Most investigations stop at the person standing closest to the harm.
Cause Unknown gives you four incidents from your own industry, eight hours of evidence and a decision to sign. Then it tells you how much of your answer landed on a person rather than on the system that put them there.
Pick the one that looks like your work.
Same method and the same scoring in every edition. Four incidents each, set in that industry. No signup, and every one installs to a phone and runs offline.
You get a brief and fourteen possible lines of enquiry. You can afford eight. What you choose to examine decides what you are able to conclude, which is the part of investigation no procedure teaches.
Halfway through, you commit to a hypothesis before you have enough evidence to be right. At the end you mark up a bowtie, build a five whys chain, and sign a finding. You are scored on evidence coverage, barrier analysis, chain quality and causal accuracy.
And you get a blame index: the proportion of your signed causes that sit with an individual. There is no target number. It is reported so you can see what your own reasoning did.
Scan to install it on your phone. It runs offline once installed — useful underground, on a plane, or anywhere the signal drops.
The Shutdown
Mineral processing. A boilermaker enters a guarded conveyor during a night shutdown to clear a jammed roller. The belt starts.
Third Storey
Construction. Edge protection comes out for a crane lift and does not go back. Two hours later a labourer steps into the gap.
Blind Aisle
Warehouse. Peak week, night shift, an agency picker is struck by a reach truck reversing out of Aisle 14.
Room 12
Aged care. A care worker is assaulted by a resident whose escalation history never reached the plan meant to manage it. The hard one.
All four are fictional composites. The conditions in them are not. Every one has appeared in real investigation material, and most in more than one.
The game is free. The session is the product.
Played alone it is a good hour. Run with teams it does something a solo player cannot get: every team commits to a hypothesis out loud at the halfway point, and at the end their blame index goes on the wall next to the sentence they wrote at minute twenty. That comparison is the training.
Facilitator kit
- 43-page facilitator pack with answer keys
- 15-page lectern script
- Student guide and printable worksheets
- 26-page worked examples
- Certificate template and print QR cards
- One facilitator, unlimited sessions
In-house licence
- Everything in the kit
- Four named facilitators
- Unlimited sessions, every site
- Lives on your own LMS
- Perpetual. No renewal fee.
Delivering it to your clients?
Consultancies, RTOs and training providers need a different licence. Four of your facilitators, unlimited client sessions, twelve months. You set your own fee and keep all of it.
Run it once at a normal consulting day rate and the licence has paid for itself.
Want your own people accredited?
One day, up to four of your facilitators, on site or online. Half of it is spent with them running the room and being critiqued on the two moments that decide whether a session lands: the forced hypothesis, and the debrief.
Assessed on observed facilitation, not attendance. Requires a current licence.
Every edition in detail
Same method, same scoring, different rooms. Every one is free, every one installs as its own app, and every one has its own facilitator kit.
Mining
- The Village — camp chemical, decanted and unlabelled
- The Intersection — light vehicle and haul truck
- Take-up — stored energy, and the isolation was correct
- Second Swing — psychosocial, FIFO
Construction
- Panel Seven — a precast panel, braced into a slab an RFI had thinned
- The Marked Route — 11kV located, marked, potholed, never proven
- Dry Cut — silica, nine years, three controls and three different reasons
- The Recovery Meeting — psychosocial, and 380 of 420 people outside the assessment
Onshore oil and gas
- Double Block — a line break, and an isolation verified by the man who built it
- To Atmosphere — the relief valve worked, and discharged where people were
- Inert — nitrogen, in a space nobody had to call confined
- The Queue — the permit office, and a safety-critical role nobody resourced
Offshore oil and gas
- The Only Route — a dropped object, over the one walkway there is
- Four Minutes — the muster route ran through the release
- Ninety Days — a temporary repair, at day 1,400
- Ten Days — reprisal in a place you cannot leave at the end of the shift
Transport and warehousing
- Restrained — fourteen straps, all correct, against a calculation for another trailer
- Beam Level Three — 4,800 kilograms on a bay posted at 5,000, and it failed
- Peak — a guard bypassed against a target nobody had done the arithmetic on
- The Score — an owner-driver, and the reporting channel was the penalty
Agriculture
- The Demonstration — the seatbelt was worn and the rollover protection held
- Bridged — grain, and the person conducting the business is the person who died
- The Window — chemical re-entry, and a crew who could not read the sign
- Forty Kilometres — every control in the district sitting with one man
Power generation
- The Last Overhaul — a fire barrier bypassed fourteen months, correctly, five times
- Under Warranty — the procedure needs two in the nacelle and sends one down the tower
- Daylight — a correct isolation certificate, and 1,340 volts on the conductor
- The Ones Who Stayed — sixty-eight thousand dollars to stay, and no pro-rata
Rail
- Degraded — the interlocking out, two worksites, one whiteboard line
- Passive — he slowed twenty km/h looking for a train behind six years of vegetation
- The Belt Pack — every protective function worked, and all five act after the fall
- The Same Stretch — rostered past his own fatality forty-seven times in fourteen weeks
Psychosocial
- Triage — cumulative exposure in an emergency department
- Mapped — restructure, role ambiguity, an office
- Service — a commercial kitchen, and no way to leave
- Notifications On — parent aggression, a school
Kits and licences are sold per edition. Ten editions, forty cases, $340 a kit. A site licence is $1,800 per edition and a commercial delivery licence is $3,500 plus GST per edition. Licensing more than one edition is quoted on enquiry.
Want it in your LMS? Every edition is also sold as a SCORM 1.2 package for Moodle, Totara, Cornerstone and the rest, tracked for completion and score. One organisation, unlimited learners, $1,100 per edition. See the LMS Edition.
Want it run for you? Half-day facilitated session, your incident types, your people, with the debrief that makes it land. Get in touch.