# Mining for Root Causes

*Tom Geraghty · Safety & Human Error, Interpersonal Practice*

A newsletter on root cause analysis, five whys, and blameless post-mortems. Draws on John Allspaw to show why 'root cause' is a fiction that forecloses investigation — and how the conditions for honest inquiry must be established before the incident, not during it.

- **This page:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/psychological-safety-48-mining-for-root-causes/
- **Read the full article on psychsafety.com:** https://psychsafety.com/psychological-safety-48-mining-for-root-causes/
- **Interactive map:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/?node=mining-root-causes

## Connected concepts (5)

- [Behind Human Error: Cognitive Systems, Computers, and Hindsight](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/woods-et-al-1994.md) (paper)
- [How Complex Systems Fail: Being a Short Treatise on the Nature of Failure, How Failure is Evaluated, How Failure is Attributed to Proximate Cause, and the Resulting New Understanding of Patient Safety](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/cook-1998.md) (paper)
- [Blametropism](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/blametropism.md)
- [HOP](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/hop-human-and-organisational-performance-training.md)
- [Learning from Incidents](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/psychological-safety-85-learning-from-incidents.md)