Five Whys is a root cause analysis technique developed by Sakichi Toyoda and popularised through the Toyota Production System.
Business Analysts can use this technique:
- To find the root cause of an issue, failure, defect or decline in performance.
- During requirements elicitation to avoid jumping into solution mode prematurely.
If a stakeholder tells you: “We need to be able to export our monthly sales reports to Excel”, it can be tempting to jump into solution mode and start thinking or asking about how the exporting should look and work. However, you would be developing a solution to a problem that you don’t understand. Or even worse, you may be developing the wrong solution or one that is inefficient and can lead to further issues.
How To Use Five Whys (with examples)
The core idea is you ask ‘why’ repeatedly five times, because the first few answers are often the symptoms, not the root cause of issues.
Using the example above, where the initial requirement is “We need to be able to export our monthly sales reports to Excel”, here is an example scenario of how Five Whys may work:
Why #1: Why do you need the monthly sales reports in Excel format?
Answer: Because the sales manager needs to combine this with marketing spend data.
Why #2: Why do they need to combine it with marketing spend data?
Answer: To calculate the ROI for the marketing campaigns.
Why #3: Why do you need to calculate the ROI every month?
Answer: To determine the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns and reallocate the following month’s budget accordingly.
Why #4: Why does the ROI need to be calculated manually?
Answer: Because we need to get the sales figures from specific dates to the relevant marketing campaigns.
Why #5: Why can’t we filter the sales data to specific dates?
Answer: The filter function only allows filtering by calendar month, financial quarter and financial year.
Using Five Whys you have now ascertained that the root requirement is actually an extension to the filtering function, not Excel reports which creates unnecessary manual processing that is prone to human errors.
Do We Always Ask ‘Why’ Five Times?
Despite the name, you can vary how you ask the five whys so they don’t always have to start with ‘why’. “What is driving that need?”, “What would that enable you to do?”, “How does it currently work?”, “Without the current issue / limitation, what should be the ideal process?” are all valid Five Whys questions.
You don’t always have to ask exactly five times either. Sometimes you may only need three, sometimes you may need seven questions before you find the root cause. The main idea is you stay curious and dig deeper through the symptoms so you understand not only what to fix, but why you are fixing it.
You’ll know you’ve found the root cause if the answer reveals a systemic issue in a process, system or policy.
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