Criticism
In the arena of systems thinking, the idea of a line of cause and effect is disputed, in favour of the concept of causal loops. To quote Senge:
- In systems thinking it is an axiom that every influence is both cause and effect. Nothing is ever influenced in just one direction.
In addition, in an article in Quality Progress by Mark Paradies (Under Scrutiny) explains the psychological and philosophical limitations of cause and effect, especially as it applies to 5-Whys. The biggest drawbacks mentioned are 1) that cause and effect does not help investigators go beyond their current knowledge, 2) that cause and effect leads to the problem of "confirmation bias," and 3) that the use of cause and effect tends to lead to "single cause" answers in an increasingly complex world.
Paradies would define a root cause as follows: "The most basic cause (or causes) that can reasonably be identified that management has control to fix and, when fixed, will prevent (or significantly reduce the likelihood of) the problem’s recurrence."
Some highly respected government investigation agencies do not routinely use the term "root cause", for example, the National Transportation Safety Board. See http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/process.html
Read more about this topic: Root Cause
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)