What you really want to know is the basic cause of certain events or conditions that may be especially harmful or beneficial to the firm.
To get to the root cause, it might be necessary for you to follow a symptom chain - a series of symptoms, one leading to another. For example, assume that management of a printing company becomes alarmed about the number of refunds being given to customers. The customers are dissatisfied with their purchases and ask for their money back. The initial symptom is the excessive refund amount. This condition leads first to the financial accounting system that issues the refunds. If this system checks out OK, the attention can be directed at the production system that does the printing. Study of this area may reveal that the cause of the excessive refunds is poor quality. The poor quality may be caused by low morale of production workers, which, in turn, is caused by poor fringe benefits. In this scenario, a symptom chain (excessive refunds, poor quality, and low morale) leads to the root cause (poor fringe benefits). Management solves the problem by addressing the fringe benefits issue.
The problem solver follows the chain of symptoms, asking for each 'What is causing this?' When the cause is some basic action or inaction that is not stimulate by some other, more basic, action or inaction, then the root cause of the problem has been identified. As you gain experience, you will become more skilled at knowing when you reach the problem that you want to solve.
As a general rule, you solve the problem that you are qualified to solve. Perhaps the real root cause is the fact that the president's mother made her or him eat broccoli as a child. However, at this point in time you are not equipped to address that problem. If you are a systems analyst you most often address problems relating to the system's objectives or standards, management, and information processor. If you are an industrial engineer you are especially adept at solution in the physical system of the firm.
This identification of the root cause is the most important and the most difficult step in the problem solving process. In developing this skill, experience is the best teacher