More than five whys and "layer eight" problems

I saw a post about a year ago talking about the "five whys" technique of trying to figure out what caused something to fail. It was using a car scenario for an example, and it went something like this: The car didn't start... because the battery is dead... because the alternator wasn't charging it... because the alternator belt broke... because the belt was beyond its useful life but wasn't replaced... because it wasn't maintained according to recommended schedule. That's about five levels, and it pretty much stopped there. I figure, well, you can go beyond that, and in the case of the infra stuff at a big enough company, you probably need to if you intend to actually try to fix something. So, that's been my life: trying to roll back through the series of actions (or lack of actions) to see how things happened, and then trying to do something about it. The problem is that if you do this long enough, eventually the problems start leaving the tech realm and enter the squishy human realm.

I saw a post about a year ago talking about the "five whys" technique of trying to figure out what caused something to fail. It was using a car scenario for an example, and it went something like this: The car didn't start... because the battery is dead... because the alternator wasn't charging it... because the alternator belt broke... because the belt was beyond its useful life but wasn't replaced... because it wasn't maintained according to recommended schedule. That's about five levels, and it pretty much stopped there. I figure, well, you can go beyond that, and in the case of the infra s