Cheap Root Cause Analysis?

Cheaper is rarely better

I saw this picture today, and I thought about how people often make decisions based entirely on direct cost. For some things, we make a deliberate analysis of the long-range costs, benefits, and applicability of a product. For example, when we buy a new car, we might decide to pass on a particular brand of vehicle based on what we know (or at least, what we have heard) about the quality of that vehicle, its features, its reliability, and the fit to what we need. Remember the Yugo? I don’t see many of them on the road any more!

And yet, when we are making the decision on the best way to improve the health and safety of our coworkers, we seem to jump right on, “What does it cost?” I heard someone in Australia just the other day tell me about an RCA “methodology” that is being evaluated for use in some for their critical improvement programs. I asked why they were considering this other method. Does it work better? The answer made me sad. “Well, no, we don’t think it works as well as TapRooT®. Using [this other system] gives pretty ambiguous results, depending on who is using it. But it’s a little bit cheaper, so my manager wants to go that way.”

This doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me. If you can save 10%, but get poor results, what have you actually saved? I encourage you to look at the costs of even a single “simple” incident, and then bounce that against a few percent savings in poor-quality training.  I think you’ll find that the initial savings are lost in the noise.

You wouldn’t buy a car based solely on price. I encourage you to take the same due diligence when you are selecting an RCA program that has the potential to save the lives of your teammates.