Thursday Q&A - Understanding & Improving your 5 Why's Process

We put the call out to our Newsletter readers, on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for questions. Questions that people are struggling with around ISO, Lean or leadership that they wanted help with and we got some fantastic responses that we have loved reading through and thinking about how we can help. We can't answer everything but we'll do our best to get through as many as we can. Welcome, to the Thursday Q&A!

This Week's Question 

This is from Ryan in Seattle - "We are introducing the 5 Why's as our main root cause tool, is there a good way to help people get comfortable with the ongoing questioning? "

The Feedback

If you're struggling to get effective use of the five-wise process for your root cause approach or you don't even know what five wise is then this video is for you we've got some great tips that can help you get the very best out of that approach I'm John Watt from Many Caps Consulting and this is another Thursday Q&A

Our question this week comes from Ryan in Seattle who says we're introducing the five why's as our main root cause tool is a good way to help people get comfortable with the ongoing questioning

The five whys process is one of those ones that we teach companies early on when we start in on the lean journey, on the surface of it the five wise process is pretty simple let's just keep asking why:

why did this happen, why was that the outcome. It's going to help you step through an issue level at a time and each time you've come up with what you think is root cause you ask again well why that could happen

It's like peeling back the onion of the process. Now you don't always have to be asking why five times sometimes it's three sometimes it's seven it's whatever you need it to be there's no secret to five it's just about digging into the issues time and time again and not accepting the initial rush to judgment of getting a solution get off your desk.

Asking why can get a little bit much so here are some tips firstly make sure everyone knows that you're trying to uncover a process problem it's not about finding someone to blame and by focusing on the process rather than the person. You put the people side of things, the personal stuff to the side and people are less likely to get defensive. You want to encourage debate not stop it. Some companies find it uncomfortable having people arguing or debating things but it's really going to help you.

You want people to challenge each other in terms of I think it's, this well why do you think it's that. You've got to test it out before you accept it as this is the next thing you have multiple paths to go down as you go through your root cause process it's fairly rare that there's one answer and to make sure you're going down the right path you want to debate it and some of those debates are going to be quite vigorous and that's a good thing.

The next thing to think about is that even though it's called the 5 Why process you don't actually have to use the word why in fact I'd encourage you not to do it that's because it is going to make people feel slightly accused of something why did that happen, why this, so as I said before it can make people uncomfortable.

Instead take a bit of a coaching approach and use phrases like what would cause how would this occur what would need to happen for that sort of stuff so you're drawing people out into conversation

The next one obviously is we're talking about coaching and drawing more of the coaching session that means the people running the session need to have a little bit of training on coaching so take them aside give them the time, get them the tools and they're going to do a far better job of pulling information out of your team taking out the coaching approach.

Now most root cause sessions happen in meeting rooms where you've got white boards and post-its and all that stuff but where you can physically go to where the problem has occurred in lean we talk about going to the Gemba, the real place, where the action actually happens it's going to give you so much more insight into what really could have occurred and allow you to look around the environment because sometimes the environment plays as big a part in finding the root cause as anything else.

When you do get root cause make sure you test that out in the actual process prove that what you think is the fault is actually the fault in the same way when you think you have a solution go back to the process and test it out make sure that your solution fixes the problem.

The other thing to remember is that people are going to come to the root cause session with preconceived ideas they think they know already what it is it's called confirmation bias you come in with a preconceived idea and then all the facts get adjusted or interpreted in a way that confirms what they think at the start. So, you have to work to avoid that.

Finally keep in mind there may not be one single root cause it's a common misconception that when you're root causing you're coming to one single final thing might not be it may be a combination of events or a combination of actions that must occur to create the issue, it's easy to pulled into just looking for that one final answer that might not be one thing.

So that's as for another Thursday Q&A session I hope you found it useful as always let us know your thoughts and keep sending in the questions they help everyone keep improving and we'd love to hear them thanks again have a great day

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