Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

It's pretty sad that people have to have something so simple spelled out for them and given a catchy motto like "The Five Whys".

Even sadder that it would be hailed as some revolutionary problem-solving technique.



Yes and no. There's some utility to having a dogma with a well-defined name. If you wanted to introduce each of these practices separately, you would have to explain each one and get people to buy into each one. Each one is a potential point for argument and derailment. It's convenient to have a handle that refers to the whole kit.

In practice, you'll have to introduce the techniques incrementally, but having an over-arching name can help people see these as part of a unified plan.


I can attest to how easy it is for even a small company to completely disregard any sort of mechanism for learning from mistakes over time. It goes against the grain of human nature to bring up problems in a useful way in a lot of cases I think.


It's a little like Ahmdahl's Law. Sure, it's really basic and kind of obvious, but it's still worth thinking about from time to time, and it's nice to be able to call it out by giving it its own name.


If you are starting your sentence with "But that's just...", you fall prey to the assumption that hindsight is 20/20.

The first thing I learned in my Ph.D. program is that the most important discoveries are the ones that seem the most obvious in retrospect.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: