Steps for Addressing Root Causes of Common Barriers

Use this tool to review challenges that have come up in your practice, and in particular harm that has occurred in your practice, to understand the possible causes, and take action to repair any harm and learn from/mitigate the risk in the future.

1. Identify a barrier, challenge, or situation that has come up. If you currently use a root cause analysis, consider enhancing that practice vis-a-vis RCA2: Improving Root Cause Analyses and Actions to Prevent Harm.

2. What level is this barrier operating on (Institutional, Interpersonal, etc.,)? Where is the impact of this situation?

• How can you better investigate the root cause of this situation?

1. Was the barrier easily preventable?

3. If so, why wasn’t it prevented? (Consider attitudes, awareness, knowledge, resources, skills, etc.)
4. How does systemic oppression relate to this barrier?
5. How does intersectionality come into play?
6. What other factors, if any, have you considered?

• When you have identified potential root causes, explore what tools your organization currently has to address each root cause.

• For each tool consider:

1. Who was involved in developing these tools? Were they designed with input from people directly affected by the issue at hand?
   1. Do those tools address the root cause?
   1. Do those tools operate on an institutional or interpersonal levels?
   1. Do those tools help prevent the issue from recurring? Consider training, policy, increased representation of directly affected people in decision-making, etc.
   1. Do those tools offer remedy to the affected parties?
   1. What other tools do you think would help at any of these points?

• What objectives can you work towards for change? Consider objectives around implementing existing tools and practices or building new ones.

• How will you accomplish these? Use your existing goal-setting frameworks to set step by step actions and identify metrics.

• Test your goals.

1. How does this goal work towards your objectives?
   1. Check again: Do these objectives really speak to your root causes of the barriers?
   1. What are the goal’s strengths?
   1. What might be some challenges in working towards this goal?
   1. How can you set yourself up for success in achieving this goal?
   1. How can you measure your goal?

• Be sure to set time frames and revisit accordingly.