This was what came to my mind as well. The fire strawman presented exemplifies this. Finding the root cause is simply a mental model. Discovering that there are

This was what came to my mind as well. The fire strawman presented exemplifies this. Finding the root cause is simply a mental model. Discovering that there are three and picking the best one to fix (assuming you’re limited by time/money/complicity/etc or it’s undesirable to fix others) is 100% ok. The existence of instances of multiple root causes does not really say anything negative about Root Cause Analysis. In cases where you can’t discover the root cause (I.e. a plane that explodes and destroys the root cause) you simply have to go as deep as is reasonable and work from there. If someone is unwilling to be reasonable and accept a number of root causes between M-N then the issue is with them, not Root Cause Analysis.