RootCauseAnalysis Skill

RootCauseAnalysis investigates incidents and recurring failures with causal methods (Five Whys, Fishbone, blameless Postmortem, Fault Tree, Kepner-Tregoe) and traces them to systemic root causes rather than to a person to blame. Apollo/RealityCharting and FMEA are supporting methods documented in Foundation.md and MethodSelection.md, not separate intents.

Ideal State

• The method fits the failure class, as the situation table under Intent Routing maps it, and a non-trivial incident is written as a Postmortem with the other methods as its investigation tools.
• Every diagnosis is evidence-backed and blameless, with 3+ actionable systemic contributing factors rather than a single blame target. It ends at causes that are both systemic and within authority to change, never at a person to blame, and each corrective action prevents a class of recurrence rather than the latest trigger.
• Every conclusion that rests on a fact the request supplied cites that fact, checked at its source, and a caller's hypothesis is never taken as fact.
• Decisions are judged using the information available at the time.
• What the evidence cannot support is disclosed as a gap or a hypothesis, never filled with invented causes, probabilities or comparisons, and never padded with invented factors to meet the 3+ target.
• The analysis delivered is finished; no sub-work is still running when it is handed over.

Intent Routing