Extend the Five- Whys to Eight- Whys! Why?

Ali Anani

Before A previous publication of mine on “

Consultative Selling and Customers’ Needs Identification” triggered quite some interest. A subsequent presentation on “Emotions in Action” gave further support to the first presentation. Out of no where a question jumped into my head.

The Origin of the Question The five basic needs of humans as proposed

by Maslow were extended to eight needs. This was done to accommodate the eight- wave structure of stock prices. Human actions, as Anani envisaged in the consultative selling presentation, composed of five waves followed by three corrective actions of refining human needs.

The Probing Question Why not then extend the five- why questions

to an eight- structured why questions? This will allow greater consistency of standardizing human behavior (if it is!)

Five questions and not eight?

The Probing Question- 2 Is there any problem with asking only five

questions?

Five questions Problems

Before Answering a quick Reminder of the Five- Whys Technique The Five –Whys technique is used to ensure

that you are analyzing a root cause problem and not only a symptom of a greater issue. By repeating “why” five times, the nature of the problem and its solution becomes clear.

We want to reach the core of the problem and not its covering layers

Problems with the Five- Whys Technique First, using 5 Whys doesn’t always lead to root

cause identification when the cause is unknown

The success of 5 Whys is to some degree contingent upon the skill with which the method is applied

The method isn’t necessarily repeatable For an excellent reference see Stewart

Anderson on the “Root Cause Analysis: Addressing Some Limitations of the 5 Whys”

But There is another Factor Missing?

Let us Get a Clue

Why did the student retreat? Because he joined careless students

Why did he join them? Because there is no body to monitor his change of friends

Why there is no body to do that? Because his parents are out all day

Why are they out all day? Because they have a busy social life

Why do they have a busy life? Because they feel they are socially eliteThe core problem here is

with the parents

Let us Get a Clue- 2

Why did the student retreat? Because he goes late to bed

Why does he go late to bed? Because he goes repeatedly to the toilet

Why does he go often to the toilet?

Because he might have health problems

Why no body knows about his health problems?

Because no one has checked on him

Why no body has checked on him?

Because his parents are socializing all the time

The core problem here is with the parents

What is Missing The five whys uses a logical approach. The

answers given are logical. But what about emotional intelligence that moves work, relations and contributes up to 67% of our success

The Emotional Intelligence (EI)Quadrant

Low EI competency

High EI competency

Low quality solution

High quality solution

Good for solving pure technical problems

Expected outcome

Why? This is the goal

Let me introduce this new quadrant

The EI Quadrant- 2 The inspection of the

why section of the quadrant shows a case in which we have low quality solution even though we have high EI

Have we over-emphasized the role of EI in this case?

The EI Quadrant- 3 The yellow quadrant

is the quadrant that combines high EI with high quality solutions

In these cases we need to involve emotions intelligently to arrive at such good solutions. This is only possible if the why questions we ask covers the EI territory.

The Conclusion We may need to expand the five- Whys to

Eight- Whys to correct for missing the emotional factors.

This is analogous to extending the five basic human needs into eight, as I proposed before.