History of Apollo RCA
Apollo Root Cause Analysis was born out of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant incident of 1979 when Dean L. Gano was working in the nuclear power industry. Following the event he became involved in many investigations and studies to determine what caused the failures and identify effective solutions. During this process he became aware of the inadequate incident investigation techniques that were available at the time. Over the next 10 years he became a student of human problem solving processes and learned many techniques – none of which worked very well in the real world. After teaching a variant form of conventional Root Cause Analysis for a few years, he developed the Apollo Method. It is derived from many years of study and application in the real world on real problems. It is simple and can be used by anyone who wants to learn.
Mr. Gano wrote Apollo Root Cause Analysis – A New Way of Thinking in 1999 and updated it most recently in 2007 after learning how RealityCharting® has changed the practice of the Apollo method since the software's inception in 2003.
If you are interested in learning more about the notion of causation and how it affects our daily lives, you may find the following articles of interest:
History of Causal Thinking
How to Have a Nice Day
Do Strategies Count?
The Apollo Name
When Dean was starting his new company in the late 1980's he struggled to find a suitable name for his ideas and the business. One night while looking at his home library, with that blank stare one gets when in a quandary, he saw a book on Greek mythology, pulled it down, and went on to find the name that symbolized this new way of thinking and termed the methodology Apollo Root Cause Analysis and the eventual company name of Apollonian Publications. This seemed a natural fit as Apollo is the mythical Greek God of clear and logical thinking. While Apollo was associated with many attributes, there is a common theme of rational thinking.
Ap·ol·lo·ni·an adj.
1. Greek Mythology Of or relating to Apollo.
a. Characterized by clarity, harmony, and restraint.
b. In the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, of or embodying the power of critical reason.