The company I work for has a postmortem process that asks for the 5 whys. I'm part of a group that "levels up" other team's postmortems and the 5 whys are always the most difficult.
5 Whys are used a lot of time to shift blame away from the team where the issue originated, or someone does the 5 whys dogmatically and ends in a non-actionable final why.
One of the things I teach is "5" is a suggestion, not a requirement. Trees are great. Each root node in the tree MUST be actionable. Asking people to do better next time isn't actionable. Blame isn't the goal of the document.
> 5 Whys are used a lot of time to shift blame away
> Blame isn't the goal of the document.
5 whys is a tool in root cause analysis. The point of 5 whys is to identify links where "failure would not have happened if" and not act on those.
Blame is a tool that helps dig deeper by aligning incentives. As a moderator you want to find those ifs and blame helps point the finger at perceived causes. The hard part is triage done on blame shifting to assess whether that is actually a cause or just an excuse.
5 Whys are used a lot of time to shift blame away from the team where the issue originated, or someone does the 5 whys dogmatically and ends in a non-actionable final why.
One of the things I teach is "5" is a suggestion, not a requirement. Trees are great. Each root node in the tree MUST be actionable. Asking people to do better next time isn't actionable. Blame isn't the goal of the document.