I do a lot of this in root-causing outages and system problems. It can help to frame it as “at least 5 whys”, and to recognize that it can branch (some whys have more than one underlying cause). Some amount of babble-and-prune almost always goes into it, in making HUGE lists of branching and looping causes, then combining, moving, or eliminating the non-controlling ones.
I do a lot of this in root-causing outages and system problems. It can help to frame it as “at least 5 whys”, and to recognize that it can branch (some whys have more than one underlying cause). Some amount of babble-and-prune almost always goes into it, in making HUGE lists of branching and looping causes, then combining, moving, or eliminating the non-controlling ones.