What routerl said. Skipping out on root cause analysis by stopping as soon as you find something actionable. Those shallow analyses often result in a much bigger cleanup project that is also much less effective. Great for empire building, not so great for progress.

It just so happens that I usually catch people at this when they only have 3 Whys mapped out. There's something going on there but I'm not sure I understand the mechanics.

I'm guessing it means "stop asking why before discovering the root cause". I.e. the analysis stops at a symptom rather than the cause.

pretty popular for root cause analysis technique at AWS. They published an article on it here https://wa.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/2020-07-02T19-33-2....