## The Tenet Cook: "Post-accident attribution to a 'root cause' is fundamentally wrong." Because overt failure requires multiple faults, there is no isolated cause of an accident. There are multiple contributors, each necessarily *insufficient* on its own; only jointly are they sufficient, and it is the *linking* of these causes that creates the accident. "No isolation of the root cause of an accident is possible." ## Root Cause Is a Social Construction The deeper claim: reasoning by "root cause" does not reflect a technical understanding of failure but rather "the social, cultural need to blame specific, localized forces or events for outcomes." Cook cites anthropological field research on the social construction of the very notion of "cause." The hunt for *the* cause satisfies a human need to assign blame, not an accurate model of how the system failed. ## Why It Matters This is the intellectual foundation of blameless culture — see [[Blameless Postmortem Culture]] — and it cuts against naive RCA. It pairs with [[Cause-Based Remedies Backfire]]: not only is a single root cause fictional, but acting as if one exists makes things worse. Compare the operational nuance in [[Triage First Then Root-Cause]].