Drill down to the root cause of any problem by asking "Why?" repeatedly. Each answer forms the basis of the next question until you uncover the fundamental issue.
The Five Whys technique was developed by Sakichi Toyoda and used at Toyota as part of their problem-solving training. It's a simple but powerful way to get beyond symptoms to find root causes.
Write a clear, specific problem statement. Be factual, not emotional.
For each answer, ask why that condition exists. Don't accept surface-level explanations.
Continue asking why until you reach a root cause—usually after 3-5 iterations.
The root cause is typically something you can take action on to prevent recurrence.
Problem: The website went down.
Root Cause: Missing performance review process.
The Five Whys is most effective when you are troubleshooting a specific problem that has already occurred and you want to prevent it from happening again. It works particularly well for operational issues, quality defects, process failures, and customer complaints where there is a clear symptom to investigate.
Use this tool when you need a quick, low-overhead way to dig into a problem without extensive data gathering or formal analysis. The Five Whys can be done in 15-30 minutes with the right people in the room, making it ideal for team retrospectives, incident reviews, and on-the-spot troubleshooting.
This approach is especially valuable when teams are stuck treating symptoms rather than causes. If you find yourselves repeatedly fixing the same issues, the Five Whys helps break that cycle by pushing past the obvious explanations to find systemic issues that, once addressed, prevent entire classes of problems.
After a deployment caused an outage, an engineering team uses Five Whys to trace the issue from the immediate bug back to gaps in their CI/CD pipeline and testing strategy.
A customer success team investigates why a key account canceled, drilling from the stated reason through internal handoff failures to discover onboarding process gaps.
An individual explores why they missed a deadline, uncovering that unclear priorities led to context switching, rooted in a lack of weekly planning habits.
Five Whys is a root cause analysis technique developed by Sakichi Toyoda and used in Toyota's production system. You start with a problem and repeatedly ask 'Why?' to drill past symptoms to the underlying cause. The name comes from the observation that five iterations usually suffice, though you may need fewer or more depending on the problem's complexity.
Use Five Whys for relatively straightforward problems where there's likely a single root cause and you want a quick, collaborative analysis. For complex problems with multiple interacting causes, consider fishbone diagrams or fault tree analysis. Five Whys is best as a first-pass tool that can guide you toward more sophisticated analysis if needed.
You've likely reached the root cause when you arrive at something actionable - a process, policy, or behavior that can be changed to prevent recurrence. If your answer is 'human error' or 'they made a mistake,' keep asking why - the real root cause is usually a system or process issue that allowed the error to happen or go undetected.
Absolutely. Five Whys works well for understanding your own motivations and obstacles. Why do I procrastinate on this project? Why does that task feel overwhelming? By drilling into your own answers, you often uncover surprising insights about what's really holding you back or driving your behavior.
Stay focused on one problem at a time - don't branch into multiple issues. Base answers on facts and data, not assumptions. Involve people close to the problem who have firsthand knowledge. Avoid blame - focus on systems and processes, not individuals. Document your analysis so you can share learnings and track whether fixes work.
Explore other decision-making tools that complement Five Whys Analysis.