> The Five Whys, as it’s commonly presented, will lead us to believe that not only is just one condition sufficient, but that condition is a canonical one, to the exclusion of all others.
Five whys presents itself as a way to dig deep but promotes doing so linearly and getting to a singular thing you can fix, hiding a lot of potential learnings along the way. Thinking about contributing factors is a much more powerful framework.
> The Five Whys, as it’s commonly presented, will lead us to believe that not only is just one condition sufficient, but that condition is a canonical one, to the exclusion of all others.
Five whys presents itself as a way to dig deep but promotes doing so linearly and getting to a singular thing you can fix, hiding a lot of potential learnings along the way. Thinking about contributing factors is a much more powerful framework.