More than five whys and “layer eight” problems
I’ve always been bothered by the five whys, simply because it’s such a dramatic oversimplification of cause and effect. The fatal flaw is the assumption that causality is linear, when it is more often combinatorial in nature.<p>To illustrate consider a drunk pedestrian jaywalking and being hit by a speeding driver who was texting while driving. Who caused the accident? They both did, together. Or maybe one of them did and the other didn’t. Or maybe the stars aligned just right and both would have been fine if they hadn’t been doing it at the exact same time?<p>I can’t help but feel like anybody who has found the “root cause” for any problem, their answer will reflect their biases far more than will reflect true causality. If you can come up with a single answer for a complex causality problem, something hints to me that you would probably point to the same “cause”for other problems too.