By Kim Smiley

On Saturday, August 28 2010, a golfer at the Shady Canyon Golf Course in Irvine, California had a bad day on the course, a really bad day.

He literally burned the course up.

He swung his golf club and accidentally hit a rock.  This put into motion a classic example of cause and effect.  The metal on rock contact produced a spark, which landed on the dry brush in the area.  This tiny spark eventually grew into a 25 acre wild fire that took 150 firefighters, 38 trucks, 53 helicopter drops and 22,000 gallons of water to finally put out.  No one was injured and no homes were destroyed, but it was still an impressively bad day of golfing.

At first glance, this might seem like a freak accident that isn’t worth expending resources to investigate.

But what if this wasn’t the first time something like this happened?

The manager of the course stated that a similar incident happened a few years ago, but the golfer had been able to put the fire out before it could spread.

It seems like it might be worth at least considering possible solutions.

A root cause analysis can be performed by building a Cause Map using the information from this example. A Cause Map provides a simple visual explanation of all the causes that were required to produce the incident.  Cause Maps can be very detailed and include hundreds of causes or can be very high level.  It depends on the type of problem being investigated.  In this case, a fairly simple Cause Map should be adequate to brain storm some possible solutions.  Click on the “Download PDF” button above to view a high level Cause Map.

In this example, there are a number of possible solutions.  The course could be watered more often so that the brush isn’t quite so dry, fire extinguishers could be put on golf carts during the dry season to extinguish any fires that occur before they have a chance to grow, more rocks could be removed from the course and surrounding areas, etc.  There are many solutions that could be implemented.  Once the issue is clearly understood and the causes determined, the most effective, cost effective solutions can be implemented.