To me that sounds pretty clearly like not the five whys: there aren't five whys, they aren't linear, and you're not asking "why" at every step. The history of t

To me that sounds pretty clearly like not the five whys: there aren't five whys, they aren't linear, and you're not asking "why" at every step. The history of the five whys and Toyoda make it clear that it's 5 linear whys. You're performing a root cause analysis, which I suspect is why you find it effective. VS the five whys are not an effective analysis tool. Maybe where we see things differently is you consider the non-five-whys analysis part of the five whys, and I consider it "root cause analysis". For me, an issue with still calling it the "five whys" is watching other folks less familiar with how to do root cause analysis using the low quality and awkward "five whys", without any clear direction that they shouldn't use that strategy because it's not effective.