How to perform 5 Why analysis?

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How to perform 5 Why analysis?

If your team comes to you with a problem, how do you solve it today? It is very easy to give a solution and ask the team to implement it but are you sure you are providing the right solution? Are you developing your team to be problem solvers? The next time they have a problem, they are being trained to come to you each time when they have a problem. This does not build the problem solving skill in the company. A better approach to solve the problem is to enable the team to solve the problem by themselves. When a team solves the problem by themselves, they are bound to come up with good solutions since they are dealing with the problem day-in and day-out and they are responsible for fixing the issue and hence have some skin in the game to get it right. Enabling problem solvers in the company to fix their own problems builds a company culture towards continuous improvement.

A lot of times when people are faced with a problem, they only attack the symptoms and not the root cause. It is important to identify the root cause of the problem so that once a solution is put in place the problem should be completely solved. One of the techniques that the team can use to solve the problem is called 5 Why analysis. As a leader or coach, it is your responsibility to instill the discipline of using the 5 why analysis to solve problems within your team.

5 Why Analysis is a technique to get to the root cause of a problem by repeatedly asking why several times. The idea behind this technique is that when people respond to a Why question, they usually talk about a symptom rather than a root cause. If you respond to the symptom and put a solution in place, then the problem will reappear since you have not addressed the core issue. For example,

Problem: There is no light in the house?
Why: The fuse is blown
Solution: Replace the fuse.

Replacing the fuse may be a temporary solution, if we don’t address the real reason behind why the fuse was blown then the problem may recur. Let’s investigate this problem by asking why a few more times:

Problem: There is no light in the house?
Why: The fuse is blown
Why: There is an overload of current in the circuit
Why: There are too many appliances connected to the circuit
Solution: Create a process where many appliances are not connected at the same time.

Well this may solve the problem of a blown fuse for us. However, note that there is no one single solution to this problem. It depends on the line of responses and questions being asked. Let’s look at this modified scenario:

Problem: There is no light in the house?
Why: The fuse is blown
Why: There is an overload of current in the circuit
Why: The wires in the house can only support 5 Amps of current load
Solution: Replace the wires to support greater amperage of current flow through the home.

The final root cause selected depends on the person or department asking the question. Let’s say that we are the builder building homes and we want to understand how to improve the process in the future, here could be one scenario:

Problem: There is no light in the house?
Why: The fuse is blown
Why: There is an overload of current in the circuit
Why: The wires in the house can only support 5 Amps of current load
Why: We did not know how many appliances the customer would use at the same time
Why: We did not ask the customer their usage pattern
Why: We don’t have a process for understanding customer requirements for appliance usage
Solution: Create a questionnaire for customers’ appliance usage when we design houses in the future.

It is important to point out that the 5 why analysis should lead to something that is actionable by the party responsible for fixing the issue. Let’s look at the following example:

Problem: There is no light in the house?
Why: The fuse is blown
Why: The design of the fuse is poor

If fuse design is not in scope of your team, it is easy to blame others but no action can be taken to improve the process right now. What actions can you take that are within your control that can help address this issue?

When to use 5 Why Analysis?

You can use the 5 Why analysis anytime you need to solve a problem. However, for some problems, it may not be clear what the root cause really is – you would need to do a lot of data collection and analysis before you understand the true cause of the problem. In such cases the 5 why analysis may not be appropriate immediately. When you ask a 5 why question, the response should be fact based and not perception based.

Notes on 5 Why Analysis

Here are some things to keep in mind when we do a 5 Why analysis:

There is no unique answer when you perform a 5 Why analysis, depending on how the questions are asked or answered, it may lead to different root causes and solutions.
The results of the 5 why analysis depends on the team. If you have a good cross-functional team who knows the problem in and out, you are more likely to get a good solution.
The 5 why analysis can yield multiple root causes and solutions. Usually, there is more than one reason why the problem occurs in the first place. Make sure to cover all the root causes and not just one of the issues. You need to focus on the most important root cause – a Pareto analysis of the causes may help to narrow down to the most important root cause.
It is important to validate the reason given by the team before you ask the next why question. Go and see the problem for yourself and make certain that it is the issue before you go to the next why.
Note that it is not necessary to ask why 5 times – 5 is just an indicative number that works well, but it could be 3 times or 15 times – how many ever times it takes to get to the root causes. Since some people may be confused with the term 5 Why Analysis so it is also called as Why-Why Analysis.

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