Like any tool, it can easily be misused. The post in question is a good demonstration of how you can misuse the 5-whys, and it gets well deserved criticism for

Like any tool, it can easily be misused. The post in question is a good demonstration of how you can misuse the 5-whys, and it gets well deserved criticism for that. It's obviously not getting anywhere 5 levels deep, so it's asking the wrong questions, and honestly, giving very bad answers that don't lead anywhere: 5-whys require a specific mindset first. Thus, the final "root cause" is very suspect and there's one too many "feel" and "think" in there. To illustrate, the answer to #2 of "Because I am constantly tempted to check my email, rather than work on important projects." is lacking in substance to answer "why are you getting distracted" (it says the same thing in slightly different words). You can go on-and-on in the same vein. "Because my email notifications pop up and I check them out", "Because when I check my email notifications out, I read the email and now I've lost my context and got immersed into the email topic instead"... That's not helpful at all. As soon as you get to "I get easily distracted by email", that's already a problem worth solving ("root cause"). And it can have multiple solutions: 1. if you are a blocker for something, move that to an email list of people, a "board" or "forum" discussion; 2. if you are not a blocker, stop notifications and set checkpoints for when you'll read email during the day, and open a side-channel for urgencies if it's ever needed. If that's not the root cause (it is actually expected of you to be responsive even if you are not a blocker to anything), only then is it worth digging deeper to find problems in the team that make this so. Of course, I am working with the assumption that being extremely responsive to email is really hurting this person's work (they were not hired to be responsive to emails, eg. as a technical architect to support a development team).