Ishikawa/Fishbone - New in Causelink 7!

Ishikawa/Fishbone is a tool commonly used within many organizations. While the Fishbone diagram is not designed for or capable of generating detailed cause and effect charts for complicated and high-profile events, it is a great way to brainstorm potential causes, especially on the front end of an RCA (root cause analysis) where little is known and information may be lacking.

In the first step of an RCA - Data Gathering - Sologic leans on the concepts of Ishikawa/Fishbone to assure a diverse range of data is collected. We task facilitators to look for evidence and causes in four different areas including: “People”, “Procedures”, “Hardware/Software/Systems” and “Environment”. Without these guides, facilitators can sometimes be susceptible to tunnel vision and focus their entire data gathering efforts solely on human error or equipment issues (for example). Subsequently, they overlook other important causes that may not be of particular interest to them, but the causes are critical to understanding the overall picture.
Because many organizations have Ishikawa/Fishbone integrated into existing work processes, and because we feel it is a great data gathering tool, we have added an Ishikawa/Fishbone module to Causelink. (Released May 2021 as part of the V7 Causelink update). Now, RCA teams will have two Causelink tools to jumpstart and guide their data gathering at the front end of an RCA--the Timeline, and the Ishikawa/Fishbone template.

Analysts can build a Fishbone diagram by themselves or with the investigation team, using it to guide initial data gathering efforts. The information on the “bones” can then be marked as “potential”, “confirmed”, or “disproven”. If the analyst wishes to port over “potential” or “confirmed” causes to their cause and effect logic diagram, a simple one-button command makes that happen. The Fishbone module also allows for customization by adding or deleting ‘bones’, or by changing the categorical labels assigned to the bones to align with your conventions.

In order to see how Fishbone can benefit your RCA’s, our latest published example illustrates how a Fishbone chart was initially generated to identify potential causes for a pipeline leak incident. Then, through additional data gathering, many of the potential causes were confirmed while some were disproven. You can see how this plays out by looking at the “Preliminary” Fishbone versus the “Final” version. 'Confirmed’ Fishbone causes made it to the detailed conditional logic diagram (Note: causes that came from the Fishbone are highlighted Yellow).

Whether using independently for brainstorming on a project, or as part of a data-gathering effort on the front end of an RCA, the new Fishbone module in Causelink fosters creativity and expanded data collection while also enabling data capture/mining for future improvement efforts.

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