Have you used the Five Hows?

The August 2024 edition of Quality Progress contains a brief article about the Five Hows, and I'd love to know if you have used them yet. Leave me a note to tell me your story!

Most of us have already heard about the Five Whys: it's the simplest tool for root-cause analysis. I describe it in multiple earlier posts: for example, I explain how the concept works in this post here. And recently I applied it (purely as a demonstration) to a current question in American public policy in this analysis here. (I discuss it in other places too, including here and here.) 

In principle the Five Hows are exactly the same thing, except that instead of asking "Why did that happen?" you ask "How will we do this?" So they look forward rather than backward. They are for planning rather than diagnosis.

So far, so good. But the documentation I have found up till now has been awfully thin on examples. The article in Quality Progress is only one page long and it's written entirely at the level of theory. I have found a few other articles, but the information they provide about how to use Five Hows are not consistent with each other.

For example, this article that Dennis Henry posted in LinkedIn (from November 2023) treats the Five Hows strictly as a supplement to Five Whys: the idea is still to find the root causes of a problem, but Henry says that by asking "How ... How ... How ...," we can uncover detailed technical root causes instead of managerial ones.

This article from Quality One (undated, no author listed) still restricts the Five Hows to problem-solving, but applies them to brainstorming corrective actions. In other words, once you have found the root cause of a problem, you next ask "How ... How ... How ..." in order to fix it.  

Back in my first article on Five Whys, I worked an example that started with "My car won't start," and the root cause turned out to be "I didn't maintain the car according to the schedule in the manual." (This was a fictional example.) So in that case, the Quality One article would propose that I next ask, "How can I make sure to maintain my car according to the schedule in the manual?" The answer would probably involve adding reminders to my calendar, or something similar.    

Then there's this article in Medium, that George Spasov wrote back in February 2017. Spasov tells us that he actually invented the Five Hows method independently. And he also gives one detailed example of how to use it outside of traditional problem-solving.

His remarks on inventing the method are as follows:

This technique was developed by… well … me.

I was trying to figure out a way to achieve a very specific goal for my work. By being a heavy user of the 5 Whys I knew that there must be a way to reverse the process. To be honest, I don’t know whether somebody else had drawn the same conclusion as me. If you know a similar concept and the person behind it, I would love to hear about it and collaborate on the matter.

His example goes like this:

• How can I improve my brand positioning? By getting more quality exposure to my target audience.
• How can I get more quality exposure to my target audience? By communicating the right messages to the right people.
• How can I communicate the right messages to the right people? By first understanding what these messages are and who is my target audience.
• How can I understand what these messages are and who is my target audience? By first making an analysis of my existing clients and their interests.
• How can I make an analysis of my existing clients and their interests? By making a drill-down of this data from the analytics.

Someone might say that "improving your brand positioning" is a kind of "problem" that Spasov is solving with this analysis, but it's certainly not traditional problem-solving! This is somehow more like corporate strategy than it is like traditional corrective action, and I'm excited to think that Quality tools can be as useful in the boardroom as they are in the laboratory or on the production floor.

I only wish I had found more examples of this kind of usage.

So tell me your stories! Have you started using Five Hows? And if so, what kinds of problems have you used them to solve? Do you find them most useful to supplement traditional root-cause analysis? Or have you been able to deploy them—as Spasov did—to build corporate strategy as well?

Drop me a note. I'd love to hear from you!