REPLY Definition of root cause (SD6798)

[SDMAIL Ralf Lippold]

Posted by  Ralf Lippold <ralf_lippold at web.de>

Hi everybody,

Zahir has made an excellent point in questioning whether "5-Whys" lead 
to a goal. Isn't that rather a VISION that we have to set in comparision 
to CURRENT REALITY?

This makes a totally different point as we have to get an understanding 
what the VISION is (shared vision) in order to strive for it. Just 
making the goal, meaning to solve the problem in the first hand doesn't 
account for an sustainable VISION. As mentioned in the "Fifth 
Discipline" by Peter Senge together with four other fields (personal 
mastery, mental models, systems thinking and team learning).

All five are necessary to move to the state of a learning organization 
(actually the SD community) seeing that they unsurface around 
communities -slowly- makes me think that

> Posted by  BalaporiaZ at schneider.com
> The main thing I got from my excellent but very compact SD education is
> that the root cause of almost all our problems is the lack of a good 
> shared mental model.

As soon as these mental models are brought into the open people involved 
get a chance to challenge them and their own assumptions actually and 
learn from there further on.

> The most important model of the real world problem isn't the
> abstraction that is captured in equations.

Actually that's more of a "pure" engineerical point on the world. As the 
interconnections between humans are not just driven by numbers, goals 
and rewards that makes intervening into a living system such as a human 
driven organization or society so much more difficult and sometimes 
foggy in terms of future outcome of the actions.

> It's the abstraction that sits
> between our ears.  So regardless of how good the analysis is, if it 
> doesn't
> change my behavior then I become the root cause of the problem.   People
> don't act in accordance with the output of simulation models, they act in
> accordance with their beliefs.

..and the direct reactions that can be seen by them on a rather short 
time horizon.

> I think that is as root cause as it gets.
> This is not new to anyone on this list but it seemed like a fundamental
> point that had not been raised.
>

As the discussion grows over time it gets more and more connection with 
other interesing questions that arise by that and connecting to other 
fields of interest / daily work / daily life.

It is great to see that the SD community is a living body that changes 
over time -and whatever direction is taken is the right one for the time 
being. There had been other starting points for similar discussions in 
the past they didn't seem to florish. For some ideas the time has to 
come and people have to put earlier questions/discussions into account 
and connect them to their own experiences.

Always remember you -almost- never can change a system as you wish  
(remember whether you could really change the behavior of your kids, 
spouse, friends or peers by just making them do what you wanted or 
thought would be best. Did it really work? NO - probably not over a 
longer time).

Best regards

Ralf
Posted by  Ralf Lippold <ralf_lippold at web.de>
posting date  Sat, 8 Mar 2008 12:20:07 -0500