Five Tips for Making Your “Five Whys” Analysis More Insightful
A “Five Whys” (or “5W”) Analysis “is an iterative interrogative technique to explore the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem.”
Don’t let this wordy Wikipedia definition of 5W fool you into believing the method is complicated.
Anyone can quickly and easily perform a 5W Analysis. Small children do it instinctively. I’ve taught hundreds of people to use the tool with just a few minutes of instruction. This is likely why 5W has remained a popular approach to upstream thinking for diagnosing complex problems since it was first developed at Toyota nearly a century ago.
- Begin with the problem in front of you and ask yourself, “Why is this happening?”
- Take your answer and ask the same question again: “Why is this happening?”
- Repeat the process at least five times and you’re likely to stumble upon a deeper issue that needs to be addressed as a precursor to solving the original problem you found yourself up against.
Despite criticism that the approach is too simplistic, 5W continues to show up in a variety of settings, from business to cognitive behavioral therapy.
Here, then, are five tips for making any 5W Analysis more insightful, reliable, and impactful.
Make it a Mind Map
Most instructions for conducting a 5W Analysis assume you will only generate one response each time you ask yourself why a problem — or any of its five subsequent underlying problems — exists.
That’s probably true for simple problems with linear causes and effects. Yet complex problems tend to have many different “whys” feeding into them from a lot of directions.
I use Mind Maps to capture every underlying problem I can think of as I work my way through each of the five “whys” in a 5W Analysis. The branching structure of a Mind Map makes space all the different “reasons why” my imagination can come up with. Mind Maps also allow me to see connections across underlying problems that might otherwise remain invisible — and, as a result, unsolved.
Make it Modular with Sticky Notes
I always reach for a stack of sticky notes when I start sketching a Mind Map for a new 5W Analysis, using a single sticky for every “why” that comes to mind at every step in the process.
Sure, it’s easy enough to draw a Mind Map directly onto a sheet of paper or a white board, but I appreciate the modularity offered by sticky notes. You can pick them up and move them around on the Mind Map. You can throw them away or replace them with new sticky notes. You can cluster them or overlap them to suggest relationships between ideas. And, when you’re done with your 5W Analysis, you can repurpose them for a “Spheres of Influence” analysis (more on this below).
Back Up Results with Research
Speed, one of the strengths of a 5W Analysis, can also be its greatest weakness.
A 5W Analysis is a sort of brain dump — an invitation to puzzle through all the underlying causes you can logically and rationally come up with in a single sitting. This rapid approach to analysis prevents us from spending time and energy attacking a surface-level problem that will persist as long as underlying causes are left unaddressed.
But without research to back up our quickfire thinking in a 5W Analysis, we run the risk of grappling with problems that don’t exist or have little real bearing on the issue we’re trying to address. A little bit of research can help you audit the accuracy of your analysis and keep you from chasing false leads. Don’t worry — research needn’t involve a million-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation or a laboratory filled with Ph.D.’s. A quick web search may be enough to turn up some useful insights from people who already have experience investigating the same problem you’re facing.
Get a Second (or Third, or Fourth…) Opinion
Using sticky notes to build out a 5W Mind Map makes it easier for more than one person to get in on the fun.
Invite collaborators to engage in the 5W Analysis process along with you to gain broader perspectives and deeper insights into the issue at hand. Each participant can harvest their own individual “whys” on different sticky notes and work together to sort, rearrange, and cluster ideas as they come up.
Alternatively, you can build out a 5W analysis on your own and then ask collaborators to add their own branches of “whys” when you’re done.
Find Leverage Points Using a “Spheres of Influence” Analysis
Like the 5W Analysis, the “Spheres of Influence” Analysis is a popular thinking tool for focusing our efforts where they are most likely to have the greatest impact.
A Spheres of Influence Analysis invites us to sort the challenges we face into three buckets: 1) The things we can immediately control and change; 2) The things we can indirectly influence to change with some degree of confidence they’ll turn out the way we want; and 3) The things we can neither control nor influence at all, making them problems we can only concern ourselves with, but never directly act upon.
I like using sticky notes in a 5W Analysis because it allows me to sort all the underlying problems into one of these three buckets in a “Spheres of Influence” analysis.
