Delivering Management Buy-In

Effective Root Cause Analysis is as much a culture as it is a process, and therefore it very often needs significant support from across a broad spread of senior management.

A typical formal RCA moves through some or all of the following ‘phases’:

• Recognition that an event of some significance has happened (or almost happened).
• A decision to thoroughly investigate it – either because it has exceeded some ‘trigger criteria’ or a management decision has been made.
• Developing/agreeing Terms of Reference for the specific investigation.
• A period of gathering initial data.
• Creation of and briefing of the Team.
• Conducting the RCA.
• Developing/approving solutions.
• Writing the closing report.
• Sharing lessons learned.

From here this looks like such a simple process, so why does it sometimes go wrong?

One ‘phenomena’ that I have experienced a few times over the years is a lack of Senior Management commitment – not necessarily to the RCA process itself but to the outcome! How can this be? The Senior guys signed off the initial Terms of Reference but, apparently, do not like the outcome.

Now, if the RCA process has been implemented well, it will have been evidenced-based and thus robust, so we would like to believe that the outcomes are equally sound. Perhaps the team has uncovered ‘causes’ that were not anticipated? Naturally, these will require appropriate solutions.

However, if the Senior Managers who set the RCA in motion, secure in the knowledge that they “knew” what the answer/s would be, are surprised by the published results, what might happen? In most cases, the Senior Managers will appreciate the outcomes, embrace the new knowledge and move forward.

However, in a few cases, we might get a very different reaction. Over several decades I have seen some quite interesting results:

• Denial – This investigation must be wrong. We helped to create this system, we have refined it over the years and it must therefore be ‘fit for purpose’!”
• Rejection – “This Team obviously moved away from their brief, they have reported on issues we did not ask to be addressed and therefore their report is irrelevant!”
• Conflict – “This Team confirmed what we already knew was wrong but are proposing incorrect answers (ie different to those we anticipated!)”

Any of these outcomes can be painful for an RCA Team and may even discourage future participation in investigations.  Overcoming these obstacles has become an increasingly significant part of the Sologic syllabus.

Our embedded RCA program ‘Teamlink’ is completely aligned with an organisations unique problem-solving challenges and delivers effective senior management awareness training focusing on how, beyond targeted and sustainable solutions, well-executed RCA delivers:

• Improved corporate memory
• Effective silo busting
• Notable contributions to continual improvement programs
• Significant reduction in blame culture
• Stronger relationships with regulatory bodies
• Reductions in intra-team conflict
• More clarity from management teams
• Greatly improved employee engagement
• Significantly improved employee wellbeing

There was a time when we considered these as ‘Secondary Benefits’ of RCA but recently we’ve begun to view them as being at least as significant as the primary problem-solving function of the core methodology. When management teams start to encounter these indirect benefits the true scale of their Return on Investment (ROI) become undeniably apparent.

If you would like to learn more please visit our website here and click through to your sector for a downloadable brochure.