Have got a bunch of young engineers around who may need a brief on correctly applying 5-Why to reach the root cause during an incident investigation.
Please share if there is some ready material available in few slides to explain this all.
5-Why Technique (Root Cause Identification)
Re: 5-Why Technique (Root Cause Identification)
Check out the attachment though it is not specifically addressing Why-Why but providing some key aspects to RCA analysis. Knowing about the root cause.
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Re: 5-Why Technique (Root Cause Identification)
Short and very clear explanation to the real essence of RCA.
ivani1 wrote: 10 Jun 2025, 09:28 Check out the attachment though it is not specifically addressing Why-Why but providing some key aspects to RCA analysis. Knowing about the root cause.
Re: 5-Why Technique (Root Cause Identification)
As part of an incident investigation team, recently applied why why technique and what I understood while applying this was to make sure you just do not count the number of whys, infact, keep going or stop when you reach to a cause which addresses the systemic issues.
That can even happen in 2 whys sometimes and there can be cases where the failure keeps on taking you to 7 whys to establish the root cause.
The other thing which was important for us to make sure that why-why should get applied not only to the process of why a thing failed however there can be two, three or even more processes to apply this technique on.
Example, analyzing the failure of a control valve can have one straight path of following its failure using why-why to arrive at the root cause.
Another path is to analyze why failure occur as a corrective maintenance. Apply why-why here as well.
Yet another path can be to apply current maintenance philosophy on general population of control valves and their failures at site. This will provide global causes of failures and make the investigation process worth doing, and very practical when generating recommendations.
That can even happen in 2 whys sometimes and there can be cases where the failure keeps on taking you to 7 whys to establish the root cause.
The other thing which was important for us to make sure that why-why should get applied not only to the process of why a thing failed however there can be two, three or even more processes to apply this technique on.
Example, analyzing the failure of a control valve can have one straight path of following its failure using why-why to arrive at the root cause.
Another path is to analyze why failure occur as a corrective maintenance. Apply why-why here as well.
Yet another path can be to apply current maintenance philosophy on general population of control valves and their failures at site. This will provide global causes of failures and make the investigation process worth doing, and very practical when generating recommendations.