The Cult of the Root Cause
It's also worth pointing out that you may not be able to fix the root cause. The sailing example is great here:- Can you fix the crack in your hull whilst you're out at sea? Almost certainly not.- Can you even tell you have a crack in the hull until you've reduced the water in the bilges by running the pumps for a time? Again, quite possibly not.Treating the symptom is really the only sensible option, unless it's serious enough that you need to put out a Mayday. Again, not a course of action that addresses the root cause but, in some situations, absolutely the right thing to do. To take things up many, many notches, the sinking of the Titanic was an appalling tragedy from which relatively few people were saved, but I guarantee that nobody at all would have been saved if the people on the ship had opted for a series of committee meetings about how to solve the problem of the iceberg. (Not to say there weren't a very large number of hideous blunders in the management of that situation going all the way back to the ship's design and fit-out.)Moreover, another problem with Five Whys is that, applied heedlessly, it's an extraordinarily arrogant philosophy, because it makes the assumption that you can know the answer to those five whys. Often you can't, at least not without going on a journey, and fixing a few things along the way, and without that, you can simply be wasting your time trying to answer questions that you can't answer in your present situation.And that really, and somewhat poignantly, cuts to the root cause of why I view the kind of thinking frameworks/fads popular in business with a degree of scepticism: over-applied or misapplied, they paralyse people into inaction, and thereby provide fertile stock for breeding mediocrity.