Upstream

Something went wrong, and the outcome sits at the bottom of an empty chain. Pick what directly caused it — not the root cause, the link immediately above — then what caused that, and keep going until you reach something nobody decided. It is scored on links rather than on naming the root, because getting the first two right and stopping beats naming the true root having skipped the mechanism. The pool holds real links mixed with things that genuinely happened and are not on the causal path at all. Five looks ship with it — the activity’s own, plus a control room, an archive, a harbour and a winter market, drawn in the file itself with no images to load.

Open the activityDownload

Problem

Ask a room for the root cause and you get an answer three links up with the mechanism missing. That answer is frequently correct and useless — nothing between it and the outcome has been named, so nothing can be changed on Monday. Most incident reviews end there and produce an action nobody can take.

Who it helps

Operations, quality and service teams running incident reviews or post-mortems, and anyone being taught root-cause analysis as something other than a form to fill in.

In training

Make them say directly caused out loud at every step — it is the discipline the whole activity teaches and it transfers immediately. When someone reaches for the answer three links up, do not correct it: place it, then ask what sits between it and the link below. The distractors are worth their own conversation, because “true, relevant, and not a cause” is where most root-cause discussions actually end up.

Skills shown

Causal chain reconstruction, link-depth scoring, distractor design, backwards-inference activity structure, in-browser editing with persistent export.