5 Whys is not intended to solve problems, or find a 'definitive' cause. It is just one way to identify a cause. "Not all problems have a single root cause. If

5 Whys is not intended to solve problems, or find a 'definitive' cause. It is just one way to identify a cause. "Not all problems have a single root cause. If one wishes to uncover multiple root causes, the method must be repeated asking a different sequence of questions each time." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys When you work on incidents, you should already know that the incident you're looking at could have wide-spread effects, and may only be a symptom of a series of complex events. You may be able to find a cause with 5 Whys, but probably not the cause, because the causal chain is almost always complex. 5 Whys is just a shoot-from-the-hip way to find the first, most obvious cause from the perspective of the person doing 5 Whys. You might not be able to identify the "real" root cause right away, but by documenting each incident's cause and linking them into a value chain, and reflecting these in runbooks, you can over time eventually see where the root causes are coming from. But you also don't need to immediately solve the root cause to begin adding safeguards around the known incidents.