The 5 whys are part of the justly famed Toyota Production System for managing factories. The key to TPS and the part that's always transferable is to get teams

The 5 whys are part of the justly famed Toyota Production System for managing factories. The key to TPS and the part that's always transferable is to get teams to think about their their work and its results (cause and effect) in an effective way and then to use the results of that thinking to improve their products and processes. Anything that contributes to that goal is well founded. Anything else is cargo cult. Requiring causal analysis to make direct claims about cause and effect, which 5 whys does, is important otherwise its hard to check or even identify those claims or evaluate the evidence. It's especially good for getting labor and suppliers to think which they often are not paid to do. It also oftens lays bare shallowness in that thinking. I can easily see that other tools might be better in other circumstances, but management is still going to need explicit claims about cause/effect and evidence to support those claims in order to make process improvements. It's also worth pointing out that there are other shop floor tools in the quality toolbox we've inherited from manufacturing engineering other than the 5 whys which are easy to apply and can be very useful and helpful (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_basic_tools_of_quality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_basic_tools_of_quality). Pareto charts for example are often seen in computer monitoring systems and can be super helpful in seeing changing or developing failure patterns. Control charts are less often seen in the computer biz but are very useful for visualizing variability and understanding when processes and systems are and are not stable.