How to do Root Cause Analysis

We often look at a problem and try to find the cause of it extensively by going deeper and deeper ( 5 Why's approach ), popularly known as the Root Cause Analysis. Does this always help on starting with a problem, or what other means could we use to arrive at solutions?

Let's look at the below situation in Vietnam and how they solved the problem.

In Vietnam, many children suffered from malnutrition, so the government deployed a research team to find the causes of it and fix those in 6 months.

Malnutrition is a condition that develops when the body deprives of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients it needs to maintain healthy tissues and organ function. Malnutrition occurs in people who are either undernourished or overnourished.

The research team did the initial analysis and came back with a report listing the most probable causes in the most densely populated developing country.

• Clean water is not readily available, which leads to many diseases
• Many areas did not have proper sanitization, causing health issues
• People in poverty do not have nutrients rich, food?

The research team decided to submit these to governments and walk away with a payment,?saying these are long-term issues?and require massive government?funding?to improve all these.

Our traditional mind/approach makes us think like this

We identify a problem - Work on finding the root causes - List solutions - Implement solutions to improve the issues, and ask for everyone's support - A typical root cause analysis process -?sometimes; this may take years trying to boil the ocean for solutions

The team understood above facts are?true but useless?as we cannot improve anything immediately and stay stalled in one place for government to implement.?They also firmly believed their job is not reporting findings/issues but also providing deeper solutions is also their job. So, the group decided to approach this problem differently.?

They went to each mother in villages and captured age, weight, height, poverty status, etc. From this, they filtered for only impoverished kids and scanned if healthier children were on that list and that was the "aha moment" where they found many children were healthy, despite poverty and other issues.

They decided to change the focus to kids who didn't have malnutrition problems instead of kids who had had problems, as thats they believed solutions exist.

3 Main patterns identified - timing, how & what mothers fed made a difference.

1) Malnourished kids had two large meals a day, whereas healthy kids from these impoverished families had four meals a day( same quantity of 2 meals but spread as four meals ), which helped them process food instead of 2 heavy meals

2) Malnourished kids' mothers gave food in a bowl and made kids eat, whereas impoverished family kids were hand fed actively by mothers.?

Also, they fed kids even if they were sick, which was not the norm.

3) Impoverished families collected tiny shrimps and crabs from rice paddy and mixed them with kids' food which is generally perceived as inappropriate or low class, but this gave enough proteins and vitamins

Now we have?an altogether different solution for a problem?suggested by the research team. These solutions improved malnutrition across the country; later government improved sanitisation and provided clean water over the years.

Always don't look for a solution considering only that problem nor walk away mentioning it's out of your scope. Instead, look for ways - or find someone who doesn't have this problem, and your answer lies with them.