
No, Seriously. Root Cause Is a Fallacy - kiyanwang
http://willgallego.com/2018/04/02/no-seriously-root-cause-is-a-fallacy/
======
alexandercrohde
This is a deliberately click-bait title.

It intentionally misuses the word fallacy, when it actually means that root
cause analysis is an essential step in the correct direction and must go even
further in that direction. All it's really saying is "cause should be plural
in root cause analysis."

The fact that perhaps an incident had multiple simultaneous causes doesn't
invalidate root-cause-analysis. The fact that 5-whys diverge after level 3 or
4 means that once you get to to a high-enough level there are numerous
solutions on how to prevent a problem (to use the car-battery example, there
are dozens of solutions. The car could show a message when the alternator
doesn't work, the dealer could call the car-owner at service times, they could
invent a belt that doesn't ever break, etc)

~~~
bayonetz
Yep, this article’s framing is poor. The 5 Whys are just a simplification that
proved useful to get people to dig deeper that previously couldn’t be
bothered. There is nothing stopping you from turning a linear sequence of
questions into a fanning-out tree of questions so that you can go both deep
and wide. ...well nothing other than time and resources. It’s like suggesting
that riding bicycles are a fallacy and that if you really want to get
somewhere fast, you need to take an airplane. It’s true that bicycles are
slower but they are usually better than walking and the cost/benefit ratio is
often better than taking a flight.

------
bandrami
Aristotle's distinctions among types of causes are, I think, very useful
compared to root cause analysis. It's not that some why's are more important
than others in an absolute sense. Rather than having four different "why?"
questions one after the other, he pointed out there are four kinds of "why?"
you can ask simultaneously, and depending on what your needs are one may be
more important than another at a given time.

So, for "why is the table flat?", the four causes are:

1\. (Material cause) because it is made of wood, and wood is rigid, and so
holds its shape.

2\. (Efficient cause) because a carpenter took a plane or chisel and cut away
all the wood that wasn't the flat surface.

3\. (Formal cause) because the blueprint the carpenter used was of a flat
rigid surface suspended over 4 legs.

4\. (Final cause) because if it were not flat, your jug of wine would fall
over when you set it down on it.

This is in some ways superficially similar to the "five why's", but it is more
flexible, because you do not _have to_ go in that order. You might look at two
tables and ask why this one is flat and this other one is curved, and realize
that it's because this other one is made of canvas rather than wood, and the
canvas has started sagging. This framework also lets you categorize each type
of "because" as you receive it.

~~~
w4tson
This is cool. Where did you learn this?

~~~
bandrami
I majored in classical philosophy.

This is actually a fairly common background for sysadmins, I've found,
anecdotally.

------
gumby
This article could better have been entitled, "Root cause is overrated". It's
not always the right way to address a problem. (a good example is modern
medicine which is almost always about addressing symptoms).

The best part of this article is "5W tends to diverge after the second or
third question."

~~~
alexandercrohde
Divergence isn't a problem though. Divergence shows how complex cause and
effect are, and how many different ways there are to prevent a problem.

If it diverges then people simply need to get in a room and list the tradeoffs
of different solutions (robustness, cost, reusability)

------
drawkbox
> _One root cause implies one problem with one answer._

I don't know that root cause was ever ONE thing. The root cause(s) can be many
roots within the root cause.

A tree has a trunk, it goes down to the root, the roots are multiple on some
instances.

The 5 Whys, 5-Ms, 8-Ps and 4-Ss help determine root cause(s). The idea of root
cause is to find all the real reasons something isn't going as planned. Many
times it is one thing but sometimes it isn't, there is also process that need
retrospectives if the root causes are not fully solved or continue to happen,
in that case the true root cause is still out there. When you only find part
of the root cause you haven't found the root cause fully.

Root cause is not a fallacy, if it isn't just one thing you just haven't found
the root cause(s) fully yet just a symptom and you need to go deeper or the
roots have grown/changed.

In logic, root cause is usually easier to find because it is more objective,
in policy there is a constant of misunderstanding that is rarely factored in
enough or is caused by unknowns that can be ever-changing.

Sometimes, especially in policy, the cause can never be solved and it should
be accepted as a known part of the solution or accepted as a constant problem.
Example: to stop drug addition we will make all drugs illegal, or to stop
alcohol addiction we will prohibit alcohol, yet people will continue to do
them because of the human condition. These are clear examples of root causes
that have deeper root causes, some causes don't need solving or can't be
solved due to misunderstanding, they need objective acceptance of them being
part of the system always and solutions within that reality. Another example
is hacking or fraud, those expectations have to be built into the system, they
aren't going away because they are evolving around the root cause solutions
put in place into a cat/mouse game ad infinitum.

------
ademup
Provacative title, but I am unconvinced. The 5W example seems completely valid
as it stands and author's attempt only leads to (to my mind ) another valid
version of 5W. Even if the article had won me over, I would change the title
to 'Root Cause can sometimes provide insufficient results'

That said, I do agree with the author on one thing: gif with a soft 'g'.

------
kirykl
The fish bone diagram in addition to 5W can help account for multiple factors
of root cause
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishikawa_diagram](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishikawa_diagram)

~~~
jspaw
No, they can’t. Both approaches are linear and sequential chains of
cause/effect, which do not work with complex adaptive systems.

Five whys give a cherry-picked paucity of data in an investigation:
[https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-infinite-
hows](https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-infinite-hows)

------
Joeri
That five why's ends up with a different resolution depending on who you ask
doesn't need to be a problem. You're not trying to fix all causes, just avoid
the specific problem you had from reoccurring. All you need to find is _a_
cause that when addressed will ensure the problem does not reappear in the
same form. In fact, it is better if multiple independent causes can be found
because then multiple causes can be addressed.

~~~
zzzcpan
Avoiding specific problem from reoccurring is not the goal either though. What
is the root goal? Why do you want to prevent specific problem from
reoccurring? Maybe you just want to limit the scope of the problem or of all
such problems and maybe it will have much better overall effect on the system.

I think the point author tries to make is that root cause analysis is a broken
thinking model that doesn't lead to actual quality improvement.

------
konschubert
For me, when I talk about "root cause", what I mean is:

What is the most generic thing, that, if changed, would have prevented that
problem?

Generic things are: Team setup, planning process, development process, choice
of framework and programming languages, coding conventions, ...

Less generic things are: Database constraints, ORM validation, ...

Even less generic: Server side API validation, frontend validation, a frontend
bug that caused a bad value to be submitted, ...

From this comparison it is clear that all levels of genericness have to be
correct and need to be fixed if necessary. The question for the root cause
simply encourages to follow the lead all the way up the chain of genericness.

------
eesmith
The example I give of a problem in 5-Whys analysis deals with Snowden's leak
of classified materials.

One RCA ends up dealing with how computer system security doesn't match up
with organizational security, another ends up with the problems of outsourcing
security, a third concerns the dissonance between internal and public views of
American military policy, and so on.

Every single one ends up with a very different resolution. As the article
quotes, "5W tends to diverge after the second or third question."

~~~
sokoloff
We saw some convergence on the 4th or 5th why frequently being “Because we
were lazy...”

------
draugadrotten
The purpose of a root cause analysis is often not to find the {only,all} root
cause, but to prevent the incident at hand from repeating by removing
something which is necessary.

Event Y happens if and only if factor X. Factor X is what the RCA is supposed
to find to prevent event Y. There may be many factors which satisfy this
equation which means there may be multiple RCAs which are correct and
functional in achieving our goal, to prevent event Y.

------
markonen
"What's the root cause of success?" really is a nice and succinct way of
illustrating the problem with root cause analysis.

Of course, a million business book writers fancy themselves capable of
answering that question, in about 300 pages or so.

~~~
phkahler
>> What's the root cause of success?" really is a nice and succinct way of
illustrating the problem with root cause analysis.

No it's not. Success is usually the result of a lot of things going right. The
implication is that root cause analysis is like asking why a new business
failed vs succeeded. That's what a post-mortem is for. Root Cause Analysis is
primarily used to find the cause of a failure in something that is otherwise
working normally. Why did the rocket explode? Why did the aircraft go down?
Why did the car have sudden uncontrolled acceleration? The results of an RCA
are specific and actionable things that can prevent future occurrences. There
may be multiple "contributing factors" discovered along the way, and it's
sensible to address those as well. Nobody says to ignore all contributing
factors along the way.

The author also takes the failed car example and proposes a bunch of things
that _were not the problem_ and acts as if they were overlooked in asking 5
whys. Each of the why questions had a specific answer in the example, but
there may have been other things looked at prior to finding each answer. He
suggests that other things may have been ignored while overlooking the
specific actionable items that were identified.

~~~
zzzcpan
Ultimately the role of root cause analysis is to help reach said success.
There is no other reason to adopt this technique, hence the fallacy.

~~~
URSpider94
No. That’s like saying one could conduct a root cause analysis on a pile of
parts on the ground, asking why they haven’t formed themselves into a car.

Root cause analysis, by its definition, assumes that you are starting with a
functioning system (turns inputs into the proper outputs) that failed
unexpectedly.

~~~
zzzcpan
Functioning system doesn't imply success. You believe you can reach success by
adopting certain techniques for solving problems. Doesn't mean they are net
positive for it though.

~~~
phkahler
>> Functioning system doesn't imply success.

It is almost a definition of success. One can refine it to include functioning
under a range of conditions, or at a desired price point, or something else.
But a system that functions as desired is the end goal of all engineering
projects. Even if you're most of the way there in development, root cause
analysis can often be used to figure out why something did not perform as
desired.

------
icegreentea2
I think root cause analysis is perfectly capable of scaling to the type of
system that we're talking about here. It just means you need to iterate and
backtrack. Maybe consider something like fault tree analysis or whatever, but
tailored for your system.

Yeah, we get it, complex systems fail due to multiple failure points. So
iterate your root cause analysis until you find multiple failure points.

The entire point of root cause analysis is to stop from mitigating the wrong
things without thinking. Where you mitigate is purely a business value
decision. Sometimes mitigating at a higher level (either by stopping your root
cause analysis early, or by deciding that mitigating at a lower level is not
possible or desirable) is the way to go. Case in point, the root cause of my
car (I live in Canada) rusting out early is cause we salt the shit of our
roads every winter and that my car is made of corrodable materials. I mitigate
that by applying undercoating that I have to reapply, instead of addressing
the root cause (I live in a terrible climate, and my car is made of metal).

Having the causal tree of events is only useful when paired with the set of
possible solutions.

------
mcqueenjordan
I find the arguments weak and lacking convincing power. Each has a pretty
obvious gaping flaw. The author seems to depend upon RCA being executed
poorly. For instance, “we take short-cuts and the investigation for the root
cause is shallow.” If you begin with the assumption that all investigations
are shallow and bad, well of course you’re going to conclude that RCA is bad.

Title claims it’s a fallacy but all the fallacious thinking I see is in its
arguments.

------
tyldum
I tend to aim for two solutions: how can we prevent this from happening and
how can we detect this kind of failure ahead of time (to alert).

------
j_m_b
'No. Wrong.' Such binary thinking. Reminds me of the quote "Google uses
Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement" which points out
how unsophisticated purely binary statements are. The Jain's captured this
idea in the philosophy of Anekāntavāda.. that reality is multi-faceted. The
philosophy teaches one to approach a situation and make statements such as "in
some ways, it is","in some ways, it is not","in some ways, it is, and it is
not"...

------
toss1
This article explains nicely why, despite a strong bias to seek deep causes,
I've always felt skeptical of formal RCA.

It's the formality and constraints. The key is in the example of the '5 Whys'
exercise diverging after 2-3 steps if people do it individually & separately.
It is simply too confining to seek a single cause -- occasionally 'true' but
rarely complete.

Seems a good first improvement could be to implement independent/separate 5W
analysis as an early step, then use those as a broader roadmap.

------
chacham15
The problem with the analysis that he is talking about is that it tends to
lead to too many problems. Is this situation worth that amount of effort to
fix? If it is, then when we would have done an RCA we would have looked for
those additional measures, if not we've saved ourselves a lot of time and
argument about whether or not something contributed to the problem.

------
karmakaze
My problem with root cause thinking is the belief that there is only one thing
that needs fixing when there are many contributing factors. Fix one thing and
you have a system that's just stable enough, not more.

------
ybrah
No, seriously. Thing is a thing.

