“Why does this always happen to me, and in the worst moments! Is it possible that the keys grow legs and hide when I need them! If I don’t leave in the next 10 minutes I’m going to be late!”, says Stacey with a frantic tone as she’s running around the house looking for her car keys. Immediately after, her husband Michael yells out, “I found them!”. “Thanks Honey, not sure what I would do without you.”. He responds, “Babe, I know you’re in a rush but if you can give me a few minutes I would like to quickly run something by you. You did mention you had 10 minutes?”. “OK, I hope this is something good.”, Stacey responds, disappointed that she once again gave in to his convincing look. Michael continues, “You mentioned you always have a hard time finding the keys and I agree as it happens to me too. At work they trained us on a simple tool to keep the same problems from happening and I think we can apply it here. Tell me, if you would have arrived late”. “I might still be late if I don’t leave soon”, Stacey interrupts him, reminding him of the situation. Michael responds, “Don’t worry I’ll get to the point soon. So tell me, if you would have arrived late what would have been your reason?”. “Well obviously it would have been because I couldn’t find my keys, or maybe because my husband held me hostage.”, she replies with a half smile. Michael responds, “But would it have really been because you lost your keys? The tool we learned about is called “5 Whys”, it helps you get to the real cause of the problem, also known as the root cause. This way you know what really needs to be addressed to keep the same problems from reoccurring. So to the first “Why”, why did you lose your keys?”. “Because I couldn’t remember where I had left them.”, Stacey replies. Michael continues, “Why couldn’t you remember where you left them?”. “Are we really going to go after solving my bad memory because we’ll need a lot more than 10 minutes to solve that.”, Stacey replies. “No, of course not, although it would be nice to finally find the tv remote.”, Michael responds jokingly, “My thought is that you don’t remember where you placed them because you always place them in a random spot, I do too. So why do you place them in a random spot?”. “Because we don’t have a designated place for them.”, Stacey responds realizing where Michael is headed. “Why don’t we have a designated spot for the keys?”, he asks. Stacey quickly replies, “Because we couldn’t agree where to place the darn key holder when we bought it and never came back to it.”. “There you go, that’s our solution, put up a key holder and make sure we always set our keys there so we don’t forget where we placed them. So we have a couple of minutes left, lets get the key holder, agree on where to place it, and I’ll have it up by the time you get back.”, Michael replies as he gets up from the couch. “OK, but there’s one problem, I don’t remember where I stored the key holder.”, Stacey responds. They both can’t help but break out into laughter. Stacey then says, “Lets agree on the spot for it then I’ll pick one up on the way back from work and we can mount it as soon as I arrive. Thanks for this Honey, we’re just starting the day and already I feel we accomplished something.”.

Root cause is the fundamental reason for the occurrence of a problem as defined by the Collins English dictionary. It’s the “real” cause of the problem. Finding the root cause allows us to solve the issue that will prevent the problem from reoccurring. This is why this practice is very commonly used in the workplace. Because of how valuable it is to find the root cause, there are many tools out there for this purpose, just google “root cause analysis tools”. In the story, Michael used a tool called “5 Whys”. This is one of my favorite tools because it’s easy to understand and you can go through it rather quickly. You might not be able to use it in all cases, but you can use it in most and it’s worth attempting to use it in all cases. In this tool you simply keep asking “Why” until you find the root cause. It’s called “5 Whys” because in most cases this is how many times you have to ask it, but it could be over or under this number. So the next time one of your kids or some else’s keeps asking you “Why?”, don’t get frustrated by it, they might just be trying to get to the root cause 🙂.

It’s also worth noting a couple of other things from the story. One is using the things we learn from work at home. So whenever you learn something new, you should always ask yourself if it’s something that can be applied at home. The second thing is the value there is taking the time to think things through. We often find ourselves in a rush that we don’t take the time to do this when taking a few minutes could save us hours later.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” – Albert Einstein