A branching tree of whys growing downward from a single dark node, crossed by three rust-coloured horizontal lines at different depths, each marking a different place where the asking stopped, with the roots below fading out.

What Is the Root Cause

“What was the cause?”, “the root cause” and “what caused it” ask for the one thing that produced an outcome, found at the bottom of a chain of whys. Derived from the definition of a condition, which does not cause, the question welds two others: what the outcome rested on, which has many answers of equal standing, and where the asker will step in, which is the asker’s to say. … readWhat Is the Root Cause