How to motivate colleagues to use 8D method or similar

[Bev D]

I find it the traditional 5-Why or even 3-Legged 5-Whys are incomplete. I have dealt with several methodologies of corrective actions in the past several years and the method that made the most sense (which was much easier to understand for more people in our organization) was the methodology introduced by former Denso employee. It's similar to 5-Why, but it's not necessarily asking 5 "why" questions." The reason for this is because some questions cannot be asked 5 times - instead the original "why" splits and create additional "whys," so the diagram will look more like a tree instead of 5 lined up questions of "whys." I would say this is a combination of traditional 5-Why and fishbone, but more in-depth.

By “traditional 5-Why” you are actually referring to the American mis-interpretation or mis-application of the original method used by Ohno. Your Denso employee probably got a more true interpretation of Ohno’s original method as Denso is a Japanese organization.

Not to brag, but I have been doing this for 4 decades…

“5-Why” is a proper name and not a direct description of the method (like the “Normal” distribution).

Ohno - and those who worked on Problem Solving before you and many people here were born - knew that we must ask very specific questions to prune the possible branches of causal paths. Some examples are:
What happened?
Can you describe the situation and what you did?
What prompted you to take that action?
What is the purpose of this step?
How did you do that? Can you show me?

Of course these types of questions only work on people or behavioral systems and not on purely physics systems…but the ideas of asking the right question, pruning or eliminating causal paths, going to the actual place, relying on objective evidence etc. are universally applicable.

Alas, Fishbone diagrams while well intended are actually diversionary guessing games, while the intent of the so-called “5-Why” is to systematically and progressively start at the Problem and work backwards to eliminate possible causes…

 

[Miner]

In the vast majority of cases you will do as @Bev D said and prune branches, but there are some cases where you will have an additional branch. Using fault tree analysis terminology, if you have an OR relationship, determine which branch actually occurred and prune the other. However, if you have an AND relationship, keep the additional branch and develop both. I have occasionally run into this type of problem, particularly when dealing with intermittent issues.

ThinkReliability has an approach they call Cause Mapping that works well for these issues. I don't think it is necessary for most issues but has its place for some. One aspect they use that should be adopted for the 5 Why approach is to document the evidence for each Why.

 

[Crimpshrine13]

By “traditional 5-Why” you are actually referring to the American mis-interpretation or mis-application of the original method used by Ohno. Your Denso employee probably got a more true interpretation of Ohno’s original method as Denso is a Japanese organization.

Not to brag, but I have been doing this for 4 decades…

“5-Why” is a proper name and not a direct description of the method (like the “Normal” distribution).

Ohno - and those who worked on Problem Solving before you and many people here were born - knew that we must ask very specific questions to prune the possible branches of causal paths. Some examples are:
What happened?
Can you describe the situation and what you did?
What prompted you to take that action?
What is the purpose of this step?
How did you do that? Can you show me?

Of course these types of questions only work on people or behavioral systems and not on purely physics systems…but the ideas of asking the right question, pruning or eliminating causal paths, going to the actual place, relying on objective evidence etc. are universally applicable.

Alas, Fishbone diagrams while well intended are actually diversionary guessing games, while the intent of the so-called “5-Why” is to systematically and progressively start at the Problem and work backwards to eliminate possible causes…

This is a book written by a former Denso employee and written in Japanese, and I had read it in Japanese and it made more sense (not because of the language but how it is explained). I did employee training (in the U.S.) based on this book and our employees understood it better and made sense to them. Unfortunately most training material out there in the U.S. for corrective actions is not as thoroughly explained and people get stuck. Another unfortunate thing is that the method that was originally developed by Japan went overseas, lost in translation and then returning to Japan in a form of quality system (ISO, IATF) and it is making them even more confused.

 

[toniriazor]

This is a book written by a former Denso employee and written in Japanese, and I had read it in Japanese and it made more sense (not because of the language but how it is explained). I did employee training (in the U.S.) based on this book and our employees understood it better and made sense to them. Unfortunately most training material out there in the U.S. for corrective actions is not as thoroughly explained and people get stuck. Another unfortunate thing is that the method that was originally developed by Japan went overseas, lost in translation and then returning to Japan in a form of quality system (ISO, IATF) and it is making them even more confused.

What's the name of the book? Can you share please?

 

[Crimpshrine13]

What's the name of the book? Can you share please?

It's called The Real "Why-Why Analysis" Learned from Denso (デンソーから学んだ本当の「なぜなぜ分析」) written by Yoshinobu Kurata (ISBN 978-4-526-07713-5). I do not believe there's an English translated version though unfortunately. Before I bought this book, I've browsed several other Japanese books about problem solving, but this one appeared to be by far more comprehensive and written in easier to understand language. At first when I did the training for other employees to show the methodology, they were still having hard time understanding, but when they started learning the examples in the book they seem to understand better, and when I walked through the actual corrective action process in our environment using the real incident, they seemed to understand much better.