Equipment failure is a recurrent industry problem and its mitigation is often a case of trial-and-error, even for experienced plant engineers – especially those engineers who presume common sense combined with rudimentary failure analysis skills may sail them through, only to meet the same problem soon again, perhaps in an evolved form. To overcome those shortcomings, this novel Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCFA) course reinforces traditional RCA methods with selected lessons from systems thinking, reliability engineering, and cognitive psychology, among other domains, to provide a deep, unique insight into how equipment failures and their root causes may be better understood, if not entirely eliminated.