Five whys

pagediagnoseconverge

Descend from symptom to cause.

Variants

• default

Data fields

The fields a spec's page can set for this component (see switchback show five-whys --json):

• problem

Grounding

Helps: when the stated problem is probably a symptom; descending by "why" is manufacturing craft with no controlled test, so treat the bottom rung as a hypothesis to test this week

Backfires: when the chain stops at an arbitrary depth, settles on one cause for a problem with several, or ends by blaming a person; in hospital root-cause work, repeated analyses mostly produced weak fixes and the same events recurred

• DIteratively asking "why?" from a symptom reaches a cause which, when addressed, prevents recurrence more reliably than unstructured problem discussion.Ohno (1988), Serrat (2017), Peerally, Carr, Waring & Dixon-Woods (2016), Kellogg et al. (2016)

What the grades mean