Why Five?

This was originally posted on thescri.be on 7 April 2007 and was imported here from the Internet Archive on 18 December 2025. Here's a good piece of advice from the National Health Service and unusually it isn't about Health. NHS The Improvement Network - Five Whys They recommend asking why five times in order to drill down to the core of a problem. It does leave me wondering what happens if you need to ask more than five whys to get to the root, but I suppose you have to draw a line somewhere. I think this ties in well with my last post as far as the way in which you should break down problems is concerned. Many people see a problem and then produce a solution to it, without giving a thought to the underlying cause of that problem. By asking why a few times the problem, and others like it, can be solved for good.