How to Create Long-Term Improvements: Using the Five Whys to Identify and Solve the Underlying Prob
- Gordon McCallum
- May 11, 2017
- 2 min read
For every question you ask, follow it up with "why" after getting the answer. Then ask "why" again after that answer to dive a little deeper. Then why again. Then again. And again. It generally takes this many iterations to truly get down to the root cause of an issue.
And while the five whys are not a new concept, they are less utilized than they should be, given how little effort they take, and how impactful they can be to an organization's bottom line.
As an example, let's say you are asked the question "how well are we leveraging paid search?", and your initial answer is "I don't know." Chances are the response won't be "Oh okay. Carry on then." The followup question should be "why not?" and the five whys help to identify the underlying issue:
Why don't we know how well we are leveraging paid search? Because we don't have any paid search experts on staff.
Why don't we have any paid search experts on staff? Because nobody has the time to learn about paid search.
Why does nobody have time to learn about paid search? Because we are always so busy with the day-to-day activities required to run the business.
Why are we always so busy with the day-to-day activities that we can't do things that will benefit us in the long term? Because we don't have time to plan ahead.
Why don't we have time to plan ahead? Because we don't have any long term plans in place.
Now we're getting somewhere actionable!
In this example (which could be from many real businesses, and I have personally seen this numerous times), the takeaway is that the business has not created sufficient direction for the team, and therefore they are not focused on the most value-added activities that support departmental and organizational goals. Creating - and sharing - longer term plans will provide needed structure for your team members and help them focus on the most important tasks at hand.
Too often organizations operate in perpetual hair-on-fire mode, and that is a surefire recipe for making mistakes and missing larger opportunities - not to mention making the same mistakes again.
To get benefit from this exercise, however, action is required. Figure out who will be the point person for each item, and what due date will be assigned? What to do should be determined in reverse order:
Consciously go through this process for any weak areas of your business, or after a mistake (such as sending out an important email with a glaring typo or to the wrong audience, for example), and document the five whys. Present the outcomes and own the next steps, and you will avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.
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