I've been trying to get down to the heart of the matter

Kojak. Columbo. Cagney and Lacey. Perry Mason. Miss Marple. Angela Fletcher. Rockford. Barnaby Jones. Magnum. Mannix. Jack Lord. Quincy. Monk.

It doesn't really matter who your favorite television detective was (or is), because all detectives are experts in their own ways (my personal favorites are Columbo and Quincy). But one skill every television detective has is the ability to go far beyond deducing who did it and how he did it; our beloved television detectives always figure out why he did it, too.

In criminal law, it's possible to prosecute a case successfully even when the motive is unknown (source: North Carolina Wesleyan University). In business, however, when there's a problem (be it a failure to follow documented procedures, a system failure, or some other error) the motive - the why - is a critical piece of information, without which you cannot prevent the problem from turning up again in the future.

Root cause analysis is the art and science of getting to the root of why a bad event occurred; when you know how and why something happened, you can identify actions you can take to keep that something from happening again. The corrective and preventative actions (CAPAs) resulting from the work are the real power of root cause analysis: if you correctly identify the root cause, and then develop an effective CAPA, then the problem goes away - for good.

I use the phrase "art and science" deliberately; although there's a clear process to analyzing root cause - and like any scientist, you'll need evidence to back up your theories - creativity plays a big part as well (particularly when you get to the point of developing CAPAs). At the risk of using a consultant-bingo phrase, you'll need to think outside of the box. If the root cause of a business problem were painfully obvious, then you wouldn't need to go through the exercise at all, yes?

Now, there may be many factors that contributed to a given business failure; in root cause analysis (let's just call it RCA from here on out, shall we?) you need to narrow your focus to those contributing factors that meet certain criteria. A root cause...

• is something that can be fixed; there's no sense wasting your time on something that's not going to change no matter what you do.
• explains the bad event; there's a clear path from the root cause to the bad event that indicates a relationship between the two.
• is controlled (or controllable) by the company's leaders; just as you shouldn't waste time on a contributing factor you can't fix, neither should you waste time on a factor that the management team can't control.
• is specific; the more specific the cause you identify, the easier it will be to identify CAPAs. This being the case, "operator error" is not a root cause; "operator stepped on the accelerator rather than the brake" is.
• is reasonably identifiable; you shouldn't have to spend thousands of labor-hours trying to identify a root cause. It may not be immediately obvious, but you should be able to find it with a reasonable amount of effort rather than a herculean one.

In this series of posts, we're going to go through the steps of conducting RCA, as well as those used to identify, implement, and measure CAPA. Tomorrow, I'll outline a few other concepts that are keys to successful RCA; from there, I'll go through one step each day until we conclude. This information is taken from a class on RCA that I've developed and delivered more than a dozen times; if you'd like more information on this workshop, please e-mail me.