Health, Safety and Environment
HSE Practice
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Using Tripod Beta Method
Tripod Beta applied to a real incident, to the point where the cause is a condition somebody can change.
- Duration
- 5 days
- Contact hours
- 30
- Level
- Intermediate
- Fee from
- On enquiry
Overview
Most incident investigations stop one step too early, at the action a person took, and produce a recommendation about care or training. Tripod Beta is built to keep going: it separates the agent, the object and the event, traces each failed barrier, and asks what preconditions made the failure likely before asking who was involved. The method is not difficult and applying it honestly is, because it usually ends somewhere organisational. Delegates work a real incident through the full tree, their own where confidentiality permits.
Who should attend
Incident investigators and HSE advisers, operations and maintenance supervisors who lead investigations, and the managers who review the reports and approve the actions.
What you will be able to do
- Build a trio of agent, object and event from the facts of an incident.
- Identify the barriers that should have worked and classify how each one failed.
- Trace an immediate cause to its preconditions and to the underlying condition.
- Write a recommendation that changes a condition rather than exhorting a person.
- Recognise where an investigation has stopped early, including your own.
How it is taught
Short input, then work, across 5 days of roughly 6 teaching hours each. Exercises run on situations delegates bring rather than on a case study written for a different organisation. Cohorts are capped so that everybody is asked something.
Available as classroom, live online, in house.
Programme outline
Day 1
Why investigations stop early
- Human error as a finding rather than a starting point
- Hindsight, outcome bias, and how obvious a sequence looks afterwards
- What a recommendation about training usually conceals
- The organisational end of a causal chain
Day 2
The Tripod model
- Agent, object and event, and building the trio
- Barriers, and the hazard release they were there to prevent
- Immediate causes, preconditions and underlying conditions
- Where Tripod differs from five whys and from a fishbone
Day 3
Evidence
- Securing a scene and a sequence before memory reshapes it
- Interviewing without leading, and without blame
- Physical, documentary and electronic evidence together
- Working with what is missing
Day 4
Building and testing the tree
- Constructing the tree from the trio outward
- Classifying each barrier failure
- Testing a branch for whether it is supported
- Knowing when the tree is finished
Day 5
Recommendations and the report
- Recommendations aimed at conditions, with owners and dates
- Writing for the people who have to act, not for the file
- Sharing a finding without identifying an individual
- Checking months later whether the condition changed
What you leave with
- A completed Tripod Beta tree for one real incident.
- A barrier analysis distinguishing missing, failed and defeated barriers.
- A set of recommendations tied to underlying conditions, each with an owner.
Dates and fees
| Dates | Location | Format | Fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| 23 to 27 November 2026 | Nairobi, Kenya | Classroom | US$1,500 |
| 30 November 2026 to 4 December 2026 | Maseru, Lesotho | Classroom | R15,000 |
| 7 to 11 December 2026 | Durban, South Africa | Classroom | R15,000 |
| 14 to 18 December 2026 | Dubai, United Arab Emirates | Classroom | US$1,500 |
Fees are per delegate and cover tuition, all programme materials and the certificate. Travel, accommodation and visas are arranged by the delegate. Registration closes two weeks before a programme starts.
Certificate
A GATI certificate recording what was attended, issued after the programme has run and attendance has been taken. Attending at least 80 per cent of the days earns a certificate of completion; attending less earns a certificate of attendance stating exactly what was attended. Every certificate carries a code that anybody can check against GATI's own record.
It records participation. and GATI does not claim one it does not hold.