one link at a time

How it plays

1Something went wrong. The outcome is at the bottom of the chain.
2Pick what directly caused it — not the root cause. The link immediately above.
3Then what caused that. Keep going until you reach something nobody decided.
4Scored on links, not on naming the root.

Why it works: ask a room for the root cause and you get an answer three links up with the mechanism missing. That answer is often correct and useless, because nothing between it and the outcome has been named, so nothing can actually be changed on Monday. Getting the first two links right and stopping beats naming the true root having skipped everything in between.

Set up

Make them say directly caused out loud each time. It is the discipline the whole activity teaches.

0 links
What happened

 

Things that are known to have happened
Your chain, reading upwards
the real chain