Five-P factors for root cause analysis - Lydia Leong

This resource first appeared in issue #99 on 05 Nov 2021 and has tags Technical Leadership: Systems: Incident Handling, Technical Leadership: Systems: Other

Five-P factors for root cause analysis - Lydia Leong

Rather than “root cause analysis” or “five why’s”, both of which have long since fallen out of favour in areas that take incident analysis seriously like aerospace or health care, Leong suggests that we look at Macneil’s Five P factors from medicine:

• Presenting problem
• Precipitating factors - what combination of things triggered the incident?
• Perpetuating factors - what things kept the incident going, made it worse, or harder to handle?
• Predisposing factors - what long-standing things made a bad outcome more likely?
• Protective factors - what helped limit impact and scope?
• Present factors - what other factors were relevant to the outcome?