In many ways a fundamental technique for improving humankind’s understanding of science, complexity, and nature’s deepest truths, root cause analysis (RCA) is an essential analytical methodology that is regularly underutilized.

What is Root Cause Analysis?

Created by Sakichi Toyoda as part of the Toyota Production System, root cause analysis seeks to remove inefficiencies and other negative outcomes stemming from a problem by finding the problem’s root cause and fixing it. This simple idea is often extremely valuable in business and engineering and has seen great success at Toyota which rose to claim the crown as the world’s largest automobile manufacturer in 2008 and as of December 2019 is the tenth largest company in the world by revenue.

Due to frustrations caused by improper implementations of the RCA technique, it has become regularly underutilized in industries where it has the most potential for success. However, along with the recent rise of big data over the past decade, there is a potential for root cause analysis to provide large business value and be brought to the forefront as one of the central themes of data analysis.

Where can RCA be Applied?

Although traditionally it’s been most frequently used in engineering and life sciences, examples of potential RCA applications are endless in industry including its increased relevancy in data analysis. Some contemporary examples include:

Microbiology

The realization that scientists need to rethink all processes involving microbiology due to the latent influence of the microbiome on almost all of human physiology.

Healthcare

The United States spending more than most other developed nations on healthcare with only lackluster outcomes.

Economics

A Nobel-winning Economist’s call to end reliance on GDP as the primary metric.

Technology

Data privacy is becoming a driving force and root cause behind many trends in the technology industry.

The examples quite literally are endless, but the implementation is difficult.

What are the Difficulties with Implementation?

Most companies that implement RCA probably don’t realize that it is part of Jidoka, another larger idea invented by Toyota which causes production to cease if an error is encountered. At first this was a mechanical concept, in the textile looms that would stop automatically if a thread broke. Yet, it can and has been used in non-mechanical applications. In traditional businesses, stopping production to fix an issue is often counterintuitive to management in today’s world where timelines are one of the main performance metrics used to assess the C-level leadership. In those businesses, they’re blinded by short-termism. By using deadlines as the end-all-be-all they are sacrificing the long-term goal of quality in their product or service for the short-term goal of meeting the deadlines. This saves the company money but often disappoints the customers or leaves hidden problems in their products waiting patiently to rear their ugly heads. Instead, as part of Jidoka, the correct approach is postulated to be:

1. Detect the abnormality
2. Stop [production]
3. Fix or correct the immediate condition
4. Investigate the root cause and install a countermeasure

Having these steps is very convenient and helps to paint a much clearer and more robust picture of how RCA can be applied to important issues. In order to have the process be as successful as possible, additionally, the leadership team needs to continue recursing through the purported root cause until finding the ultimate root cause. Finding this ultimate root cause leads me to the last bit of Japanese I’ll throw at you which is referred to in the Toyota Production System as Genchi Genbutsu which roughly translates to go and see. Because C-level executives are often so busy they tend to neglect this extremely important part of a leader’s responsibility which is to not rely on secondhand information. You must visit with all levels of teams in your organization to understand the driving forces behind them.

Conclusion

If you are on a team that delivers a high quality product or service, hopefully you have some new ideas of how you can apply these tools and techniques used by Toyota to improve your team. As said before, these concepts can be applied to any industry with great success but have huge implications in big data when hypothesizing and trying to understand your data. Thanks for reading, please follow me on social media and feel free to contact me if you spot any errors in my posts or have any suggestions!