To me your message embodies the criticism of the five whys. You don't run a five whys analysis because it's not effective. You run a more open ended root cause analysis with the goal of understanding issues, which is effective.
I believe that what I'm talking about is what "five whys" _actually_ is, and what a lot of the critics think "five whys" is, which they are rightfully criticizing, is just not a thing at all -- it would be trivially useless and ineffective, and obviously is so to anyone who does it.
In particular 'five whys' when run correctly has neither a set number of whys, nor a particular linear structure, nor a fixation on assigning blame, and involves actually taking actions in response to the root causes, not just creating meaningless action items. If those don't apply, you're not doing five whys, you're doing some bizarre aberration of it.
To me that sounds pretty clearly like not the five whys: there aren't five whys, they aren't linear, and you're not asking "why" at every step. The history of the five whys and Toyoda make it clear that it's 5 linear whys. You're performing a root cause analysis, which I suspect is why you find it effective. VS the five whys are not an effective analysis tool. Maybe where we see things differently is you consider the non-five-whys analysis part of the five whys, and I consider it "root cause analysis". For me, an issue with still calling it the "five whys" is watching other folks less familiar with how to do root cause analysis using the low quality and awkward "five whys", without any clear direction that they shouldn't use that strategy because it's not effective.
Yeah, I guess what I'm describing is "the thing we did in the Amazon COE process that we called 5 whys". Whatever that was called, it's definitely better than what you're describing.
