Identify Root Causes by Asking “Why” Five Times

ACME, unfortunately, has been going through a rough quarter. Overall sales for their signature Bamboo bookshelves are up, but returns have gone up by more than 40% this quarter. ACME has a strong belief in providing great customer service and they issue full refunds for bad products. Reducing the number of returns, then, is a priority to keep a steady cash position. To understand why returns have been going up so much, they need to find the root cause of the issue. Knowing that customers have been returning the Bamboo bookshelves, they begin by asking;

Why are shelves being returned?

The bookshelves being returned are not able to be put together correctly.

Why is that?

The shelf that goes in the middle is not long enough. It’s too short.

Why is the shelf too short?

It seems the person responsible for the wood mill has been rushing through their work, and has been using the wrong jig to cut the shelves.

Why?

They didn’t receive proper training on the wood mill. As a result, they’re rushing through production to make sure they make all the orders that come in each day, without knowing the differences between product groups.

Why?

The managers left early last month for a budget meeting and failed to complete training the wood mill operator. They assumed the training manuals would be sufficient for bringing the wood mill operator up to speed.

Finding the root cause of an issue is the only way to make sure the issue does not recur. Managers at ACME now know not to cut training short in hopes that a manual will train someone sufficiently. If there is a failure to complete training due to budgetary or any other meeting, it needs to be made up. Had ACME not asked why enough times to get to the root cause of the issue, the blame for the defects might have been placed on the improperly trained employee. Getting to the root cause allows problems to be eliminated at the source.

As a hypothetical, let’s look at the case where the employee was fired for cutting the shelves too short. The job will still need to be done, so a new person will have to be hired to run the saw mill. Finding, interviewing, hiring and training a new person to run the saw mill costs time and money. Suppose during the training, the managers have some other important meeting they need to attend, and so skimp out on a few hours of training one day. It’s not hard to imagine that there could be more quality issues in the future due to improper training (again). By treating the symptom (shelves that are too short), the real problem (managers failing to train employees) goes unresolved.

This is a simple example, but there is a lot to be learned when you dig deeper than others. A bad manager won’t accept their fallibility. Good managers recognize when they need to make an adjustment to eliminate problems. By taking the time to go deep and identify the real cause of a problem, significant time will be saved in the future. Whether it’s marketing that isn’t working, sales that aren’t going anywhere, deals that always die at the one yard line, or a pharmaceutical company that has a quality problem, putting a bandaid on the symptom isn’t going to alleviate anything. Only by tracing a problem to its source can it be properly dealt with.