[00:00:00] Cold Open

[00:00:00] Daniel Greening: the gut reaction, style of management is pick the first thing that comes to mind that makes sense to us, right? Sammy pushed the button and the whole system crashed. So let's fire Sammy. 

[00:00:13] Introduction

 Welcome to the Mindful Agility podcast. I'm Dan Greening.

The Mindful Agility project teaches skills of deep insight and rapid experimentation. We think these are the top two skills you need to succeed in life and work. 

In this episode, Dan Dickson and I talk about a tool to gain deep insight, called five whys. 

[00:00:38] Dan Dickson: Today we're going to talk about how to use the Five Whys technique to get lasting breakthroughs. The fact is, a rash knee-jerk action may lead to a temporary fix, but it's also likely to miss the root cause or causes of a problem, and the same thing's liable to happen all over again. 

Hell Aesop figured this out in the 14 hundreds.

Remember his famous quote was that "appearances are often deceiving."

[00:01:02] Daniel Greening: that is true, isn't it? Someone cuts us off in traffic and then we instantly decide they're a jerk.

[00:01:08] Dan Dickson: it's the instant reaction that could be a problem. Without understanding what is behind an action, you may be missing understanding why something is happening. Somebody cutting you off in traffic maybe because they're just learning how to drive, their mirrors broken, or maybe they're just a jerk. I mean, that's entirely possible too, but it's always worth digging at least one or two levels below .

That's why the five whys technique can really be helpful. It started in business, but it can be helpful in your, uh, personal life as well.

[00:01:39] Technique

[00:01:39] Dan Dickson: So anyway, here's the technique. You start with what happened. And let's say somebody didn't deliver on a promise. 

In the five whys technique, our first question is why the promise was not fulfilled. Perhaps they didn't have enough time to fulfill the promise. Our second question is, why didn't this person have enough time?

Did they get the request too late? Did they have too many other things to do? One cause might have multiple direct why's, but keep asking why until you have at least five in a chain and see what it tells you. And then review them to see how you can eliminate some of these causes inexpensively and permanently.

[00:02:12] Daniel Greening: Yeah, you and I have done this many times, in the Mindful Agility community and analyzing businesses ourselves. We always get this giant map of maybe three dozen causes of something. I think that's pretty interesting. And the gut reaction, style of management is pick the first thing that comes to mind that makes sense to us, right?

Like, Sammy pushed the button and the whole system crashed. So let's fire Sammy.

But then you chart these things out and you go, holy moly, there's a lot of causes here. And if we fixed one or two really simple causes, we can fix the whole system for a long time.

[00:02:58] Dan Dickson: that's true. And the example we just went, say somebody misses a deadline, all right? You can get mad at 'em and say, well, you missed the deadline, you screwed up. But it's certainly worth at least taking a look and understanding what happened, what was the reason behind it, and it may have absolutely nothing to do with the person, in terms of his or her capabilities.

It maybe because of the circumstances they were put in, and if you don't address those circumstances, the same thing's gonna happen again and again with other people. So it makes sense to go through this exercise.

[00:03:27] Daniel Greening: you and I did this exercise when we were analyzing the companies of Ron Johnson and a succession of failures. It's like he did one failure with JC Penney, and then probably did not do a five whys analysis on why JC Penney failed, because he repeated some of the same things that got him into trouble with JC Penney at his next startup.

[00:03:54] Case Study

[00:03:54] Dan Dickson: But anyways, as we're talking about it, we can do a case study. You know, I mentioned five whys originated with business. 

It actually originated with Toyota. And one of the famous examples that, people use is one of, Toyota's welding robots stopped working one day and it disrupted the entire production line.

So people dug into it. And the first why was that the robot circuit board failed. Okay. If we took something at face value that would say we replaced the circuit board and start everything again. But the fact is the second why was that the reason the board failed is because it wasn't properly maintained. And then the third why behind that was that the maintenance staff didn't follow the prescribed maintenance schedule. And the fourth way behind that was lack of. And the fifth why, in this case it was a root cause, was inadequate training programs. So in other words, if, the reaction had been just to replace a circuit board, the problem would keep on happening.

And so the important exercise was to go back through the five whys process and, try to find the real cause of a problem. 

By the way, there are two qualifiers here. Number one, it's not always five whys. It may be more, it may be fewer. And number two, very often there's not a root cause. There may be multiple root causes.

[00:05:06] Daniel Greening: The original Toyota five whys was exactly as you originally described, that you go one cause after another, and what you end up with is a single chain of five whys, but that has been modified by a number of people. You provided a reference to a root cause analysis where there were seven whys before you discovered the real set of root causes that ought to be fixed. And I have historically done these giant maps of causes. So you end up with multiple root causes in a big map, and in those situations there may be two causes for a single thing. So you end up with this map. 

The way I came up with the root cause mapping party idea, what I mean by that is that you get a bunch of people in a room that are all contributing to this map. And you go around the room and ask each person, give me just one more why to add to this map and you gradually build this giant map.

I was in a highly reactive company that was ready to fire Sammy. The system really did crash for me in the middle of a class. I mean, I was gonna teach five whys the next day. So I said, this is interesting. I am going to host a root cause mapping party in the class because some of the people in my class were actually involved in this crash, and so we did that process over GoToMeeting. We shared a screen that showed all of the whys as they were built up, I added them on a graphic tool, and each person got to say something. 

When we walked out of the room, we had a list of things to fix, but none of them were to fire someone. The person who pushed the button, exactly as in this case study from Toyota, was not properly trained and there weren't any safeguards to avoiding a crash. So those two things, training and safeguards were things that we fixed.

[00:07:28] Dan Dickson: Yeah, it can work.

[00:07:30] Daniel Greening: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:07:31] Resources

[00:07:31] Daniel Greening: My suggestion is if you're interested in learning more, we have some resources in our brief, the Mindful Sprint and in the show notes.

[00:07:41] Dan Dickson: Yeah and as you say, one of those resources is an actual map. You entitled it the mapping party, but it demonstrates how you can have multiple causes that feed into a single problem. 

[00:07:50] Discussion

[00:07:50] Daniel Greening: Where have you used five whys, after you learned about it?

[00:07:56] Dan Dickson: Well, I use it constantly. I'm on the board of a medical imaging company in California. They had, shall we say, a somewhat, uh, less than successful launch the product was fine, but it was the delivery of the product that was the issue. And in a way it was analogous to, JC Penney. They didn't do a low, cost experiment. And go through the reasons about, okay, why did this particular rollout not work out the way they thought it would? I use it constantly, to tell you the truth. 

Really there's so many, I mean, I could probably invent one while we talk.

[00:08:25] Daniel Greening: That's right. 

For me it's a similar thing. Once you start using five whys, graphically, you draw it out and you list all of the whys and so forth, you realize that you're starting to absorb that technique, and you just apply it in real life ,whenever you're in a strange situation with a problem, you stop yourself at the point that you say, "oh my God, that guy cut me off. He's a jerk." you say, "Hey, wait a minute. What are the potential causes of this? And You get a little curious, like you might look at the driver and say, Hmm, I wonder if they're crazy or I wonder if they're stressed out, or I wonder if there's a baby in the car, or

[00:09:11] Dan Dickson: or I wonder if they have a gun.

[00:09:13] Daniel Greening: Yeah, that would be a good thing to know. They are running from the police and that is why they cut us off.

[00:09:21] Dan Dickson: It's interesting you say that . I am being grudgingly dragged into participating in a homeowner's association. Not to act elitist or anything like that, but I so far seem to be the only adult in the room. 

And, um, you know, we had a meeting last night. One of the problems is poor communication and this would be a perfect exercise for that. Okay. So why is there poor communication? And to go through that even with the people on the call. It's something that is non-threatening enough and, non-biased enough, in fact that people would sit there and actually participate in that, I think is a good idea.

I'm gonna try that.

All I ask is that you report back. 

[00:09:58] Try it Yourself

[00:09:58] Dan Dickson: So we've been talking about some examples, but here's a way you can try it for yourself. Look around for something that isn't right, may have been something that happened, or something that isn't sitting right and figuring out, you know, okay, why is this happening? And especially in the case of it may have an apparent cause, dig a little deeper.

Apply the five whys technique, and see how many causes you can find, which ones are gonna be easiest to fix? Which fixes will lead to lasting improvement? I think you may be pleasantly surprised.

[00:10:26] Daniel Greening: I can see that happening in all sorts of ways, right? It can be something that, Has been nagging on us that we just haven't worked on and that's a problem, right? We can go like, why aren't I working on that thing? And then you can construct this five whys for procrastination.

[00:10:46] Dan Dickson: Well, the other thing too is that what this does is that, at least in my case, it helps you understand a problem better, and it helps you parse it into actionable segments. In other words, something you can do about, I mean, you may have the big, big, hairy, awful thing sitting in front of you.

Okay why? And you start asking why, and then you start unraveling the causes behind something. And these are things you can do something about, it's a very useful exercise.

[00:11:11] Daniel Greening: Hmm. Well, audience member, if you give this a try, please send us a note and let us know how it went.

All right.

Thank you Dan Dickson.

[00:11:22] Dan Dickson: Thank you Dan Greening, as always.

[00:11:24] Daniel Greening: Have a great time with all your merger, acquisitions, SPAC and other stuff that I know you're doing. 

[00:11:32] Dan Dickson: Yeah. Other stuff. Some fun, some not. so fun.

[00:11:34] Daniel Greening: And your condo HOA or whatever. 

[00:11:38] Dan Dickson: Really that don't, don't even go there. 

[00:11:41] Daniel Greening: For more information on this topic, references and other useful data are in the show notes. 

 Beta reviewers include Amelia Hambrecht and Dan D'Agostino .

The Mindful Agility project team includes Mirela Petalli. Dan Dickson and me Dan Greening. 

If you want to support our efforts, share the Mindful Agility podcast with your friends. We would love it if you would rate us on Spotify Podcasts or write a written review on Apple Podcasts. You'd be surprised how important those written reviews are.

If you'd like to read about this topic or any episode topic, they tend to appear first in our weekly brief called The Mindful Sprint. That brief is a super short two minute read. You'll get it in your inbox, if you subscribe at mindfulagility.substack.com. 

You can comment on those briefs right on our Substack page and we'll reply. We also have a website at mindfulagility.com. 

We periodically host webinars for our Facebook group, Mindful Agility Community, which meets every couple of weeks. They usually become videos you can find on YouTube. 

Thanks so much for listening. 

Have a great week. 

I'm Dan Greening.