First principles - ask why five times
Summary
- Sakichi Toyoda, founder of Toyota, was known for obsessively eliminating erros by always asking the 'five whys'
Details
- If something broke, he would ask 'why did that loom break?' then the next why for the answer to that question and so on and so forth until the root of the problem was identified.
References
Quotes
One suggestion comes from the production lines of early-twentieth-century Japan. In the West, Sakichi Toyoda is best known for founding the company that bears his name: Toyota. But in Japan, he has an even loftier reputation: first as the man who revolutionised the country’s textiles industry in the late nineteenth century – and second as the father of the Japanese industrial revolution.
Above all, Toyoda is famous for his obsessive focus on eliminating errors in his factories, by ensuring everyone is focused on the things that matter. Toyoda always hated misused time and resources: he first made his name for designing a hand loom that stopped automatically when a thread broke, preventing it wasting any further cloth. This emphasis on eliminating waste led him to develop a now-famous method called the ‘five whys’. In its original form, the five whys offered a simple method to work out why something had gone wrong. Whenever there was a mistake on the production line, Toyota’s staff would ask ‘why’ five times. Say there was a piece of broken-down machinery. Why? The first answer would lead them to the immediate cause. ‘Because there’s a piece of cloth stuck in the loom.’ The next would dig a bit deeper. Why? ‘Because everyone was a bit tired and hadn’t been paying attention.’ By the fifth time, the employees would have reached the true source of the problem. ‘Because the culture is terrible at the moment due to our boss being a total nightmare.’