Treat every RCA as a legal document - Legal review plus Peter personal clearance before it goes to a customer

September 23, 2026 at 4:01 PMoperationalhigh

Situation

Peter and Arthur Tyde issued a standing rule to all department heads: unless a customer contract specifically addresses liability, fault and the delivery of a Root Cause Analysis, an RCA is to be treated as an internal document. Before any RCA is shared externally, Legal must review it and confirm it is appropriate to provide, and it must be cleared with Peter personally. The stated reason is that an RCA is a legal document that can unintentionally create legal exposure through statements about fault, causation, or obligations beyond what CIQ has agreed to contractually. Arthur posted the note to #department-heads under a joint Peter-and-I attribution while Peter was in a critical meeting, at Peter request that it be posted with his agreement on the record.

Reasoning

This generalises the restraint Peter had applied to the Veeam incident four days earlier, where he told the channel the team must fully understand what happened before responding. An RCA looks like a technical artifact but operates as an admission, so the failure mode is an engineer or account manager conceding causation in writing to end an uncomfortable customer thread. Legal review alone would be a process that can be routed around under deadline pressure; requiring Peter name makes it a chokepoint. Consistent with his standing line on what gets written down versus what gets said - the same instinct that kept the RLC-AI contrivance verbal and refused the KT support-window letter.

Additional Context

Issued four days after the Veeam RCA was commissioned and five days after an account lead pressed for a written guarantee that a breakage would never recur - the specific pressure the rule is designed to absorb. Peter was unavailable when it went out and asked Arthur to post it with his agreement attached.

Observed Evidence

The rule as posted to #department-heads under joint attribution, plus Peter DM twenty-two minutes earlier authorising the post with his agreement on the record. Confirmed by Peter in review.

Matching Patterns

79%
Decide on the Precedent, Not the Case(answers the class rather than the Veeam instance, names the exposure explicitly as the reason)
58%
Promise Only What Is Inside CIQ Control(causation language commits CIQ to more than the contract does)

Confidence Breakdown

26/35
Evidence
25/30
Pattern
18/20
Source
13/15
Corroboration

Reasoning Depth Analysis

Org Signal:Candour with customers remains the default, but an artifact that operates legally is not the place for it - and the gate has a name on it, not just a function.
Who Affected:Support and Engineering, who write RCAs; account teams under customer pressure to produce one; Legal, who now review them.
Precedent:Creates a class - technical artifacts that operate legally - with a named clearer, and invites the same treatment for adjacent documents.
Consequences:Real, and it lands as recurring work on Peter own desk rather than being delegated.
Timing:Before the first Veeam RCA is finished, which is the moment someone would otherwise ask to send it.

Related Context

💬
#department-heads

slack

Unless a customer contract specifically addresses liability, fault, and the delivery of a Root Cause Analysis, we should treat the RCA as an internal document. Before sharing an RCA externally, please make sure Legal has reviewed it and confirmed that it is appropriate to provide to the customer, clear this with Peter personally. An RCA is a legal document - it can unintentionally create legal exposure through statements around fault, causation, or obligations beyond what we have agreed to contractually.

💬
DM with Arthur Tyde

slack

I am in a critical meeting. But will you post this to dept heads and say I agree.

Outcome

No outcome recorded yet.

Decision ID: 02390006-1c5f-4bb7-8720-d8204b0b9866