Airline Industry

"Since that time AirTran Airways has recorded successful and dramatic results. One of the first steps taken by Mr. Dagon was to adopt REASON Root Cause Analysis Technology throughout the corporation." (more)

Management Insights

"Once a root cause has been identified, the seamless process provides a systematic method for establishing where in the organization prevention can best be accomplished. This pinpoints exactly both what can be done in the action plan to gain immediate control over the internal system that produced the problem, and what steps are necessary to sustain control in the future. Because REASON focuses upon the internal business processes as the seat of root causes and their removal, those steps necessarily involve developing or modifying business processes..."(more)

Examining Decision Errors in Child Protection

In November of 2002, we were contacted by Professor Tina Rzepnicki with the University of Chicago. She was interested in determining the applicability of root cause analysis for systematically identifying decision errors in cases of child death involving families already known to the state public child welfare agency. The goals of her project were to 1) establish an approach that would provide both a repeatable process to which investigators of these deaths could bring their skills and experience, 2) a set of criteria for supporting thorough and uniform data collection, and 3) an analytic method that would permit the identification of common patterns of error across cases.

Their decision was made to deploy the REASON Root Cause Analysis and Lessons Learned System. From that resource of activity and study came a personal interest by Professor Rzepnicki and her co-author Penny R. Johnson in the broader potentials of root cause analysis. The paper available for download is a result of that professional curiosity and interest, and is provided for reference with the permission of the authors.

For persons involved in human behavior analysis and research, this paper provides insights to the dynamics within organizations that are generated through the interaction of individuals with the demands of critical responsibility, the personal dispositions of those individuals and the processes within the organization itself. (more)

Nine Keys to Success

A beginner’s guide to deploying and sustaining a successful root cause analysis program. (more)