Every once in a while when I’m conducting training, I have the good fortune to have someone ask a particularly atypical question that gets me thinking and helps me to develop more tools and techniques. This serves to not only augment my own bag of tricks but also increases my capacity to serve my clients.

A few weeks ago during a training session on root cause analysis, one of the attendees asked: “Can we use the same technique to figure out why something worked really well?” My initial reaction reflected my skepticism as I responded with a lukewarm: “I suppose….” I had occasionally taught people how to use some of the tools to assist in preventive action. “What would cause something to go wrong—and what would cause that?” But this was different.

 …