Thank you for this very considered response - I've enjoyed all of those books! There is a tendency to read secondary sources that are presented in a current con

Thank you for this very considered response - I've enjoyed all of those books! There is a tendency to read secondary sources that are presented in a current consumable format. Rare is it that someone has read the primary sources or even referenced them. As a gentle introduction to the impact of engineering for quality, I give people copies James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones's The Machine That Changed the World : The Story of Lean Production. If this leads to questions for further study, I point them to Ohno and Deming. As for the topic of this thread, Root Cause analysis is only one method of problem solving and other systemic methods may be more appropriate depending on the issue. For a thorough and in-depth treatise on critical thinking and methods, one could read Problem Solving, Decision Making, and Professional Judgment by Paul Brest and Linda Hamilton Krieger. They provide examples of many decision making frameworks, cognitive biases, in a readable format. I did appreciate the link to the Piper Alpha resource. For another read along these lines there is the BEA Air France 447 disaster final report. https://www.bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090601.en/pdf/f-cp090601.en.pdf https://www.bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090601.en/pdf/f-cp09060...