17 ms·

The "five whys" productivity technique

303 points by alecsandra 5y ago

imwillofficial 5y ago
::reads 5 whys:: ::shudders in COE:: Reference: https://wa.aws.amazon.com/wat.concept.coe.en.html https://wa.aws.amazon.com/wat.concept.coe.en.html
- cwilkes 5y ago
  Link at the bottom is to “the wheel” which I was expecting to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_wheel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_wheel the torture device, instead it is a way to select the weekly component talk.
  - BBC-vs-neolibs 5y ago
    Not entirely dissimilar, depending on the org.
maxbaines 5y ago
This is a great summary/reminder of a few techniques good to read.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
asmos7 5y ago
sadly I've always seen this technique used to assign blame
- gonzo41 5y ago
  And, Why do you think that is? Nah, any technique that gets people thinking about root cause analysis is worthwhile, but like most lean techniques they require a level of psychological safety in the organization to be effectively used.
  - liveoneggs 5y ago
    Because you single out a person -> ask them for the explanation -> turn the knife four additional times?
  - allemagne 5y ago
    Exactly. No methodology can overcome a low enough baseline of trust. Over time, cynicism gets equally distributed and the justification for literally any process or technique becomes vapid corporate kool-aid. You're just left with thinly-disguised attempts to assert power met with toxic resentfulness. The way I see it, there's a spectrum of trust that goes from one extreme where almost no process works well, and the other extreme where almost any process works well. So there's the easy discussion of how your technique is supposed to work, and then the hard discussion of how much trust it requires of the people involved.
ivanstojic 5y ago
If you’ve never seen the “five whys” technique before, then you are probably unfamiliar with its criticisms as well. This shows a broad spectrum of proponents and critics of the approach: https://www.google.com/search?q=five+whys+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com https://www.google.com/search?q=five+whys+site%3Anews.ycombi...
- mgkimsal 5y ago
  And... the top link I get in google is this hacker news thread... Edit: oh, because the link actually has hacker news in the query filter... duh...
- hpoe 5y ago
  And if you want the non-Google version https://duckduckgo.com/?q=five+whys+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com&t=h_&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=five+whys+site%3Anews.ycombinator....
  - mynameismon 5y ago
    Or if you prefer Algolia: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=five+whys https://hn.algolia.com/?q=five+whys
- kqr 5y ago
  Very brief summary: five whys techniques pretend complex systems are governed by simple chains of events, where each event undisputably causes the next and there's an objective "root cause" that sets the entire chain off. In reality, complex systems are driven by networks of causal effects, where some form reinforcing and balancing feedback loops. There's no start or end to a causal pathway, there's just where we choose to look and what we choose to ignore. There is no root cause, there is a myriad of interlocking factors that together dynamically drive the system in certain directions. Five whys type analyses tend to end up blaming whatever is convenient or culturally acceptable to blame, and leaves many branches of the causal network underexplored. Five whys is easy to explain and humans love the narrative point of view promoted by a chain of events, but it's a very inefficient way to explore the causal structure of a system.
itsmemattchung 5y ago
Loved the five Whys as an ex-Amazonian but could easily see how the framework can snowball into a blame game.
padastra 5y ago
Unfortunately, there's many corporate environments where technical staff are managed by non-technical staff. This comment isn't debating the merits of that, but when the manager (or especially their manager) doesn't really intuitively understand the difficulty of your work or how much you've accomplished, they measure by other things like "responsiveness". This is similar to how patients will rate doctors (lawyers, auto-mechanics, electricians) higher by things like waiting room design, ability to make small-talk, willingness to give antibiotics, etc. which are important but actually do not correlate with better care. So I've found that optimizing for "responsiveness" is important in and of itself, and much easier than the alternative of "let me make sure non-technical senior management person X spends the time to understand my contributions at a deeper level".
- brightball 5y ago
  Yep. Stuff like this is the reason that I moved from the technical side into management about 4 years ago. Seeing the dangers to my team from managers who don’t understand the challenges and constraints became a situation that I couldn’t take anymore. Now, since going that route I’ve gotten deep into SAFe (Scaled Agile) because I believe that it truly solves so many problems. SAFe recommends using “5 whys” in certain situation and SAFe itself isn’t without valid criticisms either. IMO it’s still by far the best option for a long list of reasons. Like anything in the wrong hands though, it can be co-opted. Everything revolves around good leadership.
Techbrunch 5y ago
How to solve why the server crashed using the 5 Whys: https://vooza.com/videos/the-5-whys/ https://vooza.com/videos/the-5-whys/
indymike 5y ago
Five Whys is just a tool. It really only works if it is used as a tool for finding truth and improving process. It is really dangerous in the hands of people who wish to use a process failure for political gain.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  Agreed. In constructive environment with high levels of trust you can often take a shortcut and simply ask: What problem are we actually trying to solve?
- Puts 5y ago
  I think the most helpful thing with five whys is that it counter acts blame-games within an organisation. Normally when something happens the natural reaction is to blame someone that did something which is counterproductive, it feels good for everybody else but it doesn’t change anything. But five whys is just a method, for it to work there needs to be a true will to actually change and improve things.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    Counteracting blame game comes down to being careful not to ever use certain phrasing common to the enemy. We just had one I threatened to cancel because one of the lead developers was asking how a decision happened and using The Tone. It’s not a matter of whose hands the hammer is in. Nobody gets to use it at all or everyone will.
- BatteryMountain 5y ago
  Was about to say. Plenty of the examples in this topic seems to want to use it to assign blame and to find the ultimate culprit.. that is not the point. You most likely already know who/what the culprit is, so the 5 why's should be an introspective tool to figure out any unforeseen side effects.
sokoloff 5y ago
We would frequently (half-) joke that “the fourth why is ‘because we were lazy’”
quacked 5y ago
I've never understood where to stop a root cause analysis, and the "Five Whys" has never helped at all. What's the appropriate level of abstraction? Eventually you get down to: ... "Because the sales targets for the enterprise are unrealistic" "Why?" "Because the Board of Directors can't attract investors with reasonable sales targets" "Why?" "Because investors are only interested in a company scaling at a certain rate" "Why?" "Because investors are greedy" "Why?" "Because when God first created Man, He also created Temptation..." The concept of a "root" cause is silly, because the roots of a plant spread far and wide and have many different ends. In the analogy, if the plant is the "problem", and the root is a "cause", then there are hundreds of different roots (causes) that contribute to the plant (problem). People are always trying to assign a single "root" cause as if there is one. Many causes contribute to systemic failures, and often times fixing any one of the root causes would have delayed the failure for another cycle, without actually addressing the procedural risk. Your technician accidentally skipped a step, sure, but he skipped a step because he was in a rush, and he was in a rush because he was overworked, and he was overworked because of those damn sales targets, and... If we're interested in "root" causes, then we need to end up with a list of several causes that combine to result in the problem. If we only want a single cause, we should call it a "seed" cause, as defined by "this problem (plant) is guaranteed to happen (grow) every time this cause (seed) occurs (is planted)".
- lowkey_ 5y ago
  That line of thinking is actually really valuable, here's some insights: (1) The company has either a sales issue or a pitch issue, if reasonable sales targets can't attract investors. (2) Investors aren't adequately informed on the space and may not be a good fit for the company, if they're only interested in the company if it scales faster. (3) Alternatively, if investors are short-term greedy, they may be informed on the space but not see a long-term viable path (in which case, silly of them to be investors, but also, analyze why they're long-term bearish). (4) What other measures could be indicative of success and worth showing to investors, instead of unreasonably high sales projections?
- sanedigital 5y ago
  I think the reason Five Whys seems silly to a lot of engineers (or engineer-minded types) is because we naturally progress through the first few whys on our own. Our entire work is basically: "That didn't work—why? Because this function didn't get called—why? Because this if-else branch went the wrong way—why?" Other fields don't immediately critique facts when presented to them. They're asked to update a model before the 12PM call and the get right on it. Five Whys gives them a framework for pausing, thinking, and critiquing their tasks before they set off on them. I'll note that the engineer's default criticism isn't always positive: sometimes engineers overly-question and end up derailing the actual work. Critique is important, but sometimes executing according to the plan is more important.
jacobyoder 5y ago
i'm currently the only developer on a project. i now have ... 3-5 'managers' (depending on how you count) involved in planning/direction. PM on "my" side, PM on "client's" side, PO on "client's side", and... some other 'higher ups' on each side that drop in now and then. Recently, they've instituted formal RCA process with "5 whys" and... every 'why' ultimately ends up being my fault. Now... they're not saying 'fault' directly, but no matter how you cut it, I forgot to add another test, or I didn't document something clearly enough, or I forgot some error checking, or... I forgot to remind someone of something or... whatever. "Oh, don't take it personally! It's not just you, we're a team". But.. I'm the only one doing the work that is breaking, and I'm the only one fixing it, and every documented RCA lives on, pointing out that I made mistakes, and each document is delivered to 12 stakeholders every time there's a mistake, and mine is the only name on it attached to the 'root cause'. "What lessons can we learn from this?" That we can't sustain this pace, and adding more managers is not helping the situation in any way. I've been saying for a while we're formalizing way too much stuff, and that most of the practices they're bringing in from other places all had the baseline of "more developers than managers" in a team environment. I'm a team of one, and processes designed for teams of 3-5-10 aren't appropriate, imo.
- laumars 5y ago
  I think your closing statement is very apt. Your points about tests et al works when there is a larger team so instead of accusing individuals for errors you’re blaming the process. But I can see that process blaming feeling a little more personal when there’s only one person writing the processes.
  - jacobyoder 5y ago
    Yes. As more management layers/people are added, people are all wanting to be "more professional", and seeing "oh, we did formal written RCAs on production events at my last company, we need to do that here". I did a 6 month gig at a company a few years ago. Team of... 6-8, with a dedicated PM and a good team lead. Company was around ... 80 or so at the time, and there were a couple other 'dev' teams (I think around 35-40 'dev' folks at all - it was growing so hard to pinpoint numbers). I saw some of these types of processes there - I didn't always agree with 100% of everything done, but there was a team. 1 lead, one PO/PM, and... 5-6 devs and a couple testers - a self-contained unit. It worked pretty well, all things considered. I'm currently in a situation where it's completely backwards, but they're trying to implement all the 'correct' and 'professional' techniques. Oh, and I'm part time - ~20 hrs per week. Pretty much everyone is part time, either overall, or part time on this project, and... the wrongness of trying to bring in techniques built for full time larger teams seems to be lost on everyone but me.
IAmGraydon 5y ago
The five whys also works well on people who hold irrational beliefs. Ask them why they believe what they do a few times and they will often eventually end up at a dead end or an obvious logical fallacy. It may not immediately change their mind, but it will make them question their beliefs, which is a first step.
- criddell 5y ago
  I think I know some people where this question: > Why did feature X fail? Would garner this response: > Because the universe is deterministic and the fact that this feature would exist and disappoint was determined 13 billion years ago. It really couldn't have gone any other way.
- sjostrom7 5y ago
  Exactly. If someone's in the meeting in genuinely bad faith, 5-whys isn't going to improve their attitude. But it can help re-frame things for folks that just hadn't taken the time to consider other viewpoints.
throwaway413 5y ago
I am a fan of linear, critical, singular lists of 5 whys. I am not a fan of the matrix of whys that some companies have decided to begin implementing because of 1 blog post high up on Google searches that suggests to use matrices to organize multiple root causes. They don’t need to be combined. I would rather see multiple RCAs each with a singular concrete cause, than a single RCA with a 5x5 matrix of intermingling causes. It makes it harder to address and dig through each issue accurately in context - you’re always reconciling the causes against each other to form a cohesive story, when there’s actually a good chance that there were separate, unrelated causes to your incident.
stevebmark 5y ago
We should stop using the Five Whys for root cause analysis, for this and especially for post mortems. The reasons are obvious. A “root cause” will almost never be exactly 5 whys down, there will almost never be only one root cause, and the reasons are a cyclic graph, not a line. The five whys are also random. They change based on on who does them and which why you randomly start on. If it feels like an awkward and difficult root cause analysis tool, that’s because it is.
- hinkley 5y ago
  That’s why it comes down to who is steering the conversation. And someone is even if it looks like nobody is. A lot of circular reasons come down to human factors, like juggling three things at once is distracting. Adding on an extra thing doesn’t fix that. Making one or two of the three less distracting doesn’t fix it, but it makes it better, it makes progress, and it establishes precedent for policy changes. It’s an agenda you can hammer on every time something breaks until the problem only happens once in a great while. It’s the fact that 5 Why’s develop their own epicycles that sticks with management. Of the last five three of them had the same kind of conclusion, I guess we’re spending time on that now.
allenu 5y ago
I really like the five whys to get to the truth of what went wrong, but unfortunately, in practice you only take the whys so far. For instance, where I work, if we have a large enough on-call issue, we have an RCA to figure out what went wrong. We use the five whys there to figure out what we could’ve done better. However, we usually only really go as far as the engineer’s actions that caused the issue. We usually don’t ask, why did the engineer choose to act in that manner instead of the correct one? Usually the takeaway is “We need a process to make sure engineer does right thing” and not “We need to make sure engineers don’t have too much work so that they have time and space to do the right thing.” I find it’s usually the latter is a better course of action but it’s hard to make those statements or requests, or if you do make those requests, management isn’t as open to taking action.
ajkjk 5y ago
As someone who used 5-whys when I worked at Amazon, I love it and the criticisms here don't resonate. It's not about finding one path of causation, or finding everything you can point a finger out. It's about being willing to admit the actual causes and then do something about them. "Why did our code break?" "Because we habitually ship things without thoroughly testing them." "Why?" "Because our culture has product managers demanding things with short deadlines and no concern about the code quality." ... which, and this is key, has to be followed by managers at all relevant levels changing their processes to fix this. If it's not fixed -- at an organizational level -- as a result of the analysis, fuck off with the 5 whys process, it's just a joke. I tried to run an Amazon-style 5-whys at my new job and my boss said, oh that was very good, good analysis. Then we did none of the things suggested. Well, there's no point. Just quit. You're going to be mediocre forever until the management chain buys in. The reason Amazon scales well and can do so many things is that that their management is incentivized to care about things other than shipping/deliverables/this quarter's returns. It's still about the business overall, but Bezos' long-term-thinking has infected the entire company with long-termism and it's very effective. I am quite sure that Google/Microsoft/etc do not have this quality in the same degree (or they would not have made many of their obvious mistakes). Not that Amazon doesn't make mistakes; they just make different kinds than a lot of other companies. And of course plenty of departments at Amazon don't do this well either; it's too big a company to be culturally uniform. But at least the norm is to do it well instead of badly, which is more than you can say about most larger-than-startup-sized companies.
- kqr 5y ago
  > As someone who used 5-whys when I worked at Amazon, I love it and the criticisms here don't resonate. It's not about finding one path of causation, or finding everything you can point a finger out. It's about being willing to admit the actual causes and then do something about them. You're right, of course. To do causal analysis at all, you have to do it respectfully and well. That's the first step. When you have the first step down, there are other analysis methods that are not five whys that does this better. One of my favourites is Leveson's causal analysis based on systems theory (CAST). These dig wider as well as deeper, and offer more interesting questions to ask along the way rather than just "what caused this?"
SavantIdiot 5y ago
"5 whys" is more direct, but the goal of psychotherapy is to lead you to the root cause by practiced, skillful questioning. The goal is to cut through narratives we create to obscure the emotion. I use emotion intentionally: notice the very last why in this article is a feeling of shame.
ajkjk 5y ago
All of my personal 5 whys like the one in the article end the same way. "I'm always busy but I don't feel productive with my time" Why? "Because I get distracted by email, refactoring, slack, .." Why? "Because I don't really want to be doing any of this, but I feel like I should be at my computer trying to force myself to do it." Why? "Because I have a job and therefore some responsibilities, and I wasted a lot of time last week so I guess I need to get things done this week" Why? "Because I'm sitting at a computer at home, surrounded by nobody, writing code for projects I don't really believe in, that are being mismanaged outside of my control, and what rewards there are (salary) are totally decoupled from the work, and I have lots of money saved up from doing this anyway but the modern world makes no sense and there's nothing I really want to be doing so I guess I'm working." ... ah, you say, you can't work because you're burnt-out and depressed. Yeah, probably. But I mention this to make the point that: if you can't focus, perhaps you just _don't want to be doing whatever you're doing_. It is sometimes hard to admit that in this modern world where you're supposed to be a hard-working adult. But you don't .. have.. to be employed, or working a 9-5, and for many people it's deeply unnatural, I think, to be doing this your whole life day-in and day-out. Related, this article about writer's block that was posted on HN a few weeks ago: https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/if-you-have-writers-block-maybe-you https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/if-you-have-writers-block...
- np- 5y ago
  > if you can't focus, perhaps you just _don't want to be doing whatever you're doing_ This is the thing that always gets me when reading things about productivity, how to get more done at work, etc. At first glance, the issue seemed to just be compensation—if you just pay us workers a fair wage we will be happy. But as software engineers we are generally fortunate with high salaries. So, what happens when that compensation comes and you still feel extremely unfulfilled? I don’t think the problem is the depressed workers, it seems like the whole entire system is built to slowly drain the life out of us.
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tuan 5y ago
is this just a fancy name for debugging process that SWE do everyday, no ? It's basically walking up a call stack until you find the bug.
bootstrapsite 5y ago
I'm an indie hacker and kind of struggling with making any money with this new path I've taken, so I tried this technique: [ ] I'm not making money [ ] Why [ ] Because i keep getting distracted doing new things instead of marketing [ ] Why [ ] Because marketing isn't as much fun as writing new code [ ] Why [ ] Because I'm a programmer not a marketer [ ] Why [ ] Because i love being left alone and avoid pitching to other people [ ] Why [ ] Because I'm just an introvert and sales and marketing feel like shilling and spamming [ ] Why [ ] Because i am not a businessman and i just suck sales tbh I guess I can see my problem but really don't know what to do about it. So I just do it anyway until I develop more confidence and get good at it? Is that it? Anybody got any advice for me?
- airstrike 5y ago
  Since you asked for advice, here's some that's free... Maybe partner with people who are good at what you are not? On a more constructive note—and I mean this in the best way possible, speaking from experience, not just being a critic for the sake of criticizing—maybe reflect on whether you're "getting distracted" because you're really avoiding the discomfort of not doing marketing because at a more general level you have a tendency to stay in your comfort zone. So work on breaking that habit instead. I know I'm guilty of the very same thing.
- xmprt 5y ago
  Have you tried hiring someone to do marketing for you? Or finding a cofounder? If you're not willing to try those then perhaps you care more about the building part than the making money part and are worried that making money will put unneeded stress and support load on your back when you'd instead like to be building.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  IMHO there are several paths to take once you have brought a problem down to "I am not good at [skill X]": * find One Weird Trick to work around your lack of X * get advice/training from someone who is good at X and do X yourself * find someone who is good at X and pay them to do X * decide that even thinking about this problem is painful and go back to doing the stuff you're already good at In general the first two are gonna cost less money than the third, but will probably cost orders of magnitude more time. The fourth path is obviously not going to change anything but to be quite honest it's mostly the one I take with regards to marketing my own art.
hkon 5y ago
Having played this game a few times, I have noticed that it is a very effective tool for shifting the blame onto people not participating.
joemaller1 5y ago
There are seven trees.
5tefan 5y ago
Enough of literature around to learn and train critical thinking. That would be worthwhile and gets the job done in the end.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
This works up to a point. Unless the problems are political and can't be fixed at the level at which the questioner is operating. Then it becomes an exercise in "Because there are things I can do nothing about without leaving and/or starting a revolution." This is not an answer most people want.
- EForEndeavour 5y ago
  On the other hand, stepping through a systematic process invented by Toyota and arriving at the answer "the root cause(s) are beyond our direct control" is a plausible way to (1) not waste time on futile ideas, and (2) get managers off your back.
flerchin 5y ago
It's such a childish game. You just choose the problem you want to solve, and work it back from the whys and start at the beginning. When I worked SAFe, I was able to point every single outage at the SAFe baloney using this technique. They stopped making us use SAFe.
PeterWhittaker 5y ago
They lost me at "We all strive to be more productive". Do we? It seems to me that many of us reach a point in our careers when we can maintain a high level of productivity (defined using whatever personal metric we choose (personal metric chosen over any external metric on the basis of our being seasoned professionals who can manage our own work)) for a long period. Sometimes at our cost. Productivity isn't my issue. Stepping away often is. It's far too easy to devote most of a week of long days to fixing bugs and adding features and tell one's self that a few hours of downtime Friday and Saturday will be enough to spend part of Sunday working on the critical customer demo Monday. Which went very well, thanks for asking! But how well it went isn't the point. My level of fatigue is the point. Instead of 5 why's, I offer why nots: Why not step back and take the extra day? Why not give yourself permission to rest (at least a bit) more so that you can sustain this level of quality and quantity for longer? Why not indeed....
- passivate 5y ago
  If your productivity declines, you can use the five Why's and come to the conclusion that you need more rest. I don't see what your "why not" methodology is adding here.
- duderific 5y ago
  The one I loved was this: "And of course, being productive means you can spend more time doing things you enjoy: like spending time with family and friends, honing a skill, enjoying a hobby, *or furthering your career.*" So...be more productive so you can ... be more productive. Nice.
dsizzle 5y ago
Is there some significance to the number five? I assume that's just a rule of thumb of where the true root arises, but no one seems to be questioning this seemingly arbitrary number.
- mym1990 5y ago
  I think this is typically the number where one comes to the actual root/s of a problem. If you get there in 3, I don't think anyone would decree it as a violation of the technique.
pkdpic 5y ago
This is fantastic and obviously not what I expected at all. Im totally going to file this under 'wisdom to remember for the rest of my life' thanks for posting!
stakkur 5y ago
A quicker explanation, with some background of the technique and criticisms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys Personally, despite the popularity of this technique in the Lean/Agile crowd, I've never found it useful for meaningful problems.
tyingq 5y ago
1 - Why do we think there's a trivial shortcut to analyzing problems? 2 - ...
zemvpferreira 5y ago
Another phenomenal manufacturing technique bastardised and ruined by mediocre software consultants. It's a practical tool, not psychotherapy for engineers. You're not supposed to go namby-pamby hands-in-the-air "it's the culture!" after asking why five times. You are supposed to figure some automation to implement, some tool to build that will help fix a recurring problem for good. Example: Manager: Power costs at the plastics plant are way too high! Engineer 1: Why are we using all that power? Engineer 2: I figured out we have this press that eats a bunch of electricity all the time. Engineer 1: Why's that one press so power-hungry? Engineer 2: It needs to be operated at a super high temperature so it uses all that power to keep warm. Engineer 1: Why's it wasting power to keep warm? Can't it keep temperature? Engineer 2: The thing's out in the open and the building is air conditioned, so there's constant heat transfer to the environment. And I found an A/C vent pointed directly at it. Manager: So we're wasting power on heat and cold! Good Lord! Can't we build a box around that press? Engineer 1: Good point, George thought of that a while ago but no one's gotten to it I guess. Manager (to now promoted Joint Chiefs of Ass-Kicking Question Making): Great! Get to it! It's not rocket science. Everyone knows things stink and you can't get anything done at this stupid place etc etc. You either keep busy tending to the garden or you move on. EDIT: To answer some other comments the original Toyota technique even included ways to explore multiple causes and other such complexities 50 years ago. It's ironic that lean software gurus can't even copy/paste properly. I would hope they read more books before writing their next one.
- freetinker 5y ago
  Thank you for this comment. As a manufacturing engineer, I really appreciate it.
manmal 5y ago
This looks like a useful implementation of the Socratic Method [1] of asking „Why?“ until you get to the bottom of things. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method
ahdh8f4hf4h8 5y ago
I think most of these techniques come down to the relationship between the management and employees. If everyone is honestly trying to solve the problem and earnestly listening to feedback from people above and below, than almost every troubleshooting process works. If the goal is to point blame to another team, then every process will fail.
rajacombinator 5y ago
Five whys is a good technique if you are in a position to truly apply it. Most people are heavily incentivized not to ask the right questions. So it can become yet another kabuki process quite easily.
sam1r 5y ago
Great article - does anyone here use superhuman? Curious about thoughts and usage. I am still somehow on the waitlist for the beta, unfortunately.
carapace 5y ago
A very similar algorithm is the foundation for a certain very powerful psychological/spiritual technique called "Core Transformation"[1]. You start with a particular problem or issue that you want to work with and work your way up the chain of intentions recursively to reach a "core state" which then transforms the original issue. It turns out that, seen through the lens of this process, human motivations form a kind of skein or lattice structure, which terminates (or originates) with a small set of "core states" that are transcendent: bliss, love, oneness, okayness, happiness. The states are transcendent in the sense that they depend on nothing and are universally available at all times and in all places and conditions. They are intrinsically satisfying, and all actions and behaviors are ultimately aimed at restoring the presence of these states. It follows that the vast majority of human activity is, in fact, yak shaving! Human history is the story of a massive, intricate indirection through layers of abstraction to attain goals that are already available. [1] https://www.coretransformation.org/ https://www.coretransformation.org/
akuma73 5y ago
Because of the initial conditions of the universe and the laws of physics. That's as deep as we can go right now.
trhway 5y ago
Why the "five whys" is just another cargo cult like Scrum/Agile/Lean/Six Sigma/etc. ?
soheil 5y ago
A lot of these type of tricks try to reduce a problem that is not reducible, at least not in a general way. This sounds great when read to oneself, but the moment you actually think about it for more than a second you realize the bullshit that this type of advice really is. Namely, there is never only one reason why something is the case at each of the 5 steps. It's usually a linear combination of various causes with different weights. Furthermore the reasons are not definitive, sometimes at best you can assign a vague probability to each. And finally there are unknown unknowns, the inexplicable. You may only have an intuition about something, but cannot put it into words. Remember often times intuition can be spot on and identify things that your conscious mind may not have access to.
hizxy 5y ago
I just can’t imagine doing this in a real conversation.
nrvn 5y ago
What this technique is missing is how to get yourself out of the trap of self-delusion. It is easy to lie to yourself when answering any of the why questions because our brains will more likely choose a comfortable answer instead of the right one. Instead of getting to the root cause one can easily get to the trap. I believe the actual technique should be like “break 5 layers of your confidence in a given problem and _question_ everything about it until you build the whole picture”. In other words instead of asking why 5 times question everything and unwind the knot until you have a straight thread. Sometimes it is not just 5 layers deep. And one should be brave enough to put their own beliefs and experience under doubt and reassess them from the ground up. That’s the path that leads to some really interesting questions about yourself, the world around, about other people. That’s what ignites the thought process. 5 whys is an oversimplification of the actual reasoning process. And as with other ideas that get wrapped up in a fancy proverbial form it can be misleading and turns to a cargo cult. Start with “why should I trust the 5 whys? Will it really lead me to right answers? How? What if the answer is no?”
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303 points by alecsandra 5y ago

::reads 5 whys:: ::shudders in COE:: Reference: https://wa.aws.amazon.com/wat.concept.coe.en.html https://wa.aws.amazon.com/wat.concept.coe.en.html

cwilkes 5y ago
Link at the bottom is to “the wheel” which I was expecting to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_wheel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_wheel the torture device, instead it is a way to select the weekly component talk.
- BBC-vs-neolibs 5y ago
  Not entirely dissimilar, depending on the org.

maxbaines 5y ago

This is a great summary/reminder of a few techniques good to read.

deleted 5y ago
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asmos7 5y ago

sadly I've always seen this technique used to assign blame

gonzo41 5y ago
And, Why do you think that is? Nah, any technique that gets people thinking about root cause analysis is worthwhile, but like most lean techniques they require a level of psychological safety in the organization to be effectively used.
- liveoneggs 5y ago
  Because you single out a person -> ask them for the explanation -> turn the knife four additional times?
- allemagne 5y ago
  Exactly. No methodology can overcome a low enough baseline of trust. Over time, cynicism gets equally distributed and the justification for literally any process or technique becomes vapid corporate kool-aid. You're just left with thinly-disguised attempts to assert power met with toxic resentfulness. The way I see it, there's a spectrum of trust that goes from one extreme where almost no process works well, and the other extreme where almost any process works well. So there's the easy discussion of how your technique is supposed to work, and then the hard discussion of how much trust it requires of the people involved.

ivanstojic 5y ago

If you’ve never seen the “five whys” technique before, then you are probably unfamiliar with its criticisms as well. This shows a broad spectrum of proponents and critics of the approach: https://www.google.com/search?q=five+whys+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com https://www.google.com/search?q=five+whys+site%3Anews.ycombi...

mgkimsal 5y ago
And... the top link I get in google is this hacker news thread... Edit: oh, because the link actually has hacker news in the query filter... duh...
hpoe 5y ago
And if you want the non-Google version https://duckduckgo.com/?q=five+whys+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com&t=h_&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=five+whys+site%3Anews.ycombinator....
- mynameismon 5y ago
  Or if you prefer Algolia: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=five+whys https://hn.algolia.com/?q=five+whys
kqr 5y ago
Very brief summary: five whys techniques pretend complex systems are governed by simple chains of events, where each event undisputably causes the next and there's an objective "root cause" that sets the entire chain off. In reality, complex systems are driven by networks of causal effects, where some form reinforcing and balancing feedback loops. There's no start or end to a causal pathway, there's just where we choose to look and what we choose to ignore. There is no root cause, there is a myriad of interlocking factors that together dynamically drive the system in certain directions. Five whys type analyses tend to end up blaming whatever is convenient or culturally acceptable to blame, and leaves many branches of the causal network underexplored. Five whys is easy to explain and humans love the narrative point of view promoted by a chain of events, but it's a very inefficient way to explore the causal structure of a system.

itsmemattchung 5y ago

Loved the five Whys as an ex-Amazonian but could easily see how the framework can snowball into a blame game.

padastra 5y ago

Unfortunately, there's many corporate environments where technical staff are managed by non-technical staff. This comment isn't debating the merits of that, but when the manager (or especially their manager) doesn't really intuitively understand the difficulty of your work or how much you've accomplished, they measure by other things like "responsiveness". This is similar to how patients will rate doctors (lawyers, auto-mechanics, electricians) higher by things like waiting room design, ability to make small-talk, willingness to give antibiotics, etc. which are important but actually do not correlate with better care. So I've found that optimizing for "responsiveness" is important in and of itself, and much easier than the alternative of "let me make sure non-technical senior management person X spends the time to understand my contributions at a deeper level".

brightball 5y ago
Yep. Stuff like this is the reason that I moved from the technical side into management about 4 years ago. Seeing the dangers to my team from managers who don’t understand the challenges and constraints became a situation that I couldn’t take anymore. Now, since going that route I’ve gotten deep into SAFe (Scaled Agile) because I believe that it truly solves so many problems. SAFe recommends using “5 whys” in certain situation and SAFe itself isn’t without valid criticisms either. IMO it’s still by far the best option for a long list of reasons. Like anything in the wrong hands though, it can be co-opted. Everything revolves around good leadership.

Techbrunch 5y ago

How to solve why the server crashed using the 5 Whys: https://vooza.com/videos/the-5-whys/ https://vooza.com/videos/the-5-whys/

indymike 5y ago

Five Whys is just a tool. It really only works if it is used as a tool for finding truth and improving process. It is really dangerous in the hands of people who wish to use a process failure for political gain.

mrweasel 5y ago
Agreed. In constructive environment with high levels of trust you can often take a shortcut and simply ask: What problem are we actually trying to solve?
Puts 5y ago
I think the most helpful thing with five whys is that it counter acts blame-games within an organisation. Normally when something happens the natural reaction is to blame someone that did something which is counterproductive, it feels good for everybody else but it doesn’t change anything. But five whys is just a method, for it to work there needs to be a true will to actually change and improve things.
- hinkley 5y ago
  Counteracting blame game comes down to being careful not to ever use certain phrasing common to the enemy. We just had one I threatened to cancel because one of the lead developers was asking how a decision happened and using The Tone. It’s not a matter of whose hands the hammer is in. Nobody gets to use it at all or everyone will.
BatteryMountain 5y ago
Was about to say. Plenty of the examples in this topic seems to want to use it to assign blame and to find the ultimate culprit.. that is not the point. You most likely already know who/what the culprit is, so the 5 why's should be an introspective tool to figure out any unforeseen side effects.

sokoloff 5y ago

We would frequently (half-) joke that “the fourth why is ‘because we were lazy’”

quacked 5y ago

I've never understood where to stop a root cause analysis, and the "Five Whys" has never helped at all. What's the appropriate level of abstraction? Eventually you get down to: ... "Because the sales targets for the enterprise are unrealistic" "Why?" "Because the Board of Directors can't attract investors with reasonable sales targets" "Why?" "Because investors are only interested in a company scaling at a certain rate" "Why?" "Because investors are greedy" "Why?" "Because when God first created Man, He also created Temptation..." The concept of a "root" cause is silly, because the roots of a plant spread far and wide and have many different ends. In the analogy, if the plant is the "problem", and the root is a "cause", then there are hundreds of different roots (causes) that contribute to the plant (problem). People are always trying to assign a single "root" cause as if there is one. Many causes contribute to systemic failures, and often times fixing any one of the root causes would have delayed the failure for another cycle, without actually addressing the procedural risk. Your technician accidentally skipped a step, sure, but he skipped a step because he was in a rush, and he was in a rush because he was overworked, and he was overworked because of those damn sales targets, and... If we're interested in "root" causes, then we need to end up with a list of several causes that combine to result in the problem. If we only want a single cause, we should call it a "seed" cause, as defined by "this problem (plant) is guaranteed to happen (grow) every time this cause (seed) occurs (is planted)".

lowkey_ 5y ago
That line of thinking is actually really valuable, here's some insights: (1) The company has either a sales issue or a pitch issue, if reasonable sales targets can't attract investors. (2) Investors aren't adequately informed on the space and may not be a good fit for the company, if they're only interested in the company if it scales faster. (3) Alternatively, if investors are short-term greedy, they may be informed on the space but not see a long-term viable path (in which case, silly of them to be investors, but also, analyze why they're long-term bearish). (4) What other measures could be indicative of success and worth showing to investors, instead of unreasonably high sales projections?
sanedigital 5y ago
I think the reason Five Whys seems silly to a lot of engineers (or engineer-minded types) is because we naturally progress through the first few whys on our own. Our entire work is basically: "That didn't work—why? Because this function didn't get called—why? Because this if-else branch went the wrong way—why?" Other fields don't immediately critique facts when presented to them. They're asked to update a model before the 12PM call and the get right on it. Five Whys gives them a framework for pausing, thinking, and critiquing their tasks before they set off on them. I'll note that the engineer's default criticism isn't always positive: sometimes engineers overly-question and end up derailing the actual work. Critique is important, but sometimes executing according to the plan is more important.

jacobyoder 5y ago

i'm currently the only developer on a project. i now have ... 3-5 'managers' (depending on how you count) involved in planning/direction. PM on "my" side, PM on "client's" side, PO on "client's side", and... some other 'higher ups' on each side that drop in now and then. Recently, they've instituted formal RCA process with "5 whys" and... every 'why' ultimately ends up being my fault. Now... they're not saying 'fault' directly, but no matter how you cut it, I forgot to add another test, or I didn't document something clearly enough, or I forgot some error checking, or... I forgot to remind someone of something or... whatever. "Oh, don't take it personally! It's not just you, we're a team". But.. I'm the only one doing the work that is breaking, and I'm the only one fixing it, and every documented RCA lives on, pointing out that I made mistakes, and each document is delivered to 12 stakeholders every time there's a mistake, and mine is the only name on it attached to the 'root cause'. "What lessons can we learn from this?" That we can't sustain this pace, and adding more managers is not helping the situation in any way. I've been saying for a while we're formalizing way too much stuff, and that most of the practices they're bringing in from other places all had the baseline of "more developers than managers" in a team environment. I'm a team of one, and processes designed for teams of 3-5-10 aren't appropriate, imo.

laumars 5y ago
I think your closing statement is very apt. Your points about tests et al works when there is a larger team so instead of accusing individuals for errors you’re blaming the process. But I can see that process blaming feeling a little more personal when there’s only one person writing the processes.
- jacobyoder 5y ago
  Yes. As more management layers/people are added, people are all wanting to be "more professional", and seeing "oh, we did formal written RCAs on production events at my last company, we need to do that here". I did a 6 month gig at a company a few years ago. Team of... 6-8, with a dedicated PM and a good team lead. Company was around ... 80 or so at the time, and there were a couple other 'dev' teams (I think around 35-40 'dev' folks at all - it was growing so hard to pinpoint numbers). I saw some of these types of processes there - I didn't always agree with 100% of everything done, but there was a team. 1 lead, one PO/PM, and... 5-6 devs and a couple testers - a self-contained unit. It worked pretty well, all things considered. I'm currently in a situation where it's completely backwards, but they're trying to implement all the 'correct' and 'professional' techniques. Oh, and I'm part time - ~20 hrs per week. Pretty much everyone is part time, either overall, or part time on this project, and... the wrongness of trying to bring in techniques built for full time larger teams seems to be lost on everyone but me.

IAmGraydon 5y ago

The five whys also works well on people who hold irrational beliefs. Ask them why they believe what they do a few times and they will often eventually end up at a dead end or an obvious logical fallacy. It may not immediately change their mind, but it will make them question their beliefs, which is a first step.

criddell 5y ago
I think I know some people where this question: > Why did feature X fail? Would garner this response: > Because the universe is deterministic and the fact that this feature would exist and disappoint was determined 13 billion years ago. It really couldn't have gone any other way.
sjostrom7 5y ago
Exactly. If someone's in the meeting in genuinely bad faith, 5-whys isn't going to improve their attitude. But it can help re-frame things for folks that just hadn't taken the time to consider other viewpoints.

throwaway413 5y ago

I am a fan of linear, critical, singular lists of 5 whys. I am not a fan of the matrix of whys that some companies have decided to begin implementing because of 1 blog post high up on Google searches that suggests to use matrices to organize multiple root causes. They don’t need to be combined. I would rather see multiple RCAs each with a singular concrete cause, than a single RCA with a 5x5 matrix of intermingling causes. It makes it harder to address and dig through each issue accurately in context - you’re always reconciling the causes against each other to form a cohesive story, when there’s actually a good chance that there were separate, unrelated causes to your incident.

stevebmark 5y ago

We should stop using the Five Whys for root cause analysis, for this and especially for post mortems. The reasons are obvious. A “root cause” will almost never be exactly 5 whys down, there will almost never be only one root cause, and the reasons are a cyclic graph, not a line. The five whys are also random. They change based on on who does them and which why you randomly start on. If it feels like an awkward and difficult root cause analysis tool, that’s because it is.

hinkley 5y ago
That’s why it comes down to who is steering the conversation. And someone is even if it looks like nobody is. A lot of circular reasons come down to human factors, like juggling three things at once is distracting. Adding on an extra thing doesn’t fix that. Making one or two of the three less distracting doesn’t fix it, but it makes it better, it makes progress, and it establishes precedent for policy changes. It’s an agenda you can hammer on every time something breaks until the problem only happens once in a great while. It’s the fact that 5 Why’s develop their own epicycles that sticks with management. Of the last five three of them had the same kind of conclusion, I guess we’re spending time on that now.

allenu 5y ago

I really like the five whys to get to the truth of what went wrong, but unfortunately, in practice you only take the whys so far. For instance, where I work, if we have a large enough on-call issue, we have an RCA to figure out what went wrong. We use the five whys there to figure out what we could’ve done better. However, we usually only really go as far as the engineer’s actions that caused the issue. We usually don’t ask, why did the engineer choose to act in that manner instead of the correct one? Usually the takeaway is “We need a process to make sure engineer does right thing” and not “We need to make sure engineers don’t have too much work so that they have time and space to do the right thing.” I find it’s usually the latter is a better course of action but it’s hard to make those statements or requests, or if you do make those requests, management isn’t as open to taking action.

ajkjk 5y ago

As someone who used 5-whys when I worked at Amazon, I love it and the criticisms here don't resonate. It's not about finding one path of causation, or finding everything you can point a finger out. It's about being willing to admit the actual causes and then do something about them. "Why did our code break?" "Because we habitually ship things without thoroughly testing them." "Why?" "Because our culture has product managers demanding things with short deadlines and no concern about the code quality." ... which, and this is key, has to be followed by managers at all relevant levels changing their processes to fix this. If it's not fixed -- at an organizational level -- as a result of the analysis, fuck off with the 5 whys process, it's just a joke. I tried to run an Amazon-style 5-whys at my new job and my boss said, oh that was very good, good analysis. Then we did none of the things suggested. Well, there's no point. Just quit. You're going to be mediocre forever until the management chain buys in. The reason Amazon scales well and can do so many things is that that their management is incentivized to care about things other than shipping/deliverables/this quarter's returns. It's still about the business overall, but Bezos' long-term-thinking has infected the entire company with long-termism and it's very effective. I am quite sure that Google/Microsoft/etc do not have this quality in the same degree (or they would not have made many of their obvious mistakes). Not that Amazon doesn't make mistakes; they just make different kinds than a lot of other companies. And of course plenty of departments at Amazon don't do this well either; it's too big a company to be culturally uniform. But at least the norm is to do it well instead of badly, which is more than you can say about most larger-than-startup-sized companies.

kqr 5y ago
> As someone who used 5-whys when I worked at Amazon, I love it and the criticisms here don't resonate. It's not about finding one path of causation, or finding everything you can point a finger out. It's about being willing to admit the actual causes and then do something about them. You're right, of course. To do causal analysis at all, you have to do it respectfully and well. That's the first step. When you have the first step down, there are other analysis methods that are not five whys that does this better. One of my favourites is Leveson's causal analysis based on systems theory (CAST). These dig wider as well as deeper, and offer more interesting questions to ask along the way rather than just "what caused this?"

SavantIdiot 5y ago

"5 whys" is more direct, but the goal of psychotherapy is to lead you to the root cause by practiced, skillful questioning. The goal is to cut through narratives we create to obscure the emotion. I use emotion intentionally: notice the very last why in this article is a feeling of shame.

ajkjk 5y ago

All of my personal 5 whys like the one in the article end the same way. "I'm always busy but I don't feel productive with my time" Why? "Because I get distracted by email, refactoring, slack, .." Why? "Because I don't really want to be doing any of this, but I feel like I should be at my computer trying to force myself to do it." Why? "Because I have a job and therefore some responsibilities, and I wasted a lot of time last week so I guess I need to get things done this week" Why? "Because I'm sitting at a computer at home, surrounded by nobody, writing code for projects I don't really believe in, that are being mismanaged outside of my control, and what rewards there are (salary) are totally decoupled from the work, and I have lots of money saved up from doing this anyway but the modern world makes no sense and there's nothing I really want to be doing so I guess I'm working." ... ah, you say, you can't work because you're burnt-out and depressed. Yeah, probably. But I mention this to make the point that: if you can't focus, perhaps you just _don't want to be doing whatever you're doing_. It is sometimes hard to admit that in this modern world where you're supposed to be a hard-working adult. But you don't .. have.. to be employed, or working a 9-5, and for many people it's deeply unnatural, I think, to be doing this your whole life day-in and day-out. Related, this article about writer's block that was posted on HN a few weeks ago: https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/if-you-have-writers-block-maybe-you https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/if-you-have-writers-block...

np- 5y ago
> if you can't focus, perhaps you just _don't want to be doing whatever you're doing_ This is the thing that always gets me when reading things about productivity, how to get more done at work, etc. At first glance, the issue seemed to just be compensation—if you just pay us workers a fair wage we will be happy. But as software engineers we are generally fortunate with high salaries. So, what happens when that compensation comes and you still feel extremely unfulfilled? I don’t think the problem is the depressed workers, it seems like the whole entire system is built to slowly drain the life out of us.
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tuan 5y ago

is this just a fancy name for debugging process that SWE do everyday, no ? It's basically walking up a call stack until you find the bug.

bootstrapsite 5y ago

I'm an indie hacker and kind of struggling with making any money with this new path I've taken, so I tried this technique: [ ] I'm not making money [ ] Why [ ] Because i keep getting distracted doing new things instead of marketing [ ] Why [ ] Because marketing isn't as much fun as writing new code [ ] Why [ ] Because I'm a programmer not a marketer [ ] Why [ ] Because i love being left alone and avoid pitching to other people [ ] Why [ ] Because I'm just an introvert and sales and marketing feel like shilling and spamming [ ] Why [ ] Because i am not a businessman and i just suck sales tbh I guess I can see my problem but really don't know what to do about it. So I just do it anyway until I develop more confidence and get good at it? Is that it? Anybody got any advice for me?

airstrike 5y ago
Since you asked for advice, here's some that's free... Maybe partner with people who are good at what you are not? On a more constructive note—and I mean this in the best way possible, speaking from experience, not just being a critic for the sake of criticizing—maybe reflect on whether you're "getting distracted" because you're really avoiding the discomfort of not doing marketing because at a more general level you have a tendency to stay in your comfort zone. So work on breaking that habit instead. I know I'm guilty of the very same thing.
xmprt 5y ago
Have you tried hiring someone to do marketing for you? Or finding a cofounder? If you're not willing to try those then perhaps you care more about the building part than the making money part and are worried that making money will put unneeded stress and support load on your back when you'd instead like to be building.
egypturnash 5y ago
IMHO there are several paths to take once you have brought a problem down to "I am not good at [skill X]": * find One Weird Trick to work around your lack of X * get advice/training from someone who is good at X and do X yourself * find someone who is good at X and pay them to do X * decide that even thinking about this problem is painful and go back to doing the stuff you're already good at In general the first two are gonna cost less money than the third, but will probably cost orders of magnitude more time. The fourth path is obviously not going to change anything but to be quite honest it's mostly the one I take with regards to marketing my own art.

hkon 5y ago

Having played this game a few times, I have noticed that it is a very effective tool for shifting the blame onto people not participating.

joemaller1 5y ago

There are seven trees.

5tefan 5y ago

Enough of literature around to learn and train critical thinking. That would be worthwhile and gets the job done in the end.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

This works up to a point. Unless the problems are political and can't be fixed at the level at which the questioner is operating. Then it becomes an exercise in "Because there are things I can do nothing about without leaving and/or starting a revolution." This is not an answer most people want.

EForEndeavour 5y ago
On the other hand, stepping through a systematic process invented by Toyota and arriving at the answer "the root cause(s) are beyond our direct control" is a plausible way to (1) not waste time on futile ideas, and (2) get managers off your back.

flerchin 5y ago

It's such a childish game. You just choose the problem you want to solve, and work it back from the whys and start at the beginning. When I worked SAFe, I was able to point every single outage at the SAFe baloney using this technique. They stopped making us use SAFe.

PeterWhittaker 5y ago

They lost me at "We all strive to be more productive". Do we? It seems to me that many of us reach a point in our careers when we can maintain a high level of productivity (defined using whatever personal metric we choose (personal metric chosen over any external metric on the basis of our being seasoned professionals who can manage our own work)) for a long period. Sometimes at our cost. Productivity isn't my issue. Stepping away often is. It's far too easy to devote most of a week of long days to fixing bugs and adding features and tell one's self that a few hours of downtime Friday and Saturday will be enough to spend part of Sunday working on the critical customer demo Monday. Which went very well, thanks for asking! But how well it went isn't the point. My level of fatigue is the point. Instead of 5 why's, I offer why nots: Why not step back and take the extra day? Why not give yourself permission to rest (at least a bit) more so that you can sustain this level of quality and quantity for longer? Why not indeed....

passivate 5y ago
If your productivity declines, you can use the five Why's and come to the conclusion that you need more rest. I don't see what your "why not" methodology is adding here.
duderific 5y ago
The one I loved was this: "And of course, being productive means you can spend more time doing things you enjoy: like spending time with family and friends, honing a skill, enjoying a hobby, *or furthering your career.*" So...be more productive so you can ... be more productive. Nice.

dsizzle 5y ago

Is there some significance to the number five? I assume that's just a rule of thumb of where the true root arises, but no one seems to be questioning this seemingly arbitrary number.

mym1990 5y ago
I think this is typically the number where one comes to the actual root/s of a problem. If you get there in 3, I don't think anyone would decree it as a violation of the technique.

pkdpic 5y ago

This is fantastic and obviously not what I expected at all. Im totally going to file this under 'wisdom to remember for the rest of my life' thanks for posting!

stakkur 5y ago

A quicker explanation, with some background of the technique and criticisms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys Personally, despite the popularity of this technique in the Lean/Agile crowd, I've never found it useful for meaningful problems.

tyingq 5y ago

1 - Why do we think there's a trivial shortcut to analyzing problems? 2 - ...

zemvpferreira 5y ago

Another phenomenal manufacturing technique bastardised and ruined by mediocre software consultants. It's a practical tool, not psychotherapy for engineers. You're not supposed to go namby-pamby hands-in-the-air "it's the culture!" after asking why five times. You are supposed to figure some automation to implement, some tool to build that will help fix a recurring problem for good. Example: Manager: Power costs at the plastics plant are way too high! Engineer 1: Why are we using all that power? Engineer 2: I figured out we have this press that eats a bunch of electricity all the time. Engineer 1: Why's that one press so power-hungry? Engineer 2: It needs to be operated at a super high temperature so it uses all that power to keep warm. Engineer 1: Why's it wasting power to keep warm? Can't it keep temperature? Engineer 2: The thing's out in the open and the building is air conditioned, so there's constant heat transfer to the environment. And I found an A/C vent pointed directly at it. Manager: So we're wasting power on heat and cold! Good Lord! Can't we build a box around that press? Engineer 1: Good point, George thought of that a while ago but no one's gotten to it I guess. Manager (to now promoted Joint Chiefs of Ass-Kicking Question Making): Great! Get to it! It's not rocket science. Everyone knows things stink and you can't get anything done at this stupid place etc etc. You either keep busy tending to the garden or you move on. EDIT: To answer some other comments the original Toyota technique even included ways to explore multiple causes and other such complexities 50 years ago. It's ironic that lean software gurus can't even copy/paste properly. I would hope they read more books before writing their next one.

freetinker 5y ago
Thank you for this comment. As a manufacturing engineer, I really appreciate it.

manmal 5y ago

This looks like a useful implementation of the Socratic Method [1] of asking „Why?“ until you get to the bottom of things. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method

ahdh8f4hf4h8 5y ago

I think most of these techniques come down to the relationship between the management and employees. If everyone is honestly trying to solve the problem and earnestly listening to feedback from people above and below, than almost every troubleshooting process works. If the goal is to point blame to another team, then every process will fail.

rajacombinator 5y ago

Five whys is a good technique if you are in a position to truly apply it. Most people are heavily incentivized not to ask the right questions. So it can become yet another kabuki process quite easily.

sam1r 5y ago

Great article - does anyone here use superhuman? Curious about thoughts and usage. I am still somehow on the waitlist for the beta, unfortunately.

carapace 5y ago

A very similar algorithm is the foundation for a certain very powerful psychological/spiritual technique called "Core Transformation"[1]. You start with a particular problem or issue that you want to work with and work your way up the chain of intentions recursively to reach a "core state" which then transforms the original issue. It turns out that, seen through the lens of this process, human motivations form a kind of skein or lattice structure, which terminates (or originates) with a small set of "core states" that are transcendent: bliss, love, oneness, okayness, happiness. The states are transcendent in the sense that they depend on nothing and are universally available at all times and in all places and conditions. They are intrinsically satisfying, and all actions and behaviors are ultimately aimed at restoring the presence of these states. It follows that the vast majority of human activity is, in fact, yak shaving! Human history is the story of a massive, intricate indirection through layers of abstraction to attain goals that are already available. [1] https://www.coretransformation.org/ https://www.coretransformation.org/

akuma73 5y ago

Because of the initial conditions of the universe and the laws of physics. That's as deep as we can go right now.

trhway 5y ago

Why the "five whys" is just another cargo cult like Scrum/Agile/Lean/Six Sigma/etc. ?

soheil 5y ago

A lot of these type of tricks try to reduce a problem that is not reducible, at least not in a general way. This sounds great when read to oneself, but the moment you actually think about it for more than a second you realize the bullshit that this type of advice really is. Namely, there is never only one reason why something is the case at each of the 5 steps. It's usually a linear combination of various causes with different weights. Furthermore the reasons are not definitive, sometimes at best you can assign a vague probability to each. And finally there are unknown unknowns, the inexplicable. You may only have an intuition about something, but cannot put it into words. Remember often times intuition can be spot on and identify things that your conscious mind may not have access to.

hizxy 5y ago

I just can’t imagine doing this in a real conversation.

nrvn 5y ago

What this technique is missing is how to get yourself out of the trap of self-delusion. It is easy to lie to yourself when answering any of the why questions because our brains will more likely choose a comfortable answer instead of the right one. Instead of getting to the root cause one can easily get to the trap. I believe the actual technique should be like “break 5 layers of your confidence in a given problem and _question_ everything about it until you build the whole picture”. In other words instead of asking why 5 times question everything and unwind the knot until you have a straight thread. Sometimes it is not just 5 layers deep. And one should be brave enough to put their own beliefs and experience under doubt and reassess them from the ground up. That’s the path that leads to some really interesting questions about yourself, the world around, about other people. That’s what ignites the thought process. 5 whys is an oversimplification of the actual reasoning process. And as with other ideas that get wrapped up in a fancy proverbial form it can be misleading and turns to a cargo cult. Start with “why should I trust the 5 whys? Will it really lead me to right answers? How? What if the answer is no?”

deleted 5y ago

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