Root Cause Analysis

When a communications failure happens, the pressure is often to move on quickly. Issue a fix, apologise if needed, and hope it doesn’t happen again. But unless you understand why it happened in the first place, it probably will.

Root Cause Analysis gives you a structured way to look backwards—not to assign blame, but to understand what truly went wrong and how to prevent a repeat.

This thinking model is especially useful after a crisis, public backlash, missed deadline, or internal breakdown. It’s easy to identify the moment something failed, but much harder to uncover what led to that moment. Surface-level fixes feel faster, but they rarely hold. A reactive correction might smooth things over temporarily, but the conditions that created the problem are still there.

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