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.

I know what we have to do…

08/14/2026

Improvement can feel daunting, even impossible, in a stagnant work environment.

Incident investigators may feel discouraged when leadership is adverse to change, but there are important reasons to keep putting your best foot forward:

• Giving up doesn’t fix anything.

You know the umpteenth retraining session won’t fix the constant incidents.

Having your suggestions fall through is frustrating, but the problems at your workplace will get worse before they get better if they continue to be unaddressed.

• Safety is more than a checklist.

Remember what’s the stake: the safety and well-being of your team. Going the extra mile to improve your safety systems can save lives.

• There are tools at your disposal.

We’re here to help. TapRooT® RCA is designed to find and fix the generic problems roadblocking your company.

Improvement is never impossible. There are always solutions; it’s a matter of finding them.

Lacking substance

08/07/2026

CAPA: It’s great in theory, but it really lacks substance.

CAPA (Corrective Action, Preventative Action) is the concept of handling incidents both reactively and proactively. Action should be taken to handle the situation immediately, but safeguards also need to be added to prevent its reoccurrence.

That’s great, but CAPA provides little guidance on what effective corrective or preventative actions are.

Let’s say a worker violates a procedure, leading to a minor incident.

Discipline is a common corrective action when it comes to human error. Further investigation would reveal the procedures are confusing, the worker felt time-pressured, and there’s an unhealthy company culture.

In this case, discipline would result in frustration, not improvement.

To make matters worse, the preventative action is likely to fail, too, without any direction in human performance.

Often times, teams fall back to initiating retraining or expanding the procedures. Most investigators don’t have the experience to pinpoint or fix the underlying causes.

CAPA is a wonderful concept, but that’s all it is: a concept. It needs to be used alongside a robust investigation model to be used meaningfully.

Training

07/31/2026

Training is often overused as a root cause, especially considering it isn’t even one to begin with. It’s a basic root cause category that encompasses more specific systemic problems:

❌ No Training

If a task is failed because of a lack of training, yes, the worker needs to be trained. Moreover, the training policy needs to be further investigated.

Was the task analyzed? Did someone decide the worker could skip training? Was required training missed?

😵‍💫 Lack of Understanding

If a trained worker failed to understand the task, throwing them into an unchanged retraining session will not solve anything.

Were the lesson plans, learning objectives, and instructions comprehensive? Are workers given opportunities for practice and repetition for critical tasks?

🖼️ A Small Part of the Big Picture

Many teams jump straight into training because it’s familiar, cheap, and easy. Even though many root causes relate to training, it’s still a small piece of the puzzle.

It’s important for teams to treat every investigation comprehensively, or else workers will be stuck with retraining session after retraining session.

Expectation vs Reality

07/24/2026

Audit readiness is common for planned inspections. And it defeats the entire purpose.

It’s one thing to double check everything is in order before an inspection, but it’s a whole other story to lie about what the real day-to-day operations look like.

Before you decide to put on a dog and pony show, consider the following:

• Management will be out of the loop.

Some rules and policies are unrealistic in practice: the PPE is uncomfortable, the procedures take too long, the quota is impossible to reach without rushing.

Instead of pretending these issues don’t exist when someone is watching, be transparent with the inspector. Management can’t help if they don’t know the underlying problems at your facility.

• The more you cover up, the more things will spiral.

Even if you successfully manage to dupe your inspector, you’re setting your team up for failure. Expectations will grow over time, and window dressing will only take you so far.

Furthermore, lying creates a culture of dishonesty. If you set the precedent that it’s okay to fib to management, why should workers be transparent with you?

• Safety is more about audits and statistics.

In the heat of reaching certain TRIR goals, it might be tempting to skew the numbers. But this puts your team in danger.

Unaddressed safety problems will catch up to your team eventually. If you care about your coworkers, never lie about incidents at your facility.

Phew!

07/17/2026

We’ve all experienced the dread of giving a presentation during our schooldays… And many of us have realized that we have plenty more to host.

Public speaking is one of the most common fears in the world. How can we conquer this phobia? 😰

• Know that this isn’t about your speaking skills.

You don’t have to be an amazing speaker to give an insightful presentation, especially if your field is in QHSE. Take a deep breath and remember the point is to relay important information, not to grade your performance.

• Consider any rebuttals and questions.

When it comes to topics as important as incident investigations, you don’t want to look unprepared. You should have a comprehensive timeline of the events, capturing all relevant details.

The more evidence you collect, the less likely you are to be caught off guard later.

• Stay honest.

If you are hit with a question you don’t know the answer to, it might be tempting to exaggerate or assume some details. This defeats the purpose of your investigation. The whole point is to find and improve the system failures at play.

If you make information up, you’re sending your team on a goose hunt to fix your best guess. It’s okay to say “I don’t know” sometimes. That shows opportunities of improvement in the company’s auditing, record keeping, and investigation systems.

In conclusion, a strong presentation is the result of a robust investigation, not a charismatic speaker.

Bad Call

07/10/2026

“The employee wasn’t paying attention.”

No kidding, Sherlock.

With time being such an invaluable resource, many companies are weary to invest much of it into their incident investigations. But this mentality can have rippling effects on your company:

• Time is an investment.

Many teams make the mistake of rushing investigations to get operations back online as quickly as possible.

The problem is that surface-level findings lead to surface-level solutions. The root causes remain addressed, meaning the issue will pop up again eventually.

• Employees notice a lack of care.

If yet another investigation is concluded with a root cause of “human error” and a corrective action of “retraining”, that lack of effort sets a standard for your entire organization.

If management can’t take the time to ask why people are making mistakes, why should the workforce bother, either?

• Blame spreads like the plague.

No one wants to take accountability in a work culture that attempts to fix people instead of systems.

Stopping investigations at “human error” teaches workers that deflection, dishonesty, and distrust are necessary tools to use when they inevitably make a mistake.

Take a few extra moments to ask why the employee wasn’t paying attention. You may discover several opportunities for systemic improvement.

The Endless Cycle

07/03/2026

Does work ever feel like a frustrating cycle of speed and safety?

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Too often, workers are given conflicting instructions: get the job done quickly, but get it done safely, too. Being safe and fast at the same time is certainly possible, but management needs to consider the following before jumping into discipline:

🐌 Find out what’s slowing the team down.

If production is too slow, a scolding isn’t going to fix the root causes. Investigate the processes to see if the work can be optimized.

A strong set of procedures, for example, should serve as a helpful checklist. In many cases, poor writing or formatting can slow things down.

❌ Never reward unsafe behaviors.

This might seem obvious, but many management teams inadvertently do so.

Rewarding a high level of productivity can encourage workers to skip steps or violate protocol. Management should only be rewarding high productivity as long as it’s achieved safety.

🍬 Stop the flavor of the month.

Workers notice when the values of management flip-flop every quarter.

Speed and safety are both important, so your root cause analysis system should be strong enough to improve both at the same time.

Read the Room

06/29/2026

Procurement sees big savings… And every other department sees skimping.

Procurement is often butting heads with every other team, regularly taking cost-cutting a little too far. The conflict might feel inevitable, but we can address some of the pain points systemically:

⬇️ Values trickle down.

When leadership is constantly pressuring procurement to spend less and less, of course they’re going to make sacrifices to save costs.

If management doesn’t see the impact of cost-cutting, your oversight / employee relations system may need further investigation.

🗣️ Communication should be 2-way.

On that note, the obstacles of all teams should be heard and understood.

Just as we expect procurement and leadership to listen to our frustrations, we should be willing to hear their limitations and develop compromises together.

💰 We can’t have fast, cheap, and great.

It’s also important to understand that capital is an investment. While optimizing costs is important, there is such thing as spending too little.

When it comes to safety, maintenance, quality, or any department, procuring too little can cost more in the long-run from their subsequent incidents.

Follow the Instructions

06/19/2026

Are workers failing to follow procedures? Don’t be so quick to blame their competence. Just because the instructions are technically correct doesn’t mean they’re intuitive:

🖼️ Bad Graphics

Graphics are seldom blatantly wrong like this, but they are sometimes unclear, confusing, or unhelpful. Take a look at your procedures and ask: do these graphics enhance or disrupt the process?

🏃 Too Many Actions Per Step

Step-by-step procedures should only have one action per step. Otherwise, a worker can easily miss a step or experience information overload.

❓Poor Formatting

Even if the task is complex, the procedures should be as easy to navigate as possible. If the procedure is not properly indented, sequenced, or even punctuated, a reader is bound to make a mistake eventually.

The Domino Effect

06/12/2026

“We don’t have time to sweat the small stuff.”

Maybe that’s because you wait until it snowballs into something big.

Many companies only use root cause analysis reactively, waiting until disaster has already struck to look into the system failures.

These failures can be caught and fixed well before a major incident occurs.

If you were to perform an audit of day-to-day operations right now, chances are that you would find something wrong:

• A missed step in the procedure, likely one that is commonly unfollowed.
• A piece of equipment that has never worked quite right.
• A slight surplus or deficiency of materials. 

Before you brush it off as something not worth investigating, take a moment and ask, “Could this problem contribute to a major accident?”

If the answer is yes, we recommend investigating it now rather than later.