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Problem Solving, Decision Making: Root Cause Analysis
2,878 students
Problem Solving, Decision Making: Root Cause Analysis
Root cause analysis | problem solving skills | decision making | 5 Whys | Ishikawa | Lean Six Sigma | critical thinking
Last updated 9/2026
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Frame any messy workplace problem into a precise, solvable statement using 5W1H, SCQA and MECE logic trees
- Find the true root cause with 5 Whys and the Ishikawa diagram, and prove it with data instead of stopping at a plausible story
- Prioritise where to act using Pareto analysis, bottleneck identification and an impact-versus-cost decision matrix
- Generate non-obvious solutions with structured brainstorming, SCAMPER, Six Thinking Hats and TRIZ
- Map a process end to end, spot waste and bottlenecks, and redesign it using 5S, 8D, SIPOC, DRIVE and ICOR
- Recognise the cognitive biases that quietly corrupt your analysis and decisions
- Run a problem-solving session that produces a decision with a named owner, not another discussion
- Implement the solution using Kotter's eight steps so the fix survives past the first month
- Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
Explore related topics
Course content
16 sections • 38 lectures • 19h 0m total length
Requirements
- No background in Lean, Six Sigma or analytics is required — every method is built up from zero
- A real unresolved problem at work to apply the methods to as you go
- Willingness to check your own assumptions rather than defend your first hypothesis
- English at an intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
- A whiteboard tool or paper for logic trees, Ishikawa diagrams and process maps
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
The same problem came back this quarter. It came back because last time you fixed what you could see, not what caused it.
What is going wrong right now
Most people at work are not bad at solving problems. They are bad at defining them. So the meeting runs for two hours, everyone contributes an opinion, the loudest version wins, an action item is written down, and three months later the same symptom appears under a different name. Meanwhile the actual cause sits untouched in a process nobody mapped, and the cost of it accumulates quietly every single week.
What changes after this course
This course gives you the full path from a vague complaint to a fix that holds. You will learn to state the problem so precisely that the solution becomes obvious, to dig until you hit the real cause and then prove it with data, to find where the damage concentrates rather than spreading effort evenly, to generate options beyond the first obvious one, and to run the room so that a decision actually gets made and owned. Then you will implement it in a way that survives contact with the organisation.
Your instructor
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy, with more than 1.6 million course enrolments and over 150,000 professionals trained. Holder of PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. Built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals.
How the course is built
The course follows the real sequence of solving something difficult. It opens with the quality of your own thinking: logic, argumentation, the cognitive biases that corrupt analysis, and decision models such as OODA and Cynefin. Then comes the core problem-solving cycle: framing with 5W1H and SCQA, MECE decomposition, root cause analysis with 5 Whys and Ishikawa, Pareto and bottleneck prioritisation, then idea generation through SCAMPER, Six Thinking Hats and TRIZ. The third part moves to the process level, where most business problems actually live: mapping, waste, maturity, and the tool set of 5S, 8D, SIPOC, DRIVE and ICOR. The fourth part teaches you to do all of this with a group in the room rather than alone at your desk. The course closes with implementation through Kotter's eight steps, because a solution nobody adopts is not a solution.
What is included
• Lifetime access to all course materials
• Active instructor support in the Q&A section
• Udemy Certificate of Completion
• Practical assignments and real business cases
• A section with additional courses, tools and resources
Why start now
Every quarter you keep treating symptoms is a quarter of budget spent on the same failure. The people who get moved into senior roles are the ones the company trusts with its hardest problems. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.
Who this course is for:
- Managers who keep fixing the same problem because nobody ever found what actually causes it
- Project and operations professionals responsible for delivery when something goes wrong
- Process owners and continuous improvement specialists who need a full toolkit, not one technique
- Business analysts and consultants who must diagnose a situation before proposing anything
- Team leaders who want their team to solve problems instead of escalating them
- Specialists preparing for interviews with case studies and structured problem-solving questions
- Anyone who has sat through a three-hour meeting that ended without a decision