By Mike Schultz, Publisher
RainToday Note: This article is part one of two. Here, Schultz explains the Five Whys of problem solving and how they're used to get to the root of a problem. In part two, he will elaborate and offer suggestions for how to use the Five Whys in a professional services environment.
Q. Why did the chicken cross the road?
A. Jack Bauer: Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I’ll find out.
The first time I heard the five questions I’m about to put forth as the five most important for services marketing, they annoyed me. Actually, the person who introduced them to me tended to annoy me in general. By proxy, I threw the important-question baby out with the annoying-lady bathwater. (I shouldn’t have done that, but I didn’t realize it at the time.)
The concept is the Five Whys. Popularized by Taiichi Ohno, the architect of the Toyota Production System, the Five Whys is a root-cause analysis technique, helping business leaders get past amelioration of the symptoms of a problem and instead address the underlying causes.
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