Where to Start – Proactive or Reactive?

Philosophical or Practical

I got into a debate about being proactive or being reactive. The person I was debating said reactive root cause analysis is a poor way to improve performance because it waits for something bad to happen before improvement begins. He said that instead of waiting for an incident, people should proactively look for things that could cause an accident and solve problems BEFORE accidents occur.

His logic is hard to argue with. In an ideal world, we would find problems and stop them before they could cause trouble. This sounds great. But this approach has practical drawbacks, which I cover in the next section.

What’s Wrong With Starting with Proactive Improvement?

Before I lay out the problems with starting with proactive improvement, let me admit something. I am a practical engineer. Therefore, I can see the logic in Spock’s quote:

“An easy-to-understand falsehood
is better than an incomprehensible truth.”

When I look for a solution, I tend to favor practical ones that have been proven to work. New is good, but new usually hasn’t been proven. Therefore, new solutions may have unidentified, unintended consequences that make the solution troublesome.

So, let us look at a few drawbacks of starting your improvement initiatives proactively.

Problems Starting with Proactive Improvement

I don’t object to proactive improvement. In fact, we’ve promoted using root cause analysis proactively since the early 1990s. But when you start your improvement efforts, starting proactively can be problematic. Here are some reasons why starting proactively can be a problem.

1. Start Where You Are

If you are starting a new improvement program NOW, you have a challenge. You already have an operating facility, and you’ve probably identified problems that need solutions. You have:

• Accidents/incidents
• Quality issues
• Equipment reliability issues
• Operation upsets
• Project delays/schedule slippage

Thus, you already have problems to solve without looking for additional issues.

Therefore, it seems obvious that you need to start where you are and apply root cause analysis to the incidents you have already identified.

2. Management Attention is on Current, Experienced, Real Problems

As I mentioned above, you already have recognized problems. And what does management want? They want those problems solved now. They are management’s top priority. You need to solve them BEFORE you start imagining additional problems or looking for problems that haven’t happened yet.

3. Proactive Improvement Depends on Your Ability to Predict the Future

Reactive improvement focuses on fixing recognized problems. Problems that were revealed by an incident or accident. Proactive improvement is driven by analyzing current conditions and predicting their potential future failures.

There are a variety of different types of proactive improvement efforts, including:

• Hazard Analysis/What If/LOPA
• Failure Modes and Effects Analysis
• Learning Teams
• Behavior-Based Safety
• Audits/Assessment
• Peer Reviews

Each of these depends on people recognizing potential problems. Once you recognize the problem, you still need to perform root cause analysis to develop effective corrective actions. (Although some just brainstorm solutions.)

But this method still has one problem. Did the people identify the problems that posed the biggest risks, or did they just see problems they were familiar with?

Many major accidents are caused by problems that, before the accident, people thought were incredible. That kind of failure or human error would never happen. Thus, these accidents (TMI, Texas City, Chornobyl, Deepwater Horizon, Fukushima, Boeing 737 Max, …) were not considered credible before they happened.

4. Proactive Improvement Makes Assumptions

In accident root cause analysis, investigators seek to uncover facts. Things that actually happened. Because proactive improvement involves predicting the future (things that haven’t happened yet), those predictions imply that the analysts are making assumptions. These assumptions are integral to their analysis. And the assumptions may be right or wrong. How will you know?

5. There Are an Infinite Number of Potential Problems

How many incidents did you have last year? Ten? One hundred? Five hundred? I bet the number was finite. But how many incidents could you hypothesize? An infinite number?

Starting a proactive improvement program depends on the analysts identifying the areas to concentrate on and then predicting the most likely, most frequent, and most damaging failures and mistakes.

The advantage of starting with a reactive improvement program is that the problems have happened and the consequences are known. The only prediction required is whether the incident could have been worse.

The Answer: Start Reactively and then Move to Proactive Improvement

My guess is that you have already investigated incidents and accidents. So there’s no argument about where to start. You have already started.

Plus, minor incidents often signal potential problems that could have become major accidents. If you analyze and fix these “near-misses” (precursor incidents) effectively, you can prevent major accidents.

However, you might need to improve your root cause analysis by implementing advanced techniques. Plus, if you choose your RCA system wisely, you can apply the same root cause analysis tools to proactively identify problem root causes. With highly advanced tools, you can identify root causes and develop effective corrective actions that prevent entire classes of incidents.

Learn to Use Root Cause Analysis Reactively and Proactively

Where can you learn advanced root cause analysis you can apply reactively and proactively? That’s easy!

Attend a 5-Day TapRooT® Advanced Root Cause Analysis Team Leader Course. See the course outline HERE.

When and where are these courses being held? CLICK HERE to find out. Or CLICK HERE to contact us about having a course at your site.

Improve Even More – Summit & Pre-Summit Course

Just one more idea. The 2027 Global TapRooT® Summit is coming up on April 5-9, 2027. The Summit has five Keynote Speakers and six Best Practice Tracks. One of the tracks is titled “Improving Your Root Cause Analysis.” Obviously, this is a must-attend track for anyone interested in improving their root cause analysis. See the nine sessions in the track by CLICKING HERE.

The other five tracks include sessions on improving performance both reactively and proactively. See all six tracks HERE.

You can also attend a pre-Summit Course. If you are interested in proactive improvement, consider the:

Learning Teams & RCA for Proactive Improvement Course

CLICK HERE for course details. CLICK HERE to register for the Summit and a pre-Summit Course.