Eric Ries

To accelerate, Lean Startups need a process that provides a natural feedback loop. When you’re going too fast, you cause more problems. Adaptive processes force you to slow down and invest in preventing the kinds of problems that are currently wasting time. As those preventive efforts pay off, you naturally speed up again.

The alternative is to use a system called the Five Whys to make incremental investments and evolve a startup’s processes gradually. The core idea of Five Whys is to tie investments directly to the prevention of the most problematic symptoms

Repeating “why” five times, like this, can help uncover the root problem and correct it.

Over time, those changes compounded, freeing up time and energy that previously had been lost to firefighting and crisis management.

With startups in particular, there is a danger that teams will work too fast, trading quality for time in a way that causes sloppy mistakes. Five Whys prevents that, allowing teams to find their optimal pace.

The Five Whys ties the rate of progress to learning, not just execution

Five Whys is a powerful organizational technique. Some of the engineers I have trained to use it believe that you can derive all the other Lean Startup techniques from the Five Whys. Coupled with working in small batches, it provides the foundation a company needs to respond quickly to problems as they appear, without overinvesting or overengineering

I recommend several tactics for escaping the Five Blames. The first is to make sure that everyone affected by the problem is in the room during the analysis of the root cause. The meeting should include anyone who discovered or diagnosed the problem, including customer service representatives who fielded the calls, if possible. It should include anyone who tried to fix the symptom as well as anyone who worked on the subsystems or features involved. If the problem was escalated to senior management, the decision makers who were involved in the escalation should be present as well.

For the Five Whys to work properly, there are rules that must be followed. For example, the Five Whys requires an environment of mutual trust and empowerment.

I ask teams to adopt these simple rules:
1. Be tolerant of all mistakes the first time.
2. Never allow the same mistake to be made twice.