I read the article as a critique of “root cause of failure”, making the point that failures are always failures of systems, not individual elements. I agree wi

I read the article as a critique of “root cause of failure”, making the point that failures are always failures of systems, not individual elements. I agree with this basic premise… if a single fat-fingered SQL command can bring down a service, for a random example, it’s not the operator that is really at fault but the system that has the operator typing SQL directly at the database to do maintenance. However, unless you identify the specific causal pathway that led to the failure you can’t improve the systems! Root cause attribution strategies like “5 whys” do a pretty good job of teasing out the layers of a system failure to identify both the specific causal pathway and the systematic failures, if you keep it going long enough.