The "five whys" productivity technique
I've never understood where to stop a root cause analysis, and the "Five Whys" has never helped at all. What's the appropriate level of abstraction? Eventually you get down to:<p>...<p>"Because the sales targets for the enterprise are unrealistic"<p>"Why?"<p>"Because the Board of Directors can't attract investors with reasonable sales targets"<p>"Why?"<p>"Because investors are only interested in a company scaling at a certain rate"<p>"Why?"<p>"Because investors are greedy"<p>"Why?"<p>"Because when God first created Man, He also created Temptation..."<p>The concept of a "root" cause is silly, because the roots of a plant spread far and wide and have many different ends. In the analogy, if the plant is the "problem", and the root is a "cause", then there are hundreds of different roots (causes) that contribute to the plant (problem). People are always trying to assign a single "root" cause as if there is one. Many causes contribute to systemic failures, and often times fixing any one of the root causes would have delayed the failure for another cycle, without actually addressing the procedural risk.  Your technician accidentally skipped a step, sure, but he skipped a step because he was in a rush, and he was in a rush because he was overworked, and he was overworked because of those damn sales targets, and...<p>If we're interested in "root" causes, then we need to end up with a list of several causes that combine to result in the problem. If we only want a single cause, we should call it a "seed" cause, as defined by "this problem (plant) is guaranteed to happen (grow) every time this cause (seed) occurs (is planted)".