from Hacker News

How to Run a 5 Whys (with Humans, not Robots)

by tomheon on 12/5/12, 12:58 PM with 17 comments

• by ivix on 12/5/12, 2:43 PM

  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.

• by sturadnidge on 12/5/12, 3:55 PM

  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).

• by tsewlliw on 12/5/12, 1:19 PM

  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!

• by dano on 12/7/12, 4:42 AM

  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-...

• by cmckay on 12/5/12, 2:47 PM

  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.

• by wpietri on 12/5/12, 5:39 PM

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

• by barce on 12/5/12, 7:31 PM

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

• by mikebonnell on 12/5/12, 6:55 PM

  Great talk from LS conference. Thanks for sharing.