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“Ask 'why' five times about every matter”

toyota-global.com

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Re: “Ask 'why' five times about every matter”

#111

Post by edoceo »

gregpilling wrote: post #99

I have read Ohno's book. http://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Production-System-Beyond-Large-... One thing that stuck out to me was how long everything took to figure out on the Toyota Production System. Ohno spent decades streamlining processes. The timeline is in the inside cover of my copy of the book. Fascinating read, and easier to read than some other "Toyota Production" books written by academics. Recommend.

This. When folks come to my Startup events I host and ask about Lean I point to this book. Informative and an easy read.

Re: “Ask 'why' five times about every matter”

#112

Post by xemdetia »

rileymat2 wrote: post #88

Sometimes I have multiple solutions to a problem in mind and want to throughly investigate them, but run into a minor road block when investigating one of them. In forums, some of the most annoying threads are people that are trying to help you "solve your real problem" instead of helping with the specific question at hand.

What usually happens as one of the 'solve your real problem' people is context. You searched for a path and ended up with a path of A->B->C->D->#block->F but you only tell the group about D->#block and all the readers are guessing how you constructed a path to get to D. The destination of F is often also not clear and missing from the problem description. Even if the reader can approximate a route from A->...->D->#block->F they have a chance of applying their own experience, because often D->#block is a true dead end of the hopeful path of A->F.

Too many systems have contextual inputs that only make the solution apparent with adequate context, so really we are hoping for A and F.

Re: “Ask 'why' five times about every matter”

#113

Post by thisjustinm »

waxenfigurine wrote: post #50

There seems to be some confusion/mis-interpretation about the 5 part. This is called 五回のなぜ in Japanese ("Go-kai no naze," or Why Five Times) and refers to root cause analysis. Of course the number of times the process need be repeated until the root cause is identified is variable. Five in this case is merely a jingly mnemonic, as Japanese people are so fond of.

Exactly. This is all about getting to root causes.

I learned this working in a manufacturing environment for several years the was implementing the Toyota Production System and all the things that are a part of it like Kaizen, Kanban, etc.

After I left I thought it was too bad that all that good process was locked into the manufacturing world. I've seen it creep in more and more, often under the classification of UX with understanding user flows and actual problems of usability on a site (another area where asking why 5 times is very helpful to get to the root of a user's feedback).

I've also seen what I call "kanban flavored agile" be one of the most effective engineering processes for environments with ever changing requirements who don't need the rigid deadlines of sprint-based planning. When I saw it in manufacturing it was all about "just in time delivery" meaning a factory could easily switch production lines when suppliers missed deliveries (or delivered defective goods) or a machine broke down, etc. Which when you compare to the sorts of things that happen most every day in a typical software organization doesn't sound all that different.

Re: “Ask 'why' five times about every matter”

#114

Post by Bartweiss »

code4life wrote: post #84
dTal wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you told them ahead of time what you were doing, so they would happily cooperate knowing there would only be 5? Otherwise, by the fifth most people will think "man, this never ends..."

I'd probably ask "Why 5 times?" and then it would be game on.

By six, you're usually at something like "because that makes me happy". By seven, you're into metaphysics and cognitive science.

Of course, some issues are genuinely simple, and you're off in unhelpful territory halfway through. I suspect five why's is a decent estimate, but not necessarily more accurate than four.

Re: “Ask 'why' five times about every matter”

#115

Post by methehack »

waxenfigurine wrote: post #50

There seems to be some confusion/mis-interpretation about the 5 part. This is called 五回のなぜ in Japanese ("Go-kai no naze," or Why Five Times) and refers to root cause analysis. Of course the number of times the process need be repeated until the root cause is identified is variable. Five in this case is merely a jingly mnemonic, as Japanese people are so fond of.

Thank you for confirming. :)

I've always thought the idea behind "5" was to encourage you to ask more than once or twice. I think it's natural to stop after once or twice but you usually get the good stuff further along. Why is the sky blue? The atmosphere. Oh, ok -- I got it. There's a lot more to the story.

Re: “Ask 'why' five times about every matter”

#116

Post by Bartweiss »

humanrebar wrote: post #90
kidmenot wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people tend to talk about solutions and not the problems Hard to make this any clearer. To expand a bit on this, most of the times the solutions they talk about are of course expressed in terms of what they already know, which makes communication that much harder. It's a key aspect to keep in mind, and one that ideally both parties, but at least the one that's taking the job, needs to be aware of. Otherwise it's li…

On the other hand, it's frustrating to call up the ISP help line to get a bad router replaced and get treated like a troglodyte. Likewise, I'm probably qualified to diagnose when my laceration needs stitches. A conversation about problems and not solutions are frustrating at that point.

Which is what makes this comic so powerful: https://xkcd.com/806/

The people asking the questions are trying to defend against false confidence, but drive the people with justified confidence crazy. Being able to filter for "I know you're competent, we can skip ahead a bit" is really powerful.

Re: “Ask 'why' five times about every matter”

#117

Post by iaskwhy »

erac1e wrote: post #58
iaskwhy wrote: post #9

I don't force it 5x but asking why was the best lesson I learnt working with users/clients as people tend to talk about solutions and not the problems. That's also where my nickname comes from.

why don't you force it 5x?

I just don't think there's a magical number that works for me. Dealing with users/clients is really just dealing with people so I guess it ends up like being in a light therapy session, asking questions until you get a good understanding of the real problem. I'm not good reading people but I think I'm good understanding their issues. Empathy gets you a long way. That's probably half of it, the other half being dealing with their expectations.

Re: “Ask 'why' five times about every matter”

#118

Post by Bartweiss »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #100
coredog64 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. My management is like generals fighting the last war. They continue to push process as an answer to anything that has caused an outage instead of reworking the process that we already have.

Unlike the Red Queen problem of arms race, "fighting the previous war" could help with one class of support problems (not always, not all problems). "Hmm, we've been here before, we know how to fix this; plus we should make it harder to get here again by accident."

I think the big question is whether you ever win the previous war.

If every problem adds permanent overhead ("add a check for that issue in the review process") then you're slowly losing ground. If problems get solved ("automate that step so no one forgets it"), you're making progress even if you don't anticipate issues.

Re: “Ask 'why' five times about every matter”

#120

Post by Bartweiss »

awinter-py wrote: post #73

I know a certain 3 year-old who uses a similar trick to collect knowledge about the world. Not being sarcastic here; orgs can learn a lot from young children about how to acquire new skills and make decisions in the face of uncertainty. Before they can even walk infants learn to judge whether they're about to crawl off a cliff -- a skill the yahoo board (for example) could have really used.

It's an excellent technique for learning unfamiliar domains (which is almost everything, for a 3 year old). If you don't have a strong framework to fit new data into, ask "why?" a bunch of times and people will hand you relevant pieces of that framework.
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