Incident management7 min read

Root cause analysis methods: 5 Whys, fishbone, TapRooT, ICAM

Most organizations do not need four root cause analysis methods. They need two, one fast and one serious, and a rule that decides which an incident gets before the investigator does.

Everything below is in service of that argument, including the part where the method turns out to matter less than the sales material suggests. A root cause field reading "did not follow the procedure" reads that way under all four. Every one of them stops at the injured worker if the stopping rule allows it, and every one can be pushed past that point by somebody who knows to keep going. What a method buys you is structure, a vocabulary of causes, and a written trail somebody outside the company will accept. It does not buy depth.

TapRooT is a registered system owned by System Improvements, Inc.; ICAM is taught by several independent providers. Denety is affiliated with neither, and the descriptions below come from each method's own published material.