TB871: The poverty of root cause analysis

Note: this is a post reflecting on one of the modules of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. You can see all of the related posts in this category. 

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A typical way of tracking… interrelationships in the social world is through a process called root cause analysis. Such tracking assumes a single linear pathway from one event to another, while ignoring a whole web of interacting factors and actors that may be associated with the chains of events. Root cause analysis is particularly unhelpful in addressing multiple interrelationships in the social world, as it tends to promote an insipid culture of blame; a culture of attributing events to single factors, rather than examining a conflation of different influences.

(The Open University, 2020)

References

The Open University (2020) ‘Block 2 Essential overview’, TB871 Block 2 Systems and Strategy [Online]. Available at https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=2261480 (Accessed 26 May 2024).