Have a quick look at the small cause and effect branch. Is the logic sound?
Can it be that in reality effects 1-3 are valid, but effect 4 is not?
We can come up with various explanations of insufficiency in the above logic. For instance, if the clients are not free to make their own decisions, like in totalitarian countries, then could be that the regime prefers something else. Another explanation might be that the brand name of Product P1 is much less known.
The generic point is: the vast majority of the practical cause and effect connections are not 100% valid.
In other words, most good logical branches are valid only statistically, because they might be impacted by uncertain additional effects that distort the main cause-and-effect. Actually the uncertainty represents insufficiencies we are not aware of, or we know about them but we cannot confirm whether they exist or not in our reality. For all practical purposes there is no difference between uncertainty and information we are not able to get.
This recognition has ramifications. Suppose we have a series of logical arrows:
eff1 –> eff2 –> eff3 –> eff4 –> eff5
If every arrow is 90% valid (it is true in 90% of the cases) then the long arrow from eff1 to eff5 is only 60% valid.
The point is that while we should use cause-and-effect because it is much better than to ignore it, we can never be sure we know! The real negative branch of using the TP to outline various potential impacts is that frustrated people could blame the TP and its logic and refrain from using it in the future. This false logic says: if ([I behave according to the TP branch] à [Sometimes I do not get the expected effect]) then [I stop using the TP].
The way to deal with this serious and damaging negative branch is to institute the role of uncertainty in our life and the idea that partial information is still better than no information – provided we take the limitations of being partial seriously. We can never be sure that whatever we do will bring benefits. However, when we use good logic then most-of-the-time we’ll get much better benefits than the total damage.
It’d be even better to consider the possibility of something going wrong in every step we do. This would guide us to check the results and re-check the logic when the result is different than what we have expected. It is always possible that there is a flaw in our logic and in such a case we better fix the flawed part and gain better logical understanding of the cause-and-effect. When we do not see any flaw in our logic – there is still room for certain crazy insufficiency to mess our life and this is the price we pay for living with uncertainty.