Docs/patterns/root cause pattern/skills

Root Cause Pattern — Skills

Pattern: Root Cause
Component: skills.md
Version: 1.1 | Updated: 2026-07-16


Skill Why required
Blameless facilitation Norms that produce honesty
5 Whys / causal analysis Reach systemic conditions
Observability gap analysis Detection and alerting fixes that are real
Corrective action tracking Owners, dates, verification
Knowledge capture Feed runbooks and golden evals when AI involved

Skill activation triggers

  1. Facilitation — every RCA meeting
  2. 5 Whys — after timeline agreement
  3. Observability — when detection gap is non-empty
  4. Action tracking — before marking FINAL
  5. Knowledge capture — when prompts/models/tools contributed

Verification that skills worked

  • Norm read aloud recorded in notes
  • One root-cause sentence survives scrub
  • Alert actions name metric, threshold, routing
  • Tracking ticket IDs linked from the RCA