When some big, messy, complex system breaks down, there is •never• a single smoking gun.See how.complexsystems.fail item 7: “Post-accident attribution to a ‘root cause’ is fundamentally wrong.”It’s never enough for just one thing to go wrong, or just one component to fail; if a single point of failure •does• in fact bring everything down, then that in itself is a sign of a multitude of other failures.2/

![7. Post-accident attribution to a ‘root cause’ is fundamentally wrong.

Because overt failure requires multiple faults, there is no isolated ‘cause’ of an accident. There are multiple contributors to accidents. Each of these is necessarily insufficient in itself to create an accident. Only jointly are these causes sufficient to create an accident. Indeed, it is the linking of these causes together that creates the circumstances required for the accident. Thus, no isolation of the ‘root cause’ of an accident is possible. The evaluations based on such reasoning as ‘root cause’ do not reflect a technical understanding of the nature of failure but rather the social, cultural need to blame specific, localized forces or events for outcomes.

Anthropological field research provides the clearest demonstration of the social construction of the notion of ‘cause’ (cf. Goldman L (1993), The Culture of Coincidence: accident and absolute liability in Huli, New York: Clarendon Press; and also Tasca L (1990), The Social Construction of Human Error, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Stonybrook)](https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/117/616/100/662/733/950/original/f936e6faae92cd2c.png)