I use the old Mk. 1 pen and paper to keep track of anything that needs to stay in my brain longer than a day and shorter than a week. For example, “What I am going to implement this Saturday.” Email inquiries I answer immediately the next time I check email and star in Gmail if they require follow-up. Everything else gets either blogged, remembered, or forgotten.

While the 5 Whys is a powerful tool for engineers or technically savvy individuals to help get to the true causes of problems, it has been criticized by Teruyuki Minoura, former managing director of global purchasing for Toyota, as being too basic a tool to analyze root causes to the depth that is needed to ensure that the causes are fixed. Reasons for this criticism include:

Tendency for investigators to stop at symptoms rather than going on to lower level root causes.
Inability to go beyond the investigator’s current knowledge – can’t find causes that they don’t already know
Lack of support to help the investigator to ask the right “why” questions.
Results aren’t repeatable – different people using 5 Whys come up with different causes for the same problem.
The tendency to isolate a single root cause, whereas each question could elicit many different root causes

Been following your blog/HN stuff for what seems like forever.

Best,
Paul