How to Run a 5 Whys That Uncovers Factors Not Just a Single Cause

The 5 Whys is one of the most famous tools for root cause analysis. It is simple in concept. You take a problem and ask "why" five times. Each answer leads you deeper until you find the real issue.

In practice most teams do it poorly. They stop after two questions. They land on a single obvious explanation. They assign blame and move on.

When done correctly the 5 Whys is not about finding one cause. It is about revealing the many factors that allowed the failure to happen.

Why 5 Whys Fails in Most Postmortems

The way 5 Whys is often used in incident reviews has three common problems:

1. Stopping too early
   Teams often stop once they reach something that feels like a cause. This is usually just a symptom.
2. Narrow scope
   They ask why only about the technical issue. They forget about human processes, monitoring, and communication.
3. Blame seeking
   It turns into a way to identify who made a mistake instead of what conditions made that mistake possible.

A Better Way to Run 5 Whys

To get value from the 5 Whys you need to approach it like an exploration of contributing factors rather than a hunt for one root cause.

Step 1: Start with a clear statement of what happened

Keep it specific. For example
"The checkout service was unavailable for 45 minutes."

Step 2: Ask why across multiple dimensions

After each why, ask yourself if there are other contributing factors. Think in terms of:

• Detection: Why was it not caught earlier
• Diagnosis: Why was it hard to figure out what was happening
• Mitigation: Why was recovery slower than expected
• Prevention: Why was the system vulnerable in the first place

This naturally expands the scope from a single technical issue to the surrounding ecosystem.

Step 3: Go deep enough

Do not stop after one path. Draw a tree. For every answer ask again if there was another factor that played a role. Most incidents have multiple paths that converge on the same failure.

Step 4: Look for patterns not culprits

Instead of landing on "engineer misconfigured a deployment" keep digging. Was the deployment system unsafe by default? Was there no automated validation? Was the runbook incomplete? Did the review process skip critical checks because of time pressure? These patterns are where the learning lives.

What Happens When You Get It Right

A strong 5 Whys will leave you with:

• A map of multiple factors instead of one bullet point
• Clear areas where systemic changes will reduce future risk
• Less focus on individual mistakes and more focus on how the system can be made safer

This leads to stronger action items that are worth prioritizing.

Tools Can Help

Modern incidents involve Slack messages, Zoom calls, PagerDuty alerts, dashboards and tickets. It is difficult to manually gather all of that and reconstruct a timeline.

An intelligent tool like COEhub can gather the data and build the timeline for you. It then guides you through the right kind of 5 Whys so that you focus on the thinking, not the searching.

Closing Thought

The next time you hear someone say "what is the root cause" try changing the language. Say "what were the contributing factors and why did they line up that way."

If you stop looking for a single root cause and start digging into factors you will create a culture that actually learns from incidents rather than filing them away.

You can see how COEhub helps teams do exactly that at COEhub.