All tagged root cause
Dan Heath’s Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen addresses a familiar challenge in our world: We seem to spend more time and effort fixing problems as they occur, rather than preventing them from occurring in the first place. The book travels familiar roads for people interested in “systems thinking” and it brings in some new-to-me examples. I like that the main focus of the book is on the challenges involved in moving upstream to resolve problems at their root.
Root causes on the mind, clearly. This time an article from the Farnam Street blog talks about the difference between proximate and root causes.
A lot of people struggle to identify the “real” problem they have. Some thoughts about the typical challenges with problem statements and ways around them.
An old post from Donald Reinertsen on "The Cult of the Root Cause" got me thinking about our use of logic and over-reliance on tools. He describes over-reliance on the Five Whys without applying some common sense. And I add some of my own thoughts on top.