Share this item with your network: Five Whys, sometimes written as “5 Whys,” is a guided team exercise for identifying the root cause of a problem. Five Whys is used in the “analyze” phase of the Six Sigma DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) methodology.
The 5 Whys analysis was developed by Taiichi Ohno, the pioneer of the Toyota Production System in the 1950s. He details his method of problem solving in his book, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production. The technique Ohno developed was so effective that Toyota uses it to this day.
The 5-Why is a great technique – fast, efficient, easy to understand – but it takes some thorough thought to keep it from going on weird tangents, and teaching this type of thinking is the challenging part of problem solving. This is very useful when teaching laboratory management for future Medical Laboratory Scientists.Thank You!
5 Why Diagram