When I teach people how to facilitate incident investigations with Cause Mapping® root cause analysis (RCA), they often ask how much detail to include. There’s no definitive answer to this question, because it depends on the problem you’re investigating. But while I can’t give you a one-size-fits-all solution, I can offer guidelines to help you determine an appropriate level of detail for your analysis.
In Cause Mapping root cause analysis, we begin by defining the problem: what happened, when it happened, where it happened, and how it impacted the goals of the company. How much the problem impacted the organization’s goals is your first indicator of the level of detail required. In short, problems with a bigger impact require more analysis than problems with a smaller, less severe impact.
High-severity problems typically involve multiple breakdowns across multiple processes. A helpful way to think about this is with James Reason’s Swiss Cheese Model, which illustrates how major incidents occur due to failures across multiple layers of defense (represented as slices of Swiss cheese). For high-impact problems, a more detailed analysis will reveal a larger solution set across multiple processes, allowing for more holistic risk reduction.
Consider the graphic below as a rule of thumb for the minimum level of analysis required for high, medium, and low severity incidents.
Degree of Detail by Level of Severity
Another consideration for the level of detail required is how "solved" the problem needs to be. When I bring this up in my workshops, people sometimes chuckle. The idea that anyone would say it’s okay for a problem to be anything less than fully solved seems ludicrous. But here’s the thing: You can't “solve” a problem that’s already occurred, because you can’t change the past.
We all talk about solving problems. But what we mean is reducing the risk of similar problems arising in the future. So, the question really is: How much do we need to reduce the risk? Most folks’ immediate response to this question is: “As much as possible.” But in real life, we don’t reduce the risk of everything as much as possible all the time. Our priorities determine where we focus our risk reduction efforts.
At work, your company’s priorities help determine how solved company problems need to be. If your company strives for best-in-class customer service, for example, even low-impact customer problems would be worth understanding more thoroughly to identify multiple options for solutions.
Your audience—the people involved in contributing to the investigation—also shapes how much detail you need.
When we’re familiar with a topic, we don’t need a lot of detail to understand and participate in a conversation about that topic. If I walk into an oil refinery and another engineer asks me about my career, I can simply say, “I was a process engineer for 15 years.”
But when I’m chatting with my seatmate on an airplane, this short response probably wouldn’t be enough. If my seatmate is an investment banker, a graphic designer, or any other professional who probably hasn’t heard of a “process engineer,” I’ll need to add more detail to convey what I’ve done in my career. And if my seatmate happens to be a non-professional, like a 7th-grade student, I’ll need to add even more detail.
The bottom line is to know your audience. The less familiar your audience is with the situation at hand, the more details you’ll need to include in your Cause Mapping root cause analysis. Any time you share a map with someone who hasn’t already been involved in the investigation is an opportunity to check whether you have enough detail. If they can’t follow the map on their own and you keep having to explain how causes created effects, that’s an indicator that you need more detail on your map.
The tricky thing about any form of analysis is that you can always dig deeper and deeper into the details. A literary analysis could take the form of a three-paragraph essay or a 300-page book. Data analysis can be as simple as total sales per store, or as granular as a multi-year sales forecast that incorporates region, customer demographics, and seasonal trends. Similarly, a root cause analysis can be a 5-Why, a 50-Why, or even a 500-Why.
But, the big difference between RCA and many other forms of analysis is that it’s a team sport. RCA facilitators don’t work alone, and they don’t brainstorm all the details on a Cause Map™ diagram. They draft an initial analysis and show it to frontline staff, SMEs, management, and other stakeholders who can provide insight. If you show these folks a simple 5-Why, they will give you more details to build a more thorough analysis.
When people ask how much detail is enough, they’re usually worried about adding too much detail. They think more detail means more time. But in my experience, I’ve found the opposite to be true. Adding more detail allows investigation facilitators to avoid long-winded debates over who’s right and who’s wrong. If someone points out a possible cause or wants to add clarifying details, you can just add it to your Cause Map diagram and keep the investigation moving forward. To learn how to use Cause Mapping root cause analysis to lead faster, more efficient RCA investigations, join one of our free online webinars or an upcoming public workshop.