thinking-five-whys-plus
Five Whys Plus
Overview
The Five Whys technique from Toyota Production System is powerful but often misapplied. This enhanced version adds explicit guards against common failures: premature stopping, single-cause bias, blame-oriented thinking, and confirmation bias. It transforms a simple technique into a rigorous root cause methodology.
Core Principle: Keep asking "why" until you reach actionable root causes, but guard against the technique's known failure modes.
When to Use
- Incident post-mortems
- Bug investigations
- Process failures
- Customer complaints
- Recurring problems
- Any situation where you need root cause, not just proximate cause
Decision flow:
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