The Five Whys technique was developed by Toyota as part of its training program aimed at problem-solving. By asking why five times, the causes of problems become apparent and solutions are easy to identify. The Five Whys can be applied every time something unexpected happens. Be it the failure of a marketing program or development mistakes, it can be applied to both technical and human-based problems. It is a great method for root cause analysis, for exploring why something unexpected happened, says the fastcompany.com website.
How it works
First, invite all the people who have been affected by the issue to a meeting. Then ask "Why?" five times. That will navigate you to the solution. Then assign responsibilities and send the results to your team in an e-mail. There should be five corrective actions that were defined at the meeting.
Five whys
It is not as easy as it might seem to ask the right questions. It is crucial to choose the very first why correctly. Don’t examine all possible paths at first, just pick one path that lets you to carry out as few corrective actions as possible. You want to keep the scope as tight as the situation allows.
- Identify the problem.
- Identify the cause. Ask: ”Why did this happen?”
- Write down the cause or causes. You can use a diagram or a table.
- For each cause, ask again why it happened and identify the cause.
- For each problem you need five (or fewer) whys in order to get to the root cause.
Example
- Why there was the breakdown? Because our database became locked.
- Why did it become locked? Because there were too many requests.
- Why there were too many requests? Because the database wasn't load tested. We did not expect that.
- Why it wasn't load tested? Because we don't have this testing included in our development process.
- Why we don't have it included in the process? We never needed it, but now we are at new levels of scale.
Once you have found your root motivation or the root cause of the problem, you know what to do. Agree on the next five steps to solve the problem and assign responsibilities.
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