In the previous blogpost I introduced you to Root Cause Analysis and the 5 Whys. These processes are most effective when being used by your whole team. I briefly touched on this in the last blogpost, but will elaborate on it here. How do you encourage your workplace to adopt new habits like the 5 Whys and RCA?
One of the ways I did it was by teaching our trusts and trades how to do the 5 Whys, so as to implement it at every level. We chose the 5 Whys because it’s a simple, easy-to-understand process that perfectly encapsulates RCA. We tailored our explanation to all three maintenance groups, ensuring they understood it in terms and analogies that were relevant to them.
To elaborate, we did a workshop for each group, where we each found the cause of a problem by working through the 5 Whys process as a team. It started out in groups where they worked with the instructors who offered hints and guidance, and then split them into pairs to work independently. Then we checked to see if they found answers that would lead them to a solution to the problem.
From there, we asked supervisors to check if the 5 Whys process had been completed on breakdown work orders. If they discovered something during the process that no one else knew about, new protocol commanded further investigation. Team meetings involved people sharing their 5 Whys process and results so all workers could understand the problem from all known angles thus far, allowing for an equal, confident understanding among them. This meant that machines were actually fixed rather than “held together” by means that only hid or treated the symptoms.
Through this method, we made RCA and the 5 Whys the norm by introducing it as a simple, yet integral part of the workplace. In summary, teach everyone the habit until they are confident with it, then actively encourage them to use it, then make it necessary to workplace processes. Note, they should find the habit helpful before you make it compulsory, otherwise they’d be wasting their time with a process that will not improve their work. This is about people adopting the same habit to work smoother together, after all.
Want to learn more about learning useful habits and implementing them into your workplace? Peter Horsburgh teaches that and more in his Extraordinary Reliability Engineer course. If you’re interested, you can register at our Eventbrite page here.