When Kids Start Doing Root Cause Analysis
5 Whys at the Dinner Table
My son is in the phase of life where there’s only a single question on his lips — “Why?”
At dinner, he was asking the customary endless chain of whys when it suddenly dawned on me that my five year old was doing Root Cause Analysis.
Root Cause Analysis, is a method of solving problems which doesn’t just ameliorate the symptoms of a problem, but delves deep down to find the root cause of the problem.
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We started playing a game called “5 Whys” where I would make a statement and he would say “Why?” five times and we would see where we ended up. What happened was really amazing. We soon turned trivial statements like “That airplane is flying.” into deep philosophical root causes like “Because we love to see our family all over the world.” By just constantly asking the single question and being thoughtful about the response, we really delved deep into the motivation and cause of things.
It would have been easy to get annoyed at the constant barrage of “whys” that my child throws up, but instead we turned it into a fun game and a learning exercise for myself.
The Five Whys is actually a technique I learned about while reading The Lean Startup book by Eric Ries. Quoting Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System:
Repeating “why” five times, like this, can help uncover the root problem and correct it… By asking and answering “why” five times, we can get to the real cause of the problem, which is often hidden behind more obvious symptoms.
When I was playing the 5 Whys with my son, we discovered that 5 times is close to the perfect number of times to ask the question. He wanted to experiment with more than 5 Whys, trying to go all the way to 10. We found that once we got past five it became harder and harder to answer the question — we ended up many times stopping short of the 10th why because the answer would end up being “It just is” or “I don’t know”.
In the end, what started as a fun game turned into a good lesson for me about the power of simple questions.
Originally posted 3/10/2013
