The TapRooT® Podcast: Ten Years Promoting Excellence

In honor of International Podcast Day, we are examining the TapRooT® Podcast’s history, present, and future goals. Our podcast has been changing and improving ever since its creation, and is now celebrating ten years of promoting excellence in the field of Root Cause Analysis.

History of the TapRooT® Podcast

The first version of our podcast was TapRooT® TV in 2015, a weekly podcast of “talking heads” discussing key RCA matters and TapRooT® Courses. With the explosion of live content on Youtube, TapRooT® TV transitioned from prerecorded episodes to TapRooT® TV Live. During COVID-19, however, TapRooT® TV ceased to post until our current podcast director, Anne Roberts, came onto the scene to revitalize it.

“I came in and decided to turn it into an interview-style podcast, and it became fairly difficult to get everyone’s schedules on the same page,” Roberts shares. “I had to get everyone together, review all of the footage, and edit everything together. When I was the only person doing it, it was only possible to get out one to two episodes a month.”

Now the two-year-old TapRooT® Podcast uploads weekly episodes in that same interview style, building off of all the groundwork laid by TapRooT® TV. The process, however, has had its challenges.

“I had to learn a lot about lighting, a lot about sound, and if you compare our older episodes to our newer ones you can definitely see a difference in the quality. It was also a challenge to come up with topics… You could always think you had an interesting topic but when you upload it nobody seems to be interested, and then you’ll think you’re doing a topic just for fun, such as our Ocean Gate episode, and it becomes the most popular one we’ve ever done. Learning what people want to listen to was quite the learning curve.”

The TapRooT® Podcast’s quality and viewership is at an all time high, with our team working hard to keep our information and expertise interesting and up-to-date. Even the podcast’s main voices have grown with our podcast. “The people interviewing or being interviewed have gotten better and more comfortable with the format of the podcast as they keep doing it.”

As with our RCA methods, we have put a lot of effort into learning from both our successes and failures to create the modern day TapRooT® Podcast, an ongoing process that we don’t intend to stop anytime soon.

Our Podcast Today

Today, our podcast is made for the benefit of TapRooT® Users and anyone utilizing RCA. Our biggest goal is to be informative, to create a place where people can go to find ideas, best practices, and unique ways to think about investigations. Our TapRooT® instructors and experts share their collective knowledge in response to both modern and historical incidents and systems, drawing conclusions from these incidents to help protect employees and businesses in the future.

“We started off with maybe five people viewing a podcast and it keeps growing every month,” Roberts explains. “Viewers are checking in more and more often, and part of that I think has to do with our podcast getting better. We have more topics that people are interested in, our sound is getting better, the video is getting better, and we’re posting consistently.”

The TapRooT® Podcast, like everything we do, focuses on helping people to develop both the best practices and the right mindsets to create successful systems. A large part of that, especially within the context of our podcast, is engaging with cognitive dissonance to learn to overcome the biases that can be blinding in the case of an incident. The mistakes we make give us opportunities to learn how to make it easier for one another to do the right thing, and so we put a lot of effort into examining those mistakes in a factual, evidence-based manner.

“We always try to keep our podcasts fact-based. If we make an assumption, we try to mark it that that’s an assumption and we don’t say assumptions are facts. Sometimes we wait to put out podcast episodes later, like our Ocean Gate episode, because we want to make sure we have all the evidence and the investigation reports. We never want to spread misinformation.”

Another goal of the podcast, and one of its most useful applications for our listeners, is to keep investigation skills fresh on investigators’ minds. For followers who don’t do a lot of investigations, whether it is because your company doesn’t have the resources or just doesn’t have very many incidents, our podcast is a good way to help keep TapRooT® skills at the forefront of your mind. We support our users being prepared for accidents before they occur, so that investigations can be more than just reactions, and the TapRooT® Podcast is an excellent place to supplement that preparation.

A Future of Excellence

The TapRooT® Podcast’s listeners can expect to see continued improvements from the podcast going forward, from camera quality and sound to added segments for RCA news and updates from around the world.

In the next year in particular, we are aiming to make one major update to our podcast: the introduction of new voices into the episodes.

“We want to start introducing people from outside our little office, too. We want to start interviewing TapRooT® Users or RCA users to have discussions with them, and give them an opportunity to talk about their experiences. And along with that, we want to partner with other podcasts.”

This transformation will begin this very week at the 2025 Global TapRooT® Summit, where we are hosting a live podcast with our Summit guests. Tune in on our Youtube channel and hear about all we’ve learned through our Summit.

Our first priority is, as always, to listen to our users. “We keep track of what articles get clicked on the most, what problems people bring into our classes, and what goes on in the world around us,” Roberts says. “We want to talk about it.” As the future continues to grow us and our content, we will continually take feedback and suggestions as opportunities to promote RCA excellence further.

To listen to our podcast for yourself, check it out here.

To schedule a free executive briefing and learn more about what TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis could do for you, click here.