Random Thursday: Root Cause Analysis and Sleep

My twitter plea for topic ideas turned up a request for a discussion of transportation systems in Alpennia, but I'm not sure I want to go into too much detail about how much of that is researched and how much is hand-wavy. Sorry!

So for a totally random topic, I've been thinking for some time of doing a follow-up to my attempts to address "tired/sleepy all the time" in a systematic fashion.

My day job involves "root cause analysis (RCA)", i.e., taking an observed failure and identifying the underlying causes--often at several removes--that can be addressed in order to eliminate the failure. Relatively simple causal chains can be identified and addressed easily. There's a RCA tool called "five whys" that's exactly what it sounds like: act like an annoying two year old and ask "why" of every answer that you get:

Failure: I'm tired all the time.
Why? Because I don't get the right quantity of sleep.
Why? Because I stay up until midnight playing video games and my alarm goes off at 5am.
Why? Because I'm addicted to video games and because if I don't get to work by 6am I can't buy more video games.
Why? ...

Eventually you get to an answer that is susceptible of a solution. (The above example is purely hypothetical, mind you. I actually have very little use for video games.)

( You know, this is getting long enough I should be nice to my readers. )