The appropriate level of abstraction is to find the deepest level at which your choices can have an impact. The purpose of the exercise in general is to make sure we aren't investing energy into solving a problem when that problem may manifest in different ways. To use the article's example, addressing the problem of "I get distracted by emails" is insufficient if the subject will just look for other ways to be responsive, thus reducing productivity. There's a deeper level at which they can impact the chain of events, so we want to discover that.
In your example, there's nothing we could really do about "when God first created Man, He also created Temptation..." or "investors are greedy". But we can impact "investors are only interested in a company scaling at a certain rate", since we can provide feedback about how the current processes impact scaling rates. That would be a good starting point.
> The concept of a "root" cause is silly, because the roots of a plant spread far and wide and have many different ends. In the analogy, if the plant is the "problem", and the root is a "cause", then there are hundreds of different roots (causes) that contribute to the plant (problem). People are always trying to assign a single "root" cause as if there is one. Many causes contribute to systemic failures, and often times fixing any one of the root causes would have delayed the failure for another cycle, without actually addressing the procedural risk. Your technician accidentally skipped a step, sure, but he skipped a step because he was in a rush, and he was in a rush because he was overworked, and he was overworked because of those damn sales targets, and...
>If we're interested in "root" causes, then we need to end up with a list of several causes that combine to result in the problem. If we only want a single cause, we should call it a "seed" cause, as defined by "this problem (plant) is guaranteed to happen (grow) every time this cause (seed) occurs (is planted)"
I understand what you're saying here, but I feel like you're focusing on the semantics of the argument rather than on its core message.
The appropriate level of abstraction is to find the deepest level at which your choices can have an impact. The purpose of the exercise in general is to make sure we aren't investing energy into solving a problem when that problem may manifest in different ways. To use the article's example, addressing the problem of "I get distracted by emails" is insufficient if the subject will just look for other ways to be responsive, thus reducing productivity. There's a deeper level at which they can impact the chain of events, so we want to discover that.
In your example, there's nothing we could really do about "when God first created Man, He also created Temptation..." or "investors are greedy". But we can impact "investors are only interested in a company scaling at a certain rate", since we can provide feedback about how the current processes impact scaling rates. That would be a good starting point.
> The concept of a "root" cause is silly, because the roots of a plant spread far and wide and have many different ends. In the analogy, if the plant is the "problem", and the root is a "cause", then there are hundreds of different roots (causes) that contribute to the plant (problem). People are always trying to assign a single "root" cause as if there is one. Many causes contribute to systemic failures, and often times fixing any one of the root causes would have delayed the failure for another cycle, without actually addressing the procedural risk. Your technician accidentally skipped a step, sure, but he skipped a step because he was in a rush, and he was in a rush because he was overworked, and he was overworked because of those damn sales targets, and... >If we're interested in "root" causes, then we need to end up with a list of several causes that combine to result in the problem. If we only want a single cause, we should call it a "seed" cause, as defined by "this problem (plant) is guaranteed to happen (grow) every time this cause (seed) occurs (is planted)"
I understand what you're saying here, but I feel like you're focusing on the semantics of the argument rather than on its core message.