Let’s talk about a situation that comes up more often than it should.
A pipeline weld fails inspection. Immediately, the conversation starts:
It sounds reasonable.
But in most cases, it’s wrong. Or at best, incomplete.
When teams investigate weld non-conformance, they tend to anchor on the most visible point of failure:
The weld itself.
So the focus becomes:
But that’s only one part of the system.
In the Sologic example on pipeline weld non-conformance, the issue wasn’t just about how the weld was done.
It was about how multiple conditions came together:
Individually, none of these caused the failure.
Together, they made it almost inevitable.
They look for a single cause.
But real-world failures don’t work like that.
They are the result of:
When you reduce it to: “The welder didn’t do it properly”
You miss the system that allowed that outcome.
Instead of asking: “Who made the mistake?”
Ask: “What conditions had to exist for this weld to fail?”
That shifts the conversation completely.
Now you start exploring:
Now you’re not blaming. You’re understanding.
When teams build out the full cause-and-effect chain:
And most importantly: You fix the problem in a way that actually holds.
Pipeline failures are rarely about a single bad weld.
They’re about a system that made a bad weld possible.
If your RCA stops at the surface, your solution will too.
Visit https://www.sologic.com/en-au for more example problems.