

How to Run a 5 Whys (with Humans, not Robots) - tomheon
http://www.slideshare.net/danmil30/how-to-run-a-5-whys-with-humans-not-robots

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ivix
The summarised version: 1. Mistakes happen and will always happen. Saying "it
wont happen again" doesn't fix the problem. 2. Make a joke to stop people
getting defensive.

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darrint
3\. Plan for a future in which we remain as stupid as we are today. 4\. Pick
broad fixes over root cause fixes.

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barce
It makes me wonder what the 5 whys are. :)

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sturadnidge
As much as I agree with the general message (nobody died, so it's not _that_
bad), and have employed that same technique over the years, the part about
root cause is off point IMHO.

'Root cause' can absolutely refer to a collection of events. In the example
given, clearly both things were causal, clearly you fix both - you don't pick
one and label it 'THE root cause' and forget about the other (yes I know he
talks about prioritisation, but again that's perfectly valid when addressing a
root cause that happens to be a collection).

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danmil
Heya, author of the slides here.

Re: 'root causes' -- I find the words somewhat important. Like, if you say
you're looking for a root cause, then people tend to be in the sort of moral
mindset, and have a harder time seeing it as a collection of contingent
events.

Also, in the (truly amazing) "How Complex Systems Fail", he's pretty down on
"root cause":

[http://www.ctlab.org/documents/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fai...](http://www.ctlab.org/documents/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fail.pdf)

"7) Post-accident attribution accident to a ‘root cause’ is fundamentally
wrong"

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wpietri
I'm with you on this one. Especially in an iterative context, there is zero
value in looking for the true root cause.

The point of the exercise is to identify economical interventions that will
get the system to produce better results. If you go much beyond that, people
can get off into moral, analytical, or philosophical weeds and get lost.

As long as you do retrospectives and five-whys frequently, you can count on
useful analytical depth to come over time. If an issue is really both
important and subtle, it will crop up again. The next time you'll have another
perspective, so it will be easier to find. And by waiting, you'll have avoided
examining all the equally subtle but unimportant things.

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tsewlliw
Brilliant, I've definitely struggled before with how to get people to 1)not
worry about being blamed and 2)claim they won't repeat a mistake. This is
totally actionable, thanks!

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dano
If you are interested in the root of this methodology, consider reading Toyota
Production System by Taiichi Ohno. Page 17 starts the discussion on how asking
Why Five times is a method of determining root cause. This book isn't popular,
but is worth your time.

[http://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Production-System-Beyond-
Large-...](http://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Production-System-Beyond-Large-
Scale/dp/0915299143)

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cmckay
This is more a meta-comment about slideshare than about this presentation in
particular. I really like being able to access the slides of talks I've seen,
but for talks I haven't seen, there often is just enough that's missing from
the slides that I don't get the full picture.

Does anybody have a solution to this?

Now, having said that, this particular slide deck suffers very little from
this problem.

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danmil
(author of slides here): I actually took the slides I presented, went back and
interleaved simple bullet point slides covering what I talked about.

Because I have that same problem -- if someone has nice visual slides, the
Slideshare is often kind of useless.

~~~
StavrosK
This is also good relationship advice. The slides, I mean, not putting bullets
in things.

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wpietri
This was my very favorite talk from the Lean Startup conference. I hope they
put up the video as well, which was excellent.

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barce
What if one's humor goes off wrong, which is often the case in these
situations?

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mikebonnell
Great talk from LS conference. Thanks for sharing.

