Kaizen Rules – 7 & 8
by Ron Pereira on July 25th, 2007
Want to win $50? Read this entire article to find out how.
We have officially rounded the corner on our kaizen rules series. If you are just joining us you can catch up by checking these posts out:
Rule 7: Wisdom is brought out when faced with hardship.
I cannot explain this rule any better than Matthew May, author of the excellent Elegant Solutions blog, recently did here. But be sure to come back if you want a chance to win $50!
Rule 8: Ask “Why?” five times and seek the root cause.
I am a master black belt and enjoy solving complicated problems using ultra sophisticated tools. It’s fun and exhilarating when you build a predictive regression model that confirms again and again.
But guess what? Most problems don’t require things like regression to be solved. Instead, all we must do is ask why 5 times.
It almost sounds too good to be true and I could offer some examples here starting with something like “why are you pouring saw dust on the floor” which would lead you to tell me about the leaking oil, which would result in several more “why” questions until we identified the root cause. Yeah, I could do that and sort of did.
But rather than offering you a cookie cutter 5 why’s example I will instead ask you to practice the 5 why’s the next time you encounter a problem – any problem.
When you identify the root cause shoot me an email explaining the problem and your 5 why’s analysis.
This contests starts today and will run for 7 days. Once I receive all the submissions I will check them out and name the winner who will receive 50 American smackeroo’s (otherwise known as dollars).
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