Wonder Why

How a technique developed by Toyota for better manufacturing might help you uncover the root causes of your problems

Problems are like onions and ogres – they have layers.

When diagnosing a problem, it’s easy to get stuck at surface level explanations. Most problems are complex and multi-layered, so we need to iteratively diagnose them to understand their root cause. By forcing ourselves to continue to dig deeper, we are more likely to cure the problem instead of just treating its symptoms. This is particularly important because if we treat the wrong thing, we may ultimately end up making things worse.

One technique to help dig down to root causes is an activity called “5 Whys.” This method was originally developed by Sakichi Toyoda, the father of the man who would go on to found Japan’s largest automaker, Toyota.

The 5 Whys method works as follows: first state the problem and then ask “why”. Take your answer to this question, and again ask why. Repeat this process five times, digging deeper each time by examining the reasons behind each intermediate answer. (If you need a primer on how it works, I encourage you to find your nearest toddler. I am suspicious that the word “why” is second in frequency only to the word “no” in their vocabulary.)

For example, consider the problem statement “I am consistently arriving late for work.” This might generate the following list of responses.

Why am I consistently arriving late for work?

You: Because my commute took longer than I anticipated.

Nearby Toddler: Why?

You: Because I haven’t adjusted for the return of pre-pandemic traffic levels

Nearby Toddler: Why?

You: Because I still haven’t returned back to the steady work habits I had established before the pandemic

Nearby Toddler: Why?

You: Because I haven’t taken the time to rethink my routines in light of the return to more normalcy in post-pandemic life

Nearby Toddler: Why?

You: Because I’m burned out from the cumulative toll of the past two years.

This is just a toy example, but you get the picture. Even if your problem is the same, your answers to the whys might take a totally different path than I shared above. Persistently pushing deeper helps us see beyond the surface level reasons that may be true, but are not the root cause. In this example, if we simply chalk up the late arrivals to traffic, we might try to solve this by setting aside more time for our daily commute, but miss the deeper fact that the past two years have had significant impacts on the structure of our work lives and left many of us needing rest.

I think the 5 Whys activity should be a part of our toolkits, especially when we try to diagnose the complicated problems that life throws at us. And I think that practices like this which help us to reframe and see more deeply are even more important today when our time, attention, and patterns of thought can be so strongly influenced by the content that is algorithmically curated for us with the explicit purpose of maximizing engagement.

In future essays I hope to continue to follow this line of thought and push us to use methods like the 5 Whys to help gain perspective on the root causes of our feelings of discontentment, offering thoughts on how we might replace the areas of shallowness and dissatisfaction in our lives with greater meaning, depth, and significance.

Thanks for continuing to read my musings and as always, I would love to hear from you if any of these ideas are helpful in your pursuit of the deep life. If you are getting this in your email inbox you can simply hit reply. If you’re viewing it on the web, you can email me at joshbrake@substack.com. Hope to hear from you!

Book Nook

I just recently finished Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Underground Railroad. In it, he chronicles the story of a fictionalized enslaved woman Cora as she strives for her freedom. The main story-telling device that Whitehead uses is imagining the underground railroad as a physical set of trains and rails that travel underground with secret stations located around the country.

So What?

What resonated most about this book was the way that the story gave me a visceral sense of what it must have felt like (at least in part) to live a day in Cora’s shoes. This is the power of books – with all the current conversation in tech circles about “the metaverse” and the immersive story-telling capabilities unlocked by virtual reality, books are old-school virtual reality, giving us the freedom to imagine and build our own worlds as we immerse ourselves in the story. As we intertwine our own experiences with those of the characters in the story, we come out on the other side having a deeper sense of empathy for others and new ways of seeing the world around us.

The Professor Is In

I think one of the most significant differences between experts and novices is natural intuition for a topic. Someone who has worked in a particular field for a long time often has an almost magical way of predicting how things will work even without sitting down and doing any calculations. Maybe they just need the back of a cocktail napkin to jot down a few equations – making their work seem more art and less science.

But, how does one acquire this prowess and gain intuition for a subject? Obviously time is a fundamental requirement. The more time you spend doing something, the more familiar you will get with the processes and the more likely you are to absorb some general predictive powers. But these skills can be acquired even more rapidly with a little bit of intentional effort.

One quite powerful technique is dimensional analysis. The basic idea is that the dimensions of the quantities in a calculation are useful by themselves in order to figure out something about the problem. For example, just knowing that the dimensions of velocity are length per unit time can give us a sense of how we might compute a velocity, even if we know nothing else about it. Similarly, even more complicated problems like calculating the irradiance of light on the earth’s surface from the sun can be greatly simplified with the information that irradiance has dimensions of power per unit area.

Some of my absolute favorite work in this space is the course and book Street Fighting Mathematics by Sanjoy Mahajan. He takes a systematic approach to this idea of being scrappy and using our existing knowledge in unconventional ways to attack problems that we might think at first glance are intractable.

If you want to level up and become an estimation ninja, or even just improve your odds at the next “guess the weight of the pumpkin” or “guess the number of M&Ms in the jar” challenge, give the course or book a look!

Leisure Line

With the declining COVID numbers it has been wonderful to have more in-person dinners with friends. Having folks over for a meal is one of the community activities I missed most during the pandemic. There is something about gathering together over food that stimulates good conversation and brings us together. If you aren’t already in the habit of having folks over and doing potluck-style dinners (or just buying some big pre-made dinners from Costco), I highly recommend that you consider it, especially as we look to engage more deeply with our friends and local communities this year.

Still Life

We had an unwelcome visitor near our house this week – a very large coyote! I like wildlife, but would prefer the coyotes stay in the wild and away from the yard where my children play!