How to solve any problem by asking why 5 times

The 5 Whys is a technique created by Taiichi Ohno, when he worked at Toyota in the 1950s. Ohno said that “by repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear.”(1)

Here’s an example of the 5 Whys in action.

1. Why did the campaign landing page go down? Because it was over loaded with traffic.
2. Why was it over loaded with traffic? Because we sent out 50,000 concurrent EDMs at 10am.
3. Why did we send out 50,000 concurrent EDMs? Because we didn’t know it would be a problem.
4. Why didn’t we know it would be a problem? Because we’ve never been told that 50,000 EDMs could take down a landing page.
5. Why weren’t we told that? Because we’ve been too busy to have any formal team training in high volume EDM sends.

From this series of questions we have learnt that:

• In future we can reduce the load on the landing page by sending emails in batches e.g. 10,000 at a time
• In future if there’s a chance that a large number of concurrent users will visit a landing page, we’ll let IT know so they can have additional hosting resources available
• We need to learn techniques on how to send high volume EDMs