The "five whys" productivity technique
As someone who used 5-whys when I worked at Amazon, I love it and the criticisms here don&#x27;t resonate. It&#x27;s not about finding one path of causation, or finding everything you can point a finger out. It&#x27;s about being willing to admit the actual causes and then do something about them.<p>&quot;Why did our code break?&quot; &quot;Because we habitually ship things without thoroughly testing them.&quot;<p>&quot;Why?&quot; &quot;Because our culture has product managers demanding things with short deadlines and no concern about the code quality.&quot;<p>... which, and this is key, has to be followed by managers at all relevant levels changing their processes to fix this. If it&#x27;s not fixed -- at an organizational level -- as a result of the analysis, fuck off with the 5 whys process, it&#x27;s just a joke.<p>I tried to run an Amazon-style 5-whys at my new job and my boss said, oh that was very good, good analysis. Then we did none of the things suggested. Well, there&#x27;s no point. Just quit. You&#x27;re going to be mediocre forever until the management chain buys in.<p>The reason Amazon scales well and can do so many things is that that their management is incentivized to care about things other than shipping&#x2F;deliverables&#x2F;this quarter&#x27;s returns. It&#x27;s still about the business overall, but Bezos&#x27; long-term-thinking has infected the entire company with long-termism and it&#x27;s very effective.<p>I am quite sure that Google&#x2F;Microsoft&#x2F;etc do not have this quality in the same degree (or they would not have made many of their obvious mistakes). Not that Amazon doesn&#x27;t make mistakes; they just make different kinds than a lot of other companies. And of course plenty of departments at Amazon don&#x27;t do this well either; it&#x27;s too big a company to be culturally uniform. But at least the norm is to do it well instead of badly, which is more than you can say about most larger-than-startup-sized companies.