5 Whys - Criticism

Criticism

While the 5 Whys is a powerful tool for engineers or technically-savvy individuals to help get to the true causes of problems, it has been criticized by Teruyuki Minoura, former managing director of global purchasing for Toyota, as being too basic a tool to analyze root causes to the depth that is needed to ensure that they are fixed. Reasons for this criticism include:

  • Tendency for investigators to stop at symptoms rather than going on to lower-level root causes.
  • Inability to go beyond the investigator's current knowledge - cannot find causes that they do not already know.
  • Lack of support to help the investigator ask the right "why" questions.
  • Results are not repeatable - different people using 5 Whys come up with different causes for the same problem.
  • Tendency to isolate a single root cause, whereas each question could elicit many different root causes.

These can be significant problems when the method is applied through deduction only. On-the-spot verification of the answer to the current "why" question before proceeding to the next is recommended to avoid these issues.

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