Humans basically can’t deal with 2 things going wrong at once. Especially if they might require 2 coordinated actions to fix. We are wedded to single-factor explanations of problems and single-intervention solutions. Politics is SISO (single input single output) narratives.
Conversation
The biggest complex system accidents always seem to happen when 2 things go wrong at once: a common failure and a rare one. Cf normal accidents
This is one of my favorite pieces of reading on the subject. Chapter 5 is so gripping: energy.gov/sites/prod/fil
1

