What does bad root cause analysis cost?

Have you ever thought about this question?

An obvious answer is $$$BILLIONS.

Let’s look at one example.

The BP Texas City refinery explosion was extensively investigated and the root cause analysis of BP was found to be wanting. But BP didn’t learn. They didn’t implement advanced root cause analysis and apply it across all their business units. They didn’t learn from smaller incidents in the offshore exploration organization. They didn’t prevent the BP Deepwater Horizon accident. What did the Deepwater Horizon accident cost BP? The last estimate I saw was $22 billion. The costs have probably grown since then.

I would argue that ALL major accidents are at least partially caused by bad root cause analysis and not learning from past experience.

EVERY industrial fatality could be prevented if we learned from smaller precursor incidents.

EVERY hospital sentinel event could be prevented (and that’s estimated at 200,000 fatalities per year in the US alone) if hospitals applied advanced root cause analysis and learned from patient safety incidents.

Why don’t companies and managers do better root cause analysis and develop effective fixes? A false sense of saving time and effort. They don’t want to invest in improvement until something really bad happens. They kid themselves that really bad things won’t happen because they haven’t happened yet. They can’t see that investing in the best root cause analysis training is something that leads to excellent performance and saving money.

Yet that is what we’ve proven time and again when clients have adopted advanced root cause analysis and paid attention to their performance improvement efforts.

The cost of the best root cause analysis training and performance improvement efforts are a drop in the bucket compared to any major accident. They are even cheap compared to repeat minor and medium risk incidents.

I’m not promising something for nothing. Excellent performance isn’t free. It takes work to learn from incidents, implement effective fixes, and stop major accidents. Then, when you stop having major accidents, you can be lulled into a false sense of security that causes you to cut back your efforts to achieve excellence.

If you want to learn advanced root cause analysis with a guaranteed training, attend of our upcoming public TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis Training courses.

Here is the course guarantee:

Attend the course. Go back to work and use what you have learned to analyze accidents,
incidents, near-misses, equipment failures, operating issues, or quality problems.
If you don’t find root causes that you previously would have overlooked
and if you and your management don’t agree that the corrective actions that you
recommend are much more effective, just return your course materials/software
and we will refund the entire course fee.

Don’t be “penny wise and pound foolish.” Learn about advanced root cause analysis and apply it to save lives, prevent environmental damage, improve equipment reliability, and achieve operating excellence.