Why do people try to make root cause analysis so difficult?

I read a comment string on LinkedIn about root cause analysis. People made the concepts and techniques so hard to understand.

First, there was an argument over what is a root cause. One person argued that there was no such thing because EVERY cause had another deeper cause. Someone else argued that there wasn’t a root cause because most incidents had multiple causes. Someone else introduced the idea of root causes, contributing causes, causal factors, and initiating events. Someone else brought up the concept of latent causes and Swiss cheese.

If that wasn’t enough disagreement, another side argument started over what was an incident, and accident, a near-miss, and a significant incident. This lead to a discussion of what needed investigation and how good an investigation was good enough.

At SI, we too had discussions about these topics 30 years ago. However, in the TapRooT® System, these arguments are settled and the terminology is either settled or irrelevant.

Perhaps it is my engineering and Nuclear Navy training that lead me away from philosophical discussions and turned me toward practical solutions to problems.

Perhaps it was my human factors training that made it easy to see why people made mistakes and what we could do to prevent them.

Perhaps it is my ability to take complex subjects and make them understandable that lead to the development of a systematic, practical, repeatable system to find the root causes of problems – the TapRooT® System.

So, if you are tired of debate and just want a system that has been proven around the world to find and fix the root causes of safety, quality, equipment, and production issues, learn about TapRooT® and save lot’s of time by avoiding needless arguments.

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