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point? Does an incident involving death or serious injury always qualify? Is a majorproperty loss (typically internally defined) enough? In short, there is no cookie-cutteranswer to the question of whether to subject an event to a root cause analysis. Whilesome events may fit neatly into this category – the event is so overwhelming that ananalysis is obviously needed - many others do not. A company should not waste criticaltime by waiting for an event to occur before it holds this conversation. A wiser approachwould be to decide well in advance if there are subjective factors that, in the company’sexperience, dictate that a root cause analysis be performed. The key is being able torespond quickly and in an organized fashion. Delaying the conversation on whetherand when to investigate incidents will unnecessarily delay the ability to respond timely.Resources exist which can assist a company in the selection of events to investigateand analyze. 10Another critical consideration at this stage is the determination of who will conduct theinvestigation. An investigation is only as good as the quality of the team conducting it.If the team is inexperienced, lazy, careless, or slanted towards bias, the quality ofinformation which is discovered will likely reflect that. Investigation teams assembledunder the stress of an event (as opposed to an existing policy/process) are selectedmore on the basis of availability than on competency. To provide for a truly effectiveprocess, time and care must be taken to identify the appropriate members of theinvestigation team. The available team members should be broad-based and, ifanything, over inclusive – not all members will necessarily respond to each event, butthere should be those who are ALWAYS involved to ensure consistency in approach. It10 See, e.g., Vanden Heuvel, et al., supra at 119-132.6