Cause mapping

From HMCwiki

To gain the greatest understanding: take 28 minutes, pull up the site below and watch the slide show. The pointers below are mostly from Mark Galley’s live presentation on cause mapping.

1. Peter Singe suggests: Don't push growth through, rather remove the causes of unreliability.
2. There are two types of problems in this world. Those that have an answer and those that have a system of answers.
3. School taught us to have right answers - Most organizations have systems problems, not right answer problems.
4. Organizations tend to want to run directly to solutions instead of understanding the system of causes which created the problem.
5. When you ask what is most important function in the system, it is like asking, what is the most important part on this car. Travel is a system of parts that interact together. Problems are a system of causes that aren’t working together as planned.
6. Every system is designed to produce what it produces.
7. If you didn’t have a cause, you wouldn’t have a solution. A good solution without a cause doesn’t fix the problem.
8. To get people focusing at ‘the problem’ and not the people, get them looking at a map of it of causes of the problem (on the wall). What is obvious to one is not obvious to another. When they see their 'truth' on the map, they see it is one of many causes. Verbally describing the cause is person to person. Cause mapping the cause is system to persons.
9. Every cause is an effect of a preceding cause.
10. To discover a cause, ask: why did this happen, what made this happen? Tip: don’t ignore the obvious or you may remain ignorant.
11. Also ask: what, when, where and what was the impact questions.
12. To discover an effect, ask: what happened next.
13. Aha! To fix a problem which has a series of causes, you need only eliminate one in the series of causes.
14. There are ‘and’ causes and ‘or’ causes. To fix a problem with ‘and’ causes, you need only eliminate one of the causes. For a problem with ‘or’ causes, all causes must be eliminated.
15. Fire requires heat, oxygen and fuel. You need not eliminate all the causes to eliminate the fire -- just one. Same with systems of ‘and’ causes. The ones that have impact, ease of implementation, costs may be the ones you choose to solve.
16. Reading the map from left to right is cause mapping. Reading the map from right to left is choice mapping.
17. Alignment - ALWAYS couch your cause mapping with respect to organizational goals. Finite change efforts dictate that we must work on those causes that impact the right goals.
18. To prioritize causes in terms of significance: line them up with regard to the goals of the system. If you don’t have a goal, then you don’t have a problem. Suggestions – Safety, Service, Production…
19. Understanding can be a discovery process. Understanding the holes in you system helps you understand the system.
20. Once you have a map of causes: creative juices can be laser-focused on their elimination.
21. Solutions are designed to 'control' certain causes.