A German decision of any weight is preceded by a Gutachten: an expert report, commissioned, written, and read before anything is decided.
Building disputes, medical questions, insurance claims, legislation. The report comes first and is a document in its own right, with an author who is answerable for it.
The diagnostic phase is not a stage of thinking. It is a deliverable.
To grab the evil by the root.
Not cut, not treat, not manage. Grab. And not the plant — the root.
Liebig found that plant growth is limited not by the total nutrients available but by whichever single nutrient is scarcest. Add more of everything else and nothing improves. Add the one that is missing and the crop grows.
The Law of the Minimum is a diagnostic principle disguised as agricultural chemistry. The problem has one cause, and treating the others is waste.
Koch established a formal procedure for proving that a particular microorganism causes a particular disease. The organism must be found in every case, isolated and grown in culture, produce the disease when introduced into a healthy host, and be recovered again from that host.
Before Koch, causation in medicine was asserted. After Koch, it had to be demonstrated, in four steps, in order.
In 1858, at the Pathological Institute in Berlin, Virchow published Die Cellularpathologie. His argument was that disease does not reside in organs or tissues in general, but originates in individual cells, and that the nature of a disease can be understood by looking at those cells under a microscope.
He also developed the first systematic method of autopsy, and the modern autopsy still uses his technique.
He is called the father of modern pathology. Pathology is diagnosis pushed as far down as it will go.
Symptom-fighting. A German word that exists in order to criticize.
Das ist reine Symptombekämpfung — that is pure symptom-treatment — is a standard charge in German political and business argument. It means: you have not understood the problem, and what you are doing will not last.
A culture builds a word like that only when it needs to make the accusation often.
Cause-research. German has a single ordinary word for the activity of investigating why something happened, and it appears in news reports as a matter of course. Die Ursachenforschung läuft — the investigation into causes is running.
There is no English equivalent that is not a phrase. Root cause analysis is consultant’s language. Ursachenforschung is what a newsreader says.
Ur, primal or original. Sache, the matter. The cause is the original matter — the thing that was there first.
English took cause from the Latin causa, which also gave us accuse and because. The German word contains its own instruction: go back to the thing underneath.
The same German word means the ground beneath your feet and the reason for something. Aus welchem Grund? — from what ground? Im Grunde genommen — taken at bottom.
In German, the cause of a thing and the floor of a thing are the same word. You have not found the reason until you have hit the bottom.
Grund is the ground — the bottom of a thing. Gründlich means going down to it.
English thorough comes from through: covering the whole extent. The German word is not about extent. It is about depth, and specifically about reaching the floor.