Why this, why that, why up, why down. This is a question I get from my Kids almost every day. It is frustrating how few whys will push me to the limits of my knowledge.
Why is postive, why is curiosity, why is why people act, why has purpose and question in 3 letters, why makes you think. I love why (even when frustrating)
I use it with my team to get to the bottom of things that went well or bad.
For example:
business
- Why is the customer unhappy? - because we did not deliver on time
- why did we not deliver on time? - because we were managing the crisis with customer 2
- why were we managing a crisis with customer 2? - because they ask for a service we were not ready to delivers
- why did they ask for that service? - because we sold it to close the identical
- why did we sold it? - because it was quarter end
Actions: make sure the service descriptions are accurate and do not share almost ready products to sales and be ready to fight for my team :)
technical
- Why did this service perform has fewer outages than usual? - because we created a updated runbook to manage it
- Why did you create an updated runbook for that service? - because the last outage forced any of us to stay overnight
- Why did a runbook changed not staying overnight? - because we have included preventive actions for most problem
- Why did you choose those preventive actions? - because during a team 2 minutes brainstorming session we’ve found the most important source of outage
- Why did you only apply this approach to one service? - now that we know it works we will implement this approach on all other Services
Me thinking: I need to get those guys out for a team dinner.
IMPORTANT
Be mindful to tell the people about the technique before asking 5 whys is a row and being seen as a pain!