NOTES · 1
Ask a group to list what is wrong and then vote on what matters most, and the winner is almost always the thing everyone can see. A warehouse names picking errors. An emergency department names waiting times. A ministry names public trust. Each of those is real, and each is a consequence: something further back produces it.
Kevin Dye gave this a name: the erroneous priorities effect. In complex situations, the problems people rank highest are reliably the ones furthest downstream. What hurts most is what is most visible, and what is most visible is rarely where it starts. Salience runs opposite to depth.
John Warfield added the second half, spreadthink: put fifteen informed people in a room and their individual priorities barely overlap. Not because anyone is wrong, but because a complex situation holds more than one person can. In our runs, 61–89% of all proposed items receive at least one vote. Dispersion is the normal state of a room, not a failure of it.
You cannot score a real room, because no real room has an answer key. A simulation can. We built an organisation with twenty problems, five of which really are the deep causes, and had fifteen people work through it two hundred times per setting, deciding each pair the way True Causes does: at 75% of the votes cast.
When the room is not misled by what hurts, stopping at the vote names 3.1 of the 5 real causes, while building a map of what influences what names 4.3. Even an unbiased room does better by mapping, because a pairwise question at 75% is a better instrument than a ranking.
When the room ranks purely by what it feels, the vote names none of the five, and building a map on top rescues only 0.2. A cause dropped at the ballot cannot be recovered later: once an item fails the vote, no amount of careful structuring brings it back.
Voting is fine for choosing among options. It is the wrong tool for finding causes, because it measures salience and calls it priority. The fix is not a better vote. It is to ask a different question: for each pair of problems, does one significantly influence the other? The deepest causes are the ones everything else traces back to, and they are often the cards nobody voted for.