When you are not happy about something there are probably a dozen or more potential causes. Its usually easy to jump to an idea which of these to blame. But do we really know it is the main cause? And have we even thought about the other causes to see how much each of them is to blame?

I had this problem in a big way at work. A project wasn't working. Something big. All sorts of systems and processes and people weren't quite playing together nicely and the collective outcome was bad, bad, bad. Each team involved had an idea of what the problem was. Some blamed a system. Some blamed processes that weren't being followed. But the fascinating thing was than nobody involved could come up with a complete list of what all the root causes could be, and how much each was contributing to the poor performance. So we developed a guide (obscured because its confidential - sorry!):


This shows the three main measures of 'performance': What are the things we can measure to know whether performance is 'good' or 'bad'? It then lists the seven things that can cause performance to be bad. It has to be one of these and all should be investigated to understand poor performance. Finally it branches out in to a tree: If one of the seven things looks like its a cause, it shows you what to check next.

This was used to great effect recently by one of our projects. Things were looking bad. The overall results were terrible. I visited the country in question and they had used the principles from the root cause tree to really understand it. They could tell me straight away that although overall performance was poor, 60% was due to XXX, 20% due to YYY, 10% was ZZZ and the remainder was a bunch of smaller issues that weren't worth investigating. Amazing insight. We were then able to confidently and quickly focus our efforts on the real root cause.

Its not just boring work projects that would benefit from explanation in this way. I thought about what it is that makes me happy and came up with this:


... which immediately made me realise that I had got the balance wrong in daily life!!

I also thought about what makes me happy at work, and came up with this:
A little simpler than the life version, and a lot simpler than the one I did for work. But it gives me something to measure my job against and to judge other jobs by.

Finally I was looking back with frustration at political campaigns I have been involved in. The bits I was interested in is the gathering of data and the use of data to help increase the campaign's effectiveness. I sketched out a diagram with the overall thing I sought to achieve in campaigns at the top (Improved effectiveness and clear reporting on progress) and all of the things that were needed to achieve this. No campaign I have worked on had these elements. But I have also never seen a diagram with all of the elements on it before. So its not really a surprise that it was never achieved if nobody had ever clearly set out what needs to be achieved!

So all in all I have fallen in love with drawing root cause trees as a way to understand complex problems and thought I'd write a little blog post to share it. (Even though there are no numbers or charts involved.)

I guess the moral of this story is, if there is a complex problem out there with lots of things contributing to it, try listing them all and joining them with little arrows. It just may help to bring some clarity.