Whenever quality professionals get together to talk about quality management questions, eventually the question of 'root cause' becomes the general topic. There seems to be a firmly held perception that if you work hard enough, or perhaps long enough, at some point in time the 'root cause' of your problem will be discovered. Shared in this belief is the presumption that root cause is the essential understanding required for ideal corrective action, and that this is an unmistakable fact of life. But is it really?



What do we mean by root cause? In theory we mean the one cause, that corrected/removed would be sufficient to prevent the recurrence of the failing we first observed. However, when pushed most people adhere to the view that one simple cause for any specific failing is just too simple a concept to be true.

There are two 'always present' exhortations in the problem solving literature.

- Don't jump to conclusions

- Make sure you discover the root cause before taking action.

The first is fine, I can find no reason to argue against the philosophy analyzing the situation in order to implement a fact based solution. The second can be a recipe for continuous analysis and debate, with no useful answer at the close.

Root cause as a concept is closely linked to another, that of relativity, which states that the state of a situation or body is not absolute but relative, it depends on the observer as much as it depends on the observed. At its simplest, imagine waiting for a bus to get to the station for the commuter train. The bus is late, you miss the train, are late for work and are fired for poor time keeping.

Your employer thinks the root cause of your dismissal is time keeping. You think it is because buses seldom run on time, the bus company thinks it is the unkempt road conditions or the ability of the drivers that they have to hire, and so it goes on.

There is therefore seldom a single root cause for a failing, in part because the perceived failing isn't constant.

The emphasis on Root Cause has for many years been a feature of training provided for QA people and particularly auditors. Auditors are exhorted to 'identify the root cause' when reporting audit findings. This search for the single cause of a failing has led to significant time wasting while the real issue, 'what are we going to do about the problem', remains unsolved and even unaddressed.

In the just given example the employer noticed a root cause to the problem, and took action. The employee was aware that buses had a tendency to run late, and took no action. As for the buses - it really doesn't matter much in this case, since they didn't seem to have a problem of their own!

Root cause - it depends where you are in the cycle of failure correction, and therefore what you are actually capable of doing to solve the problem as you see it. Your root cause may not be, indeed seldom is, the same as the root cause identified by others seeing a different occurrence in the same sequence of events