against the odds.
  Look for what's working despite the system. When you find people who succeed despite structural disadvantage, study what they had to overcome - those friction points reveal root causes. Example: Kids who succeed academically despite poverty often have one adult who helped them navigate bureaucratic systems.
  
  These workarounds point to what the system could do better, by design.
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• Look between silos.
  Education leaders search for education solutions. Health leaders look for health solutions. The highest-leverage causes aren’t inside sectors—they’re between them. Example: Youth justice challenges often stem from education gaps and housing instability, not the justice system itself.
  
  Look at the intersections. That’s where the real leverage lives.

3 Practical Ways to Weave Root Cause Work into Delivery

• Make the cost visible.
  Want to get prevention funded? Show what it saves. Formulate it like this: "If we prevent X% of this problem, we avoid $Y in crisis response costs over Z years." Example: Every $1 invested in high-quality early childhood programs saves $7–13 across health, education, and criminal justice.
  
  When stakeholders see the math, prevention becomes smart accounting.

• Find specific high-leverage points.
  Not just “early childhood,” but: “Quality childcare for working parents in X neighborhoods prevents housing instability, improves school readiness, and boosts family mobility.” The more specific, the more compelling.
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• Think in systems.
  Aim for compounding impact. You can read more about how to find high-leverage points in different contexts here.
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• To improve coordination, start in the middle.
  Look for the mid-level people who would welcome coordination (usually program managers) and work with them to create informal partnerships that prove the value before asking executives to formalize anything. This way, instead of trying to convince agencies to coordinate, you design systems where coordination becomes easier than working alone.

Perspectives

Most recurring problems don’t have a single root cause, they have a tangle of them. That’s why it helps to identify and address them from multiple angles.

Instead of asking “why?” five times in a straight line, this approach asks three different types of “why”—focused on prevention, detection, and recovery.

• “Why measures that might have prevented a threat didn’t work or work in time;
• Why measures that might have detected a threat before it went wrong didn’t work or work in time;
• Why recovery measures that might have reduced the impact of a problem didn’t work or work in time.

You can see how an analogy with the roots of a plant is useful.
‍"If you don’t find and pull out all the roots, the plant grows back.”
— Beyond the Five Whys: Root Cause Analysis and Systems Thinking, James C. Paterson

Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to see the system clearly. Fresh eyes—especially those trained in structured analysis—can surface assumptions and blind spots teams may miss.

“Involving outsiders can be helpful, since they’re often coming to the issue cold. A good way to prompt the team to consider alternative scenarios is by asking “What if…?” and “How might we…?” questions. For example, ask your team, “What if we had access to unlimited resources to tackle this issue?” or “How might better collaboration between departments or teams help us tackle this issue?”
— To Solve a Tough Problem, Reframe It, Harvard Business Review

These kinds of prompts help teams break out of reactive mindsets and imagine systemic solutions.

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Question to Consider

If your initiative could tackle one root cause that unlocks progress in three other systems, what would that be?

Quote of The Week

“Obvious problems rarely have obvious solutions.”
— Malcolm Gladwell