Three whys? Five whys? Why not more?

[sawyl]

During a somewhat interminable presentation this afternoon, I realised the speaker was drawing on some of this weekend's Guardian office buzzwords feature with absolutely no irony or self-awareness.

In a particularly radical development, they went two whys beyond the traditional three whys, pushing all the way out to five whys in their attempts to explain how root cause analysis. I'm somewhat disappointed they didn't go the whole way up to eleven whys — because, well why not? — or maybe some sort of near-infinite recursion down to an ultimate un-whyed why, mirroring the Aristotelian idea of an unmoved mover at the base of all things.

I was extremely tempted to mention that we were all firm believers in the Feynman method of RCA:

1. You write down the problem
2. You think very hard
3. Then you write down the answer

Fortunately my natural tendency to flippancy had been tempered somewhat by the need to practice some sort of mindfulness to mitigate the tedium of the situation — a highly successful coping strategy! — and I was able to reign myself in, instead contenting myself with filling in a mental bingo card of Tim Dowling's buzzwords...