Don’t Let Fast Women and Slow Horses Ruin Your Investigations.

There’s an old-fashioned expression, “Fast women and slow horses will ruin your life.” If you take it at face value, it is a lesson in avoiding two vices that could potentially ruin you. However, if we break down this phrase, we can find a more profound lesson to apply to your investigations.

What exactly do “fast” women and “slow” horses represent in the expression? I’m using the expression purely in a figurative sense, referring to the general idea of risky behavior or poor choices leading to negative outcomes.

• Fast Women refers to a quick thrill. It represents instant gratification that will often come with a hidden cost. You trade the reliability of discipline for speed and convenience.
• Slow Horses refer to putting your efforts into wasteful actions. As people waste their money gambling on horses, we can also waste our resources focusing on actions that take us down the wrong path.

How do these two traps hurt your investigation programs?

The “fast women” you want to avoid in your investigation program are the RCA shortcuts. Often, investigators want to do things as fast as possible. This leads to essential steps being skipped and poor investigation results. If an investigation focuses on how fast it is, you must stop and ask, do I want fast or good? You must fix the issues you find; speed often results in missed opportunities by overlooking facts and evidence. Remember, you can always find a faster root cause system … But you need the RIGHT answers to improve human performance and prevent accidents. You don’t want to rely on experience, hope, and luck to get results. You need a process that uses facts and evidence to guide the investigation to all potential improvement opportunities.

The slow horses that drag your investigation program down are root cause analysis processes that waste time investigating things that didn’t happen. By that, I am not referring to actions that didn’t happen but instead possible causes that didn’t occur. There are many bias-based root cause analysis methodologies that have you list all the ways a process could fail and all the different aspects of how a process could fail. In these investigations, people will get into a group to map out potential failure modes. This often leads the group to distracted conversations about things that did not happen. It slows down the investigation process and introduces a lot of bias into the investigation. It frustrates users with the root cause analysis process and leads to them looking for faster, not better, options.

So avoid the fast women who promise you a quick but ultimately empty investigation and the slow horses who distract your investigation, hindering your evidence collection and execution.

If you want to cultivate a robust root causes analysis system to is simple enough to be quick but thorough enough to get you real results, then check out a 2-Day TapRooT® RCA Course or 5-Day TapRooT® Advanced RCA Teamleaders Course.