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.
Read more about this topic: 5 Whys
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“As far as criticism is concerned, we don’t resent that unless it is absolutely biased, as it is in most cases.”
—John Vorster (1915–1983)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)