Root Cause Analysis Tip: 6 Reasons to Look for Generic Root Causes
“Allowing generic causes to fester can sometimes cause similar problems to pop up in unexpected areas.”
You have established a good performance improvement program, supported by performing solid incident investigations. Your teams are finding good root causes, and your corrective action program is tracking through to completion. But you still seem to be seeing more repeat issues than you expect. What could be the problem?
We find many companies are doing a great job using TapRooT® to find and correct the root causes discovered during their investigations. But many companies are skipping over the Generic Cause Analysis portion of the investigation process. While fixing the individual root causes are likely to prevent that particular issue from happening again, allowing generic causes to fester can sometimes cause similar problems to pop up in unexpected areas.
6 Reasons to Look for Generic Root Causes
Here are 6 reasons to conduct a generic cause analysis on your investigation results:
1. The same incident occurs again at another facility.
2. Your annual review shows the same root cause from several incident investigations.
3. Your audits show recurrence of the same behavior issues.
4. You apply the same corrective action over and over.
5. Similar incidents occur in different departments.
6. The same Causal Factor keeps showing up.
These indicators point to the need to look deeper for generic causes. These generic issues are allowing similar root causes and causal factors to show up in seemingly unrelated incidents. When management is reviewing incident reports and audit findings, one of your checklist items should be to verify that generic causes were considered and either addressed or verified not to be present. Take a look at how your incident review checklist and make sure you are conducting a generic cause analysis during the investigation.
Finding and correcting generic causes are basically a freebie; you’ve already performed the investigation and root cause analysis. There is no reason not to take a few extra minutes and verify that you are fully addressing any generic issues.
Learn more about finding and fixing root causes in our 2-day or 5-day TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis courses!
