The Problem with ‘5 Whys’ (2016)
Many years ago, I worked at Amazon, and at the time they LOVED "5 Why" analysis. I had to write a couple of them. The second and final one I wrote came back from my manager, who told me that it was unacceptable for my "5 Whys" to blame something outside our team's control when the most immediate cause was a bug written by our team, and I needed to come up with a different ultimate cause. This was really frustrating, but it was easy enough to completely change the cause without being dishonest. "5 Why" style analysis is really easy to steer toward whatever you want to blame.