Turning Problems Into Learning Opportunities

Things are always going to go wrong, but there’s always an opportunity to learn from mistakes and not repeat them in the future. In this section, we’ll take a look at how you can begin discovering the root causes of problems in your team and how to record the outcomes. Then, we’ll explore what to do when there are bugs in processes and how they can be resolved.

Five whys

If your team experiences an issue in their software, such as a bug in production or some downtime, you should obviously fix it. However, an incident is an excellent chance to perform some root-cause analysis, because as a manager you should be attempting to uncover the real reasons problems occur to prevent them from happening again.

A five-whys session is an excellent way of determining the root cause for an issue by repeatedly asking the question, “Why?” The number of whys is unimportant, but five is usually enough to get to the bottom of an issue. For example, let’s assume that your application went down for a period of time and a patch was required to fix the bug that was causing it.

Before the team moves onto whatever is next in the work queue, get them together to interrogate the problem. Get around a whiteboard or a shared document and begin questioning: