How to Get to the Root of the Problem

By Shlomo Maital

       Let’s say you have a tough problem.  You want to get to the root of the cause. 

       But how?

       Ask a five-year old.

        Really.  Ask a kid.  Because – they get to the root of things, by the method of ‘rood cause analysis’,  RCA, used widely by systems experts diagnosing crashes, by computer engineers designing software…  in general, by the hi-tech experts. 

        The method was used eons ago by kids, long before silicon.  It’s called “the 7 Question Path to Enlightenment”. 

          Here’s a fictional conversation with one of my grandchildren.

           Why are there people on Earth?  Because they descended from primates, monkeys and apes. Why are there primates?  They too descended, from other mammals, through evolution. Why are there other mammals?  Well, see, this fish figured out how to move from the sea, breathing oxygen through its gills, to the land, breathing air through lungs. Where did the fish come from?  It began with single cell living things, created by a combination of the right chemicals in a warm sea.  Where did those single cell things come from?  From the oceans, created when the Earth cooled from boiling, and when rain began to fall.     Why didn’t the oceans just evaporate, as they did on Mars?  Gravity. What causes gravity?  And what is it? … Uh….

          There we have it.  The root cause.  Life on Earth, because of…gravity.  But..what in the world is gravity?  Truth is, we do not truly know how gravity works or what it really is – Einstein’s theory of relativity is a start.

           Root cause?  Overweight?  Out of shape?  Tired?   Financial problems?  Ask why.  And then again.  And again.  Either you get to a dead end…or the root cause.  And even dead ends sometimes are very helpful, right?  They tell us what we need to explore in depth more thoroughly.