Proximate vs Root Causes: Keep Digging to Find the Answer

A proximate cause is the immediate, most obvious trigger of an event (e.g., 'I lost my job because the company had financial difficulties'); a root cause is the deeper, underlying condition that actually explains why the proximate cause was able to happen at all (e.g., 'I hadn't kept my skills current, so I wasn't valuable enough to retain'). Techniques like the '5 Whys' (repeatedly asking why, using each answer as the basis for the next question) and Socratic questioning are used to dig from the proximate cause down to the root.