Sometimes, problems can feel overwhelming and stressful. When you’re particularly tense or time-poor, it’s really natural to just try to put the fires out and get back to what you need to do – but it’s worth it to identify the root cause and solve that instead.

But how do you know you’re solving the real problem?

Let’s get into a classic tool: The 5 Whys.

🤷‍♀️ The 5 Whys

The 5 Whys is a root-cause identification technique. Originally pioneered by Toyota and now used by designers everywhere, it’s effectively:

1. Identify a problem

2. Identify why the problem exists

3. Identify why that problem exists

4. Repeat until you get to the real problem

Asking “why” 5 times is just a guide – you might get to the root cause earlier or later. Just go as deep as you need to.

📝 A worked example

Why aren’t they using it? Users aren’t finding it.

Why can’t they find it? We didn’t promote the new feature.

Why didn’t we promote it? The marketing team didn’t know it was coming out.

Why didn’t they know? Because the product team didn’t involve marketing in the release process.

By applying the 5 Whys technique, we can now look at solving how to get marketing involved in the release process so that they know about upcoming features. Imagine what we would’ve done if we didn’t know why customers weren’t using our new feature!

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✨ Some bonus tips

How many Whys should I ask?

Finding the natural root cause is not an exact science, but when I’ve run this exercise with teams, we usually stop when we uncover the reason that makes the team sit back and go, “Ohhhhh. That makes sense.”

The 5 Whys are not about blame.

Sometimes in doing this exercise, you’ll blame someone or a team for a problem. It’s important to remember that a screw-up, human error, or other blame-filled things are not root cause problems. If you get here, keep pushing until you figure out what caused the human error.

When can I use 5 Whys?

This exercise is usually best done in teams rather than just by yourself, since it’s unlikely you’ll be able to see the holistic cause-and-effect chain on your own. It’s a great activity for a post-mortem (ie. after an incident).