5 Whys – Getting to the Root Cause

We all need to go back to the days of our child hood where we asked a ton of questions.  Imagine yourself saying why over and over. This totally helps for getting to the root cause of a problem or issue.

Pascal Dennis, in his book The Remedy: Bringing Lean Thinking Out of the Factory to Transform the Entire Organization, uses the example of a customer getting a cheese burger with no cheese.  I love the simple and tangible example.  Sometimes when you are learning about new tools it can be difficult to figure out how to apply them to what you do.

The above diagram was an attempt for me to apply 5 Whys to my life as well as use it to help educate others on my team about finding the root cause to a problem.

1. Why were we late in delivering a website to a customer? It didn’t pass user acceptance in time.
2. Why did it fail user acceptance testing? We missed some things that the customer expected.
3. Why did it fail to meet the customers expectations? We didn’t have clear requirements.
4. Why weren’t the requirements clear?  We didn’t have a business analyst on the team?
5. Why wasn’t there a business analyst driving the project? We had too many projects going on at the same time.

How can you use 5 Whys to improve your org and your team?  Read Pascal’s book and then figure out how you can share what you learn with your team.