> Your "Whys" quickly end with "because so-and-so said so", and will change tomorrow. The "5 whys" always seemed to stop just short of formally identifying the

> Your "Whys" quickly end with "because so-and-so said so", and will change tomorrow. The "5 whys" always seemed to stop just short of formally identifying the root cause of conflicting management techniques, inexperienced decision makers, poor planning and people not understanding the technology they were making decisions and deadlines around. I saw this first hand a couple years back, except... we always seemed to stop one step short of the "so and so said so" because... "we don't want to blame people". So often it would stop at me, instead of going one more level up beyond me to the people who gave me impossible/contradictory things to do. So, to get past the "no blame" thing, I got "we're not 'blaming' you, but perhaps you need more training on X" and that sort of thing. I've been doing this professionally longer than most of the rest of the team have been adults (or in some cases, alive)... no, I don't need more training on X. The system didn't fail because I hit a problem with X. The system failed because 3 people set too many deadlines concurrently, and when it was pointed out to everyone (individually, then in a group setting), no one would budge and I get told "just make it happen". Laws of physics, etc. But... let's make sure we don't "blame" people! Just... it's OK if we blame you, we just won't call it 'blame'. We're just "identifying".