RootCauseAnalysis

Customization

Before executing, check for user customizations at: ~/.claude/LIFEOS/USER/CUSTOMIZATIONS/SKILLS/RootCauseAnalysis/

If this directory exists, load and apply any PREFERENCES.md, configurations, or resources found there. These override default behavior. If the directory does not exist, proceed with skill defaults.

MANDATORY: Voice Notification (REQUIRED BEFORE ANY ACTION)

You MUST send this notification BEFORE doing anything else when this skill is invoked.

1. Send voice notification:

   curl -s -X POST http://localhost:31337/notify \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"message": "Running the WORKFLOWNAME workflow in the RootCauseAnalysis skill to ACTION"}' \
     > /dev/null 2>&1 &
   

2. Output text notification:

   Running the **WorkflowName** workflow in the **RootCauseAnalysis** skill to ACTION...
   

This is not optional. Execute this curl command immediately upon skill invocation.

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RootCauseAnalysis Skill

What It Does

Investigates why something failed — past the proximate cause, down to the contributing factors and latent conditions that actually made the failure possible. It offers five structured methods (5 Whys, Fishbone, Postmortem, Fault Tree, Kepner-Tregoe) and ends with actionable changes that prevent a whole class of failure, not just the one incident. Grounded in Toyota Production System, Ishikawa, Reason's Swiss Cheese model, Gano's Apollo method, and Google SRE / Etsy blameless culture.

How It Works

The goal is not "the" root cause — that framing is almost always wrong. A good RCA ends with 3+ actionable, systemic contributing factors, named blamelessly, that prevent a class of failure — not a single blame target. Everything below is structure that pushes the analysis past the first plausible answer, past blame, and stops only at causes you can actually change.

Core Concept

Five axioms this skill operates on:

1. Proximate cause ≠ root cause. "The deploy failed because X crashed" is usually where real analysis starts, not where it ends.
2. There is rarely one cause. Incidents typically have multiple contributing factors — active failures (what a human did) and latent conditions (what the system allowed). James Reason's Swiss Cheese model.
3. Humans are not root causes. "Operator error" is a stop sign for analysis, not a conclusion. If a human could make the mistake, the system allowed it. Go deeper.
4. Actionability is the stop condition. A cause is "root enough" when it points to a change you can actually make. Go too shallow and you miss the fix; go too deep ("physics") and you can't act on it.
5. RCA is a bias-fight. Hindsight bias, confirmation bias, single-cause bias, and outcome bias all actively corrupt investigations. Structure exists to resist them.