Comment by juancn
4 days ago
It's rarely a single cause, there's no root, it's a forest.
It's usually a combination of things that are not quite right, specially in mature orgs where all the simple fixes have already been applied.
It's semantic, if you do RCA right you don't stop at a single cause, but that's what usually ends up happening.
About that, I'm still a fan of the classic "How Complex Systems fails"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32895812
I get that. But it might not be feasible to immediately maintain an entire forest.
Whereas it’s usually easy to point at a specific tree and say “that one has got to go”.
Keep doing this and you maintain the forest without ever getting overwhelmed.