GA 239 | How to Determine Root Causes with Ron Pereira

Hey, everyone, this is Ron. And today I'm going to be doing a solo show. I've got a few things I definitely been wanting to talk about, and I thought, you know what, I'm just going to dedicate an entire episode to getting this information out to you. So in particular, I want to give you a quick Gemba Academy Update. I know we have a lot of Gemba Academy subscribers who listen to the show, so it won't be long, but I want to give a short update on what we got going on there. I want to talk about a book that I'm actually listening to through audible right now, which I think is going to be very, very applicable to folks within the continuous improvement world. I want to talk a little bit about the Katakan Summit, which is going to be coming up in early 2019. And then kind of the thrust or the main point of the. Of today's episode is going to be digging into the whole five why concept, root cause analysis, methodology of asking why, you know, not just five times, but a number of times. And in particular, I want to kind of talk about a pretty fake famous 5y example that's used in a lot of Lean training programs, namely the Lincoln Memorial and Jefferson Memorial. If you've been to some Lean training or some Six Sigma training, you may have heard this example I had. But unfortunately, many of us haven't got the full story or really maybe even the most important aspect of this 5 why example. And so I want to kind of uncover that and unpack that a little bit towards the end of the show. So first, Gemba Academy Update, you're listening to this on a Thursday. If you're listening to this on a day it's released, and AME literally just wrapped up out in San Diego. And if we met you and saw you, thank you for coming. If you didn't make it this year, no worries. Next year, next, I think it's going to be in Chicago. I'm actually obviously recording this before we even head off to San Diego, but I think it's going to be in Chicago this next, this next year. So definitely check that out. And if you've never been to an AME conference, you really need to. You really need to check one out. So what we will have done by the time you're listening to this, and what we're still planning to do is we're going to be recording Mike Rother doing the kata in a classroom workshop. Now, this is a. It's a really fun workshop. I actually recently did it with some Some kids. So it's really designed for kids or adults to do, and it's just a way to practice the improvement kata and the coaching kata. And so what we're going to do with this footage that we've captured is basically turn it into videos that anyone will be able to use to run their own. Caught it in a classroom workshop. And you'll have the man himself, Mike Rother up there kind of walking you through it as if, as if you're there in the room with him. So we're pretty excited about that. A few weeks ago we were in Northern Ireland at Seating Matters and we captured a Gemba Academy live episode with Ryan and the team over there in Limavady, Northern Ireland. So we've, we've begun to, to edit that and we hope to have that done here in the next month or two. Now we've also unveiled at AME some pretty cool technology that we're playing around with, which is 360 video. So you're really going to be able to put on some virtual reality type glasses or you can even use your iPhone and some, some cheap glasses if you don't want to spend a lot of money. And it's incredible. You're like literally standing inside these people's factory. So we've got Paul Akers at FastCap, did some experimentation with us and, and shot their morning meeting in 360. So we have all this footage and we're going to be slowly releasing this onto our website. It's going to be a bit of a technology learning for most folks because it's going to, you know, you can just watch 360 video on your computer or even on an iPad or something like that. But, but to get the full experience, you really need to strap it on your head with these glasses. And when you do, goodness gracious, it's like you're there. So we're really excited for that Seating Matters Gembacademy Live. Cause we shot quite a bit of 360 footage there. Now in December, we are going to be out back in California. As it turns out, we're gonna be doing a Gemba walk workshop and Michael Bremmer is actually going to be running that and we're gonna record it. And so if you've ever wanted to get better at doing a Gemb walk, you're going to get to hear Michael Bremmer run a workshop. But then most importantly, you're going to see Michael do live coaching. And this is real, it's not staged. Michael is going to be coaching up the leadership of this particular company on how to do better Gemba Walk. So we're really excited about that. And then lastly, our Spanish language team, Ana Cruz Carlos, they're so busy constantly creating new content all in Spanish. So if you do have, do you speak Spanish or you have employees who speak Spanish, definitely check out our Spanish speaking content over@gemba academy.com just go under the products tab and you'll see Escuela Lean. It's they've done a fantastic job. So that's an update on Gemba Academy. I want to quickly plug a book that I'm, I'm actually listening to right now on audio form through Audible and the book is called Atomic Habits by a gentleman named James Clear. I've been following James for, you know, a little while. He has a blog and he does a really nice job on his blog. And he's not really into, you know, the continuous improvement world, although he does talk a lot about many of the same things. If you've read the Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, this is maybe a follow up to that book and it kind of builds on some of the things that Power of Habit introduced to the world. And, and it's a really good book. You know, I'm not done with it yet, but I highly recommend checking it out. In fact, you can, if you're not an Audible customer, you can get a, you can get a free, a free book. We've got a link on the Show Notes page here, so just go to gembapodcast.com this will be episode 239 and Jessica can put a link to Audible. But definitely recommend checking out this book Atomic Habits. Now as I just mentioned, we just finished up ame, but the next conference that we, that we're really looking forward to is going to be in February. It's with the folks over at Lean Frontiers, it's Dakota Con Summit. Now this, this particular summit is going to be pretty incredible. It's February 18th to the 19th. It's going to be in Savannah, Georgia. And so in addition to all this amazing Toyota Kata stuff with TWI also happening later in the week, that we're going to be celebrating five years of Katacon. So that's pretty cool. But Jeffrey Leiker and Mike Rother are both going to be there. And as it turns out, this is going to be the 10 year anniversary of the book Toyota Kata. It's going to be the 15 year anniversary of Jeff Leiker's Toyota Way. And it's going to be the 20 year anniversary of Mike Rother's Learning to See. Now all three of these books have greatly impacted me and I'm guessing many of you have also been touched or benefited from, from these books and, and just the work that, that Mike and, and, and Jeff Leiker have done over the years. So if you want to meet them face to face and you want to kind of, kind of celebrate this, these, these anniversaries or these milestones, definitely come now we can uh, we've partnered with uh, Lean Frontiers and uh, we're able to get you a 10% coupon. So if you go to katasummit.com the coupon code is LF for like Lean Frontiers LF10. And yeah, that'll get you 10%. So definitely encourage you to go that we're going to be there, we're going to be recording a bunch of stuff and, and doing all kinds of fun stuff as well. All right, now what I want to really spend the rest of this episode on is the topic of Five why now? We actually did a pretty in depth episode with my business partner and, and great friend and men, John Miller back in episode 182. 182. And we'll definitely link to that episode in the show notes is if you have not listened to that episode, I really, really encourage you to do that because John actually really kind of dives in pretty deep on this whole five why? Because it is much more than just standing there and asking why a few times. Okay. There's a lot to it and so John really unpacks it. But in case you're not familiar with what 5 why is, what I want to do is play just a bit of a clip from that particular episode, episode 182 where John Kind of just in just a few minutes explains what the five why are. So here's that clip.

Five why is just the process of asking why repeatedly and not even asking why, but just investigating and pursuing the causes until you can get to a source level or root level. Cause that you can take action and do something about the number five is not really significant. Unfortunately. It's a popular and convenient handle that people like and that can be misleading sometimes. But yeah, as I would say, first of all, one thing I could change about Five why. It's the name like with many things in Lean, people get kind of stuck on the Five and you have to explain what's not really five. Well then why is it called why Five why? Right, and that's an interesting story in itself. Taji Onoff who was a. A man who helped develop Lean in Toyota production system at Toyota. There he was asked by probably a young engineer wanting to sound smart on the shop floor. Mr. Ono shouldn't be using the 5W 1H approach here for this problem. 5W 1H being the who, what, where, when, why, and the 1H being how. So this young person probably had read that in a textbook someplace and wanted to show Mr. Ono, hey, I've got a tool for you. And Mr. Owner said, oh, you don't need all that. Just keep asking why. So that became, you know, that. That legend became. He wanted it to be five whys and no, nothing else. You know, don't complicate it. Just. He just only asked why. And so I don't know the truth of that story and I'm sure details have changed over the years. But I think the interesting thing is in, in Japanese, when you, when people talk in companies, they talk about the root cause analysis or the five why or asking why, it's almost never five times why. They might refer to that because it's been in books in the west or some people there have caught on to it a little bit. But it's always why, why. It's twice and it isn't about. It isn't twice. It's just why, why. And it's kind of like when you say in English, drip, drip. A faucet goes drip, drip. It doesn't mean that it's drip twice. It just means that it's continuing and repeating and it's persistent. Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. But you don't say drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. You know, seven, eight times. You say it twice. And in a lot of languages, that's true. In Japanese, that's true. Where you repeat a couple of syllables a word. Why?

Why?

In Japanese, it's naze. So you say nase naze. And people know that that means not twice, but repeatedly. Yy but, you know, it's lost in translation. And instead of five why. Well, that why, why doesn't sound very good. We have 5s. We have all these other numbered things 7 ways can we get. You know, so I think that's probably where it came from. Is that somebody, somebody that packaged it to become five. Why? Because it's not five. It's. It's as many as you need to arrive at the source. So it's really quite misleading in that sense.

Okay, again, so if you want to listen to that full episode, which I definitely encourage you to do, that's going to be episode 182, but we'll link to it in the show notes. So this GembaPodcast.com and this will be episode 239. So many numbers. So many numbers. All right, but that's what 5 why is at a high level. Now what I want to do is share kind of a classic example that we often hear in lean training classes to demonstrate the power of five why? And the story goes something like this. In 1989, the United States National Park Service asked a team of consultants to come and study a big problem they were having in Washington D.C. in particular, they were having a problem at the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial. And the problem was that the. The stone monuments were falling apart. They were deteriorating. So what happened was the scientists kind of came in and consultants came in and. And really they kind of started practicing the concept of five why? And so they began by asking, why are the stone monuments deteriorating? So to figure that out, they kind of had to do some research and study and look, look around. And what they found out was the monuments were being pressure washed every two weeks, and the water was causing the marble to expand, become brittle, crack. And I believe in at least one occasion, part of it broke off and fell. I think it broke off like late in the evening. So no one was there or injured or anything like that. But yeah, so they were having a pretty big problem. So then they asked kind of the second why, why do the monuments need to be washed so often? And after investigating, they learned that the causes were kind of a combination of bird droppings and, and dead insect. And they were these. I think it's midges, I think. I think is how you say it is. You know, they were laying these eggs all over the place, and they're black and kind of stuck to the, to the monuments. And so they had to clean all that junk off at that point, technically, they could have just said, well, we figured it out. Let's put up some repellent and drive these birds and insects away, and that'll be at. But they didn't. They were good scientists and they kind of kept digging in. And they asked another. Why? Why are there so many birds? Well, they found that the birds. Because the birds were obviously, you know, going to the bathroom all over the place. So they found that the birds were attracted to the spiders and the insects. The birds ate the insects or ate the spiders. So then they asked why again. So why are there so many insects and spiders? Well, the spiders were there to eat the insects and the insects as it turned out, were attracted to the lights that illuminated the memorials at night, in particular right at sunset. That was kind of the peak time when when these, these midges and these bugs and spiders and everything just kind of swarm the, the memorial right at sunset. So at this point the scientists kind of thought maybe we've kind of gotten down more to a root cause, namely these lights that are attracting the, the bugs, the insects. So they attempted at that point, they're a countermeasure. And what they did with the National Park Service delayed turning on the lights by one hour to see if it would help. In particular, it's right at that kind of that sunset period of the day. And so they delayed it by an hour. Well, guess what? It worked. In fact, it worked extremely well. There was an 85% reduction in bug infestation. I don't know exactly how they measured that, but that was what the research papers are saying, 85% reduction. So a big, big, big reduction. So you think, wow, we've done it, you know, and now if you've been again to lean training or you've heard this on some other videos out there, that's where the story ends. And everybody high fives and says, yeah, five. Why is awesome. We did it. Woo hoo. And we go to break and have brownies right in a training class. Well, unfortunately, the story didn't end there. And maybe this is why it gets left out because it's kind of a, oh, it's a little bit of a buzzkill what I'm about to tell you. So what, what really happened was when the National Park Service turned the lights off or delayed the lights by an hour, the, the tourists and photographers and people who traveled from all over the world, you know, came to see the Jefferson Memorial and just to see the beauty of them. And they always want to see it kind of at night when it's all lit up. Well, when they delayed lighting it up by an hour, people lost their minds. They're like, where's the lights? We can't take our pictures during this crucial sunset period. And they really complained and complained and complained and well, guess what? They end up, they went back and turned the lights back on and at that point, the story as we as we know it right now has kind of gone cold. And they continue to study the problem and they continue to try to counter the bug problem. But to be honest, I don't know the current day situation. Now what I have done personally from my own investigation is I've actually reached out to the National Park Service. I talked to a few folks this past week even, and they wouldn't say so much on the phone. And, and so I emailed them and I'm hoping, hopefully they'll reply to me. And, and, you know, I'm just curious on if they, maybe they found another countermeasure. But I guess the reason that I want to share this is that first of all, you know, from a lean perspective, 5Y, or, you know, as John said, it's always not exactly five whys. In fact, I don't even know how many Y's I said there. But digging in and really trying to get to the root cause done correctly is extremely effective. And you could say that it was very effective. Even in this example, they did get to a root cause that did radically improve the situation. But here's the tricky part about continuous improvement. You know, we often have many different types of customers. Now, in this case, you could argue there's really kind of two primary customers at play. You could argue customer number one is sort of an internal customer, like the National Park Service, the, the government, if you will, who's spending all this money having to clean the memorial and, and, you know, keep it safe even. Right. And so, so that's one customer, and then the second customer is obviously, you know, the tourist and you know, the people who come from all over the world to see, you know, how beautiful these monuments are and that sort of thing. And so, you know, the countermeasure that, that they came up with helped customer number one, namely the National Park Service. But it was to the detriment of customer number two. And so that's why continuous improvement, my friends, is very hard because we often have customer needs, internal customer, external customer, and sometimes they contrast and you have to make a business decision on who you're going to satisfy. Now, again, hopefully they can come up, or maybe they already have come up with a fantastic countermeasure to the bug problem. So if you're listening to this and you know the answer, please hit me up rongembaacademy.com shoot me an email, give me a call, because I really am curious and we can do an update on a future podcast or something if anybody knows. So if you're in a Washington, D.C. area, maybe just drive on over there and let me know. When do they turn the lights on? That'd be helpful to know. But yeah, you know, this five why is really, really fun and really fascinating. We do cover it in pretty great detail in our practical problem solving course. So if you are Interested in learning more about root caus analysis? Definitely check that course out. And then as I mentioned, go back and listen to episode 182 with John where we, we dove much deeper into the whole five why concept. Anyhow, that's what I've got for today. I really do appreciate you all listening. You know, the show is, it's growing year over year. In fact, you know, one update on the podcast, it was, oh, it was about a month ago, we saw this like incredible peak in downloads. In fact, we had like a hundred. We doubled, doubled our normal downloads. We do pretty good on a normal basis, but it doubled and it held there for a while and we still don't know the cause of that, you know, and you know, continuous improvement. When you have a signal or a special cause, you know, in your control chart, you want to know what happened. We still can't figure it out. We think we may have been maybe featured in itunes or something like that. But yeah, that was, that was pretty fun and that was pretty, pretty interesting to see. But yeah, if you do listen to us and you enjoy the show, if you want to pop over to itunes and give us a five star rating, that sure would help us because apparently the algorithms over an apple, you know, when folks leave good reviews, it does help the show. So the more folks that we can get listening and learning about Lean, the better. Obviously this show is completely free of charge and we just want to get the word out as best we can. So anyhow, thanks again for listening. Show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com this will be episode two, three, nine. So check out Atomic Habits. Go to katasummit.com use LF10 lean front like Lean Frontiers 10 LF10 for 10% off. And, and yeah, go listen to John's podcast so I'll be quiet so you can go listen to John now talk about five why. Take care. Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. Now we invite you to take a no strings attached, fully functional Test drive of Gemba Academy.com gain immediate access to more than a thousand Lean and Six Sigma learning resources, all free of charge at GembaAcademy.com.