I did my first 5-whys analysis this week. The LW team has just run a big in-person event, and I got all the team together to go through about 4 of these.
One main issue I ran into is that at every step of the 5-whys, there were a bunch of different things that could’ve caused the problem. Like, a task didn’t get done. Why not? Well, nobody knew it was their responsibility for one. For two, the person who saw the problem didn’t know who to tell. For three, we hadn’t noticed in advance that the problem would arise, and could’ve fixed it at an earlier point. Etc. Sometimes we got a bunch of branches.
The take we had was that we should pick the cause that we think we “should” have fixed. Another way of putting it is: the one we’d most like to do better on in the future. This was generally good.
(The other thing that was not clear to me at the time but was when we re-read the Lean book, and that you get right in the post, is that you’re supposed to make an effort to solve each of the 5 problems, not just the most fundamental one. The idea being that if you regularly do 5-whys, then the fundamental problems will get solved by just lots of problems stemming from them.)
I did my first 5-whys analysis this week. The LW team has just run a big in-person event, and I got all the team together to go through about 4 of these.
One main issue I ran into is that at every step of the 5-whys, there were a bunch of different things that could’ve caused the problem. Like, a task didn’t get done. Why not? Well, nobody knew it was their responsibility for one. For two, the person who saw the problem didn’t know who to tell. For three, we hadn’t noticed in advance that the problem would arise, and could’ve fixed it at an earlier point. Etc. Sometimes we got a bunch of branches.
The take we had was that we should pick the cause that we think we “should” have fixed. Another way of putting it is: the one we’d most like to do better on in the future. This was generally good.
(The other thing that was not clear to me at the time but was when we re-read the Lean book, and that you get right in the post, is that you’re supposed to make an effort to solve each of the 5 problems, not just the most fundamental one. The idea being that if you regularly do 5-whys, then the fundamental problems will get solved by just lots of problems stemming from them.)