Root Cause Seduction

One of her slides addressed a phenomena she called Root Cause Seduction. She stated that assuming there is a root cause for an incident, provides us with an illusion of control. She indicated that typically this search for a root cause focuses on an operator error or technical failures. However, she asserts this approach totally ignores systemic and management factors [13]. 

In her view there is a Root Cause Seduction search, which leads to an organization that fixes the symptoms but not the process that lead to those symptoms. The organization is in continual fire-fighting mode and the organization is having the same incident repeated over and over [13]. 

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