Friday Jokes
Friday Jokes are memes, videos, and anything funny! Tune in every week for another joke that may (or may not) relate to root cause analysis.
Changing His Tune
05/18/2026
The supervisor when I make a mistake: 👹
The supervisor when he makes a mistake: ☺️
Human error can be frustrating for the entire team. Management can get sick of dealing with recurring incidents, and operations can feel like their discipline is unfair. Here’s how to balance enforcement and fairness:
🧠 Understand Our Biases
Actor-Observer Bias is the natural tendency to blame internal characteristics (laziness, incompetency) when others make mistakes, but to blame external characteristics (workload, stress level) when we make mistakes.
With this heuristic in mind, an incident investigator should focus more on evidence than personal opinions.
⚠️ Avoid Inconsistency
If a supervisor can avoid repercussions from the same mistake that got an operator disciplined, the workforce will notice.
Always give the involved employee the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise, when someone trusted makes the same error, inconsistent enforcement will be interpreted as favoritism.
🔧 Fix Systems, Not People
Discipline achieves nothing if someone is bound to make the same mistake later down the line. Instead of warning or punishing workers, investigators should work to create better human factors design.
Don’t let human error be a bed of thorns. Nurture your event-learning into a stronger system!
I Must Break You
05/08/2026
Operator error can feel intimidating, especially for your poor equipment.
Many technicians mistakenly end Failure Analysis (FA) at human error. Incorrect use will break equipment, yes, but the root causes stem deeper. Here are a few areas to investigate:
🖋️ Procedural Discrepancies
Double check if your procedures are all correct and up-to-date with your latest equipment upgrades.
Even if the procedures are technically accurate, a confusing format or inaccessible location will facilitate mistakes, too.
📋 No SPAC Enforcement
A strong set of procedures won’t achieve anything if they aren’t being enforced. Is your management team conducting regular audits?
🤷 Poor Human Engineering
A nonintuitive interface will always invite misuse, no matter how many times the supervisor says to “be more careful.”
Investigate the equipment’s labels, displays, and controls to see if the complexity can be reduced.
The Code
05/01/2026
Are your company policies rules or suggestions? Here’s why enforcement matters:
🌀 The Normalization of Deviance
If we tolerate even a smidge of noncompliance, then someone will decide a smidge over the smidge is acceptable, and so on.
Enforcement needs to be soon and certain for any violation. (And that entails investigation BEFORE discipline!)
😒 The Illusion of Safety in Familiarity
Even if our rules are well-communicated, their importance fades as workers become desensitized to their everyday hazards.
Management needs to understand violations may stem from our natural heuristics, rather than a lack of care or competency.
❗ The Role of Rules
Rules are important, but administrative controls are a relatively weak safeguard compared to engineering controls or hazard reduction.
Your systems should embrace human behavior instead of attempting to fix it.
Too Much
04/24/2026
Take it from us: there IS such a thing as too much RCA. If you feel you’re spending too much time on investigations, consider the following advice:
🚫 Stop when there’s nothing more to learn.
For low-to-medium risk investigations, the TapRooT® Process asks the following question after the evidence collection phase: “Is there anything more to learn?”
If the problem wasn’t any deeper than a paper cut or a dead bulb, your time is better spent elsewhere.
👋 Say something!
Leadership can’t fix a time-consuming reporting system if no one brings it up.
It might be tempting to just disregard the company policy if common sense says not to investigate something small, but that attitude can easily snowball into a culture of distrust and dishonesty.
🤝 Step into this issue with gratefulness.
Many organizations miss the warning signs that precede major incidents due to a lack of reporting.
If you feel like your company is on the other end of the spectrum, understand your leadership team has the best of intentions — they want to be proactive about safety.
Same Energy
04/17/2026
This “root cause” is too long to say in one breath!
Beware root cause analysis advice from the internet. Complex doesn’t necessarily mean solution-oriented.
Where’s the Doorway?
04/10/2026
Drake… Where’s the doorway? 🤨
Emergency preparedness takes more than big signs or stern looks. If you want to keep your team safe, you need to be proactive:
🔍 Investigate Noncompliance Fairly
Discipline isn’t always the correct choice for policy violations. Talk these issues out with your team members; you might discover deeply rooted issues.
In the case of a blocked fire exit, poor housekeeping, strict deadlines, or lack of space can all facilitate adverse behaviors.
🏃 Incorporate Simulation Training
The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut where individuals skew the likelihood of an event based on how easily examples come to mind.
If emergency drills never happen, the team will see no reason be prepared for an actual emergency.
⌛ Understand Change Takes Time
One corrective action, no matter how extreme, will not magically fix the culture of any facility.
Shifting the focus towards safety takes dedication, coordination, communication, and, most importantly, time.
Emergency… Stop?
04/02/2026
If your focus on safety falls through the floor… So will your company.
Cases like this are rarely the consequence of individuals’ laziness or maliciousness. Safety failures can manifest among well-intended teams for a number of reasons:
👥 Groupthink
In a fast-paced team, an operator might think confrontation will be misinterpreted as conflict. Leadership needs to clearly establish safety as a more important value than production or revenue.
🤷 Diffusion of Responsibility
Without strong guidance, your team can struggle to address a safety hazard — no matter how pressing. Operators need clear instructions and reminders on how and why to report a safety concern.
❓ Unknown Consequences
Even if team members know how to relay an issue, the mere perception of discipline can obstruct honest reporting. Reward operators for coming forward. Implement safeguards, not punishments, for their teams.
Back to 1984…
03/27/2026
How many times do we have to say this… Human error is NOT a root cause!
Despite common belief, human error (or pilot error) is not the primary root cause for any airline crash. It is a causal factor.
Do the semantics really matter? 🤓
Yes. If human error is thought as the root cause of an incident, the investigation team doesn’t have enough information to create a meaningful corrective action.
When human error is understood as a casual factor, the team is prompted to find systemic issues that facilitated the mistake.
Perhaps the myth that human error is a root cause is the reason for its overbearing presence in the aviation industry. 🤔
Interesting…
03/20/2026
Computer-based training: Is it a decent choice or just a déjà vu?
No matter your line of work, you likely have to perform some processes on a computer. If your software necessitates training, how do we balance the line between too little and too much?
⌨️ Consider frequency of use.
Regular users of your software likely don’t need training as extensive or frequent as beginners.
Competency-based training is a good choice to appease everyone. The length of your retraining varies based on the skill-level.
🔔 Update users on changes nonintrusively.
Even highly requested quality-of-life changes can cause frustration if they’re under- or over-communicated.
Every user should be notified about any major changes to the interface, but retraining should perhaps be available upon request rather than required for everyone.
🔧 Understand training isn’t a fix-all for overcomplexity.
The amount of induction will vary based on the complexity of your work. However, training isn’t a magical solution for a bad human-machine interface.
A clunky, hard-to-use program is going to facilitate mistakes, no matter how many resources you burn on training.
At the end of a day, computer-based training is still training: one of the many, many tools that improves human-performance.
Giving Only a Shrug
03/13/2026
“How am I supposed to conduct an investigation without any training?” Well… 🤷
We’ve heard this story too many times: a safety assistant is handed some paperwork, told to do an investigation, and receives no further guidance.
Incident investigators need proper induction because:
💡 Event-learning is an opportunity, not a formality.
An investigation shouldn’t be something thrown onto you for the sake of “getting it done”, especially if it impacts the safety of your team.
Formal training helps you look past surface-level symptoms (like human error) and make meaningful corrective actions.
🧠 Intuition and intelligence will only get you so far.
While being trusted to correct a large issue at your company must feel flattering, it’s also overwhelming.
No matter how smart you are, you can’t investigate every corner of human performance without some guidance.
❌ Trail-and-error doesn’t bode will in safety.
Hands-on experience is a great way to learn in low-risk environments. When it comes to safety, though, failure isn’t acceptable.
For the sake of your team, you should know the best practices before stepping into an investigation.
