Business Bites: Root Cause Analysis: 5 Whys

Welcome to Business Bites. My name is Sara. This is the podcast for busy professionals who want the quick hits of business terminology, historical context, and strategies for integration. Today, we're going to be talking about root cause analysis and the five whys. Root cause analysis is an area that was initially brought forward by Sakichi Toyoda, who is one of the initial inventors of total quality management and root cause analysis. He initially designed as a part of this process thinking about how we identify the true root cause for an event and understand how we can understand it better.

One of the initial strategies that he's used is the five whys. Which, on the surface, is as simple as it sounds, simply going through a process of asking why five, six, or even seven times, to use that as the ability to determine what is the real cause or effect with a specific problem. It's considered to be a repeating interrogative technique that's used to determine true cause and true analysis for a specific issue. There are many different ways and methods and forms of tracing quality management, and the Five Whys is just one of them.

Let's consider a situation where an organization might be wondering, why aren't they getting more sales? If we start with that question of, why aren't we getting more sales? Our first why would address the question as well, our target clients aren't seeing our marketing. We would then ask, why are your target clients not seeing your marketing? Well, we're not marketing in the right place. I'd then ask, why aren't we marketing in the right place? After asking that question, well, we haven't asked clients how they came to us. Which then takes us to the fourth why, of, well, why haven't we asked clients? The reason we haven't asked clients is it's not part of our intake process or our initial introduction to the client. Which takes us to our fifth why. Why isn't it a part of the initial client intake process? Well, we don't have a standard client intake process. So everyone kind of just does their own thing.

So what started out as an initial question and or concern about getting enough sales turned into not having a standard operating procedure for the way that we welcome new clients and understanding where they're coming from. This type of technique is really important and can be valuable to use because if we only ask the first question, why aren't we getting more sales, we might think that we need to hire a sales coach, or we need to hire a different kind of salesperson, or we might need to adopt a different type of technique for doing sales.

If we stopped at the question of why aren't clients seeing marketing, we might go into other avenues for marketing, pick up a new medium, join a new social platform to determine other ways of outreaching to people. When in truth, we didn't have enough information about the clients that we already had.

Again, using this simple kind of framework is one of the ways that we can use root cause analysis to be able to look at a problem and determine what's really going on underneath the surface of a problem that we've identified or that we've seen. Again, this is a technique that can be used and it's highly easy to utilize and incorporate into your organization and to be able to share amongst partners, customers, and then even clients in the long run.

This has been Sara with Business Bites. You can reach me at [email protected]. We would love to hear from you on what other terminology you would like bite-sized. And as always, give us a quick rating on your platform of choice and share this podcast with a friend. We'll see you next time.