five-whys — independently scanned and version-tracked by SaferSkills.
SaferSkills independently audited five-whys (Agent Skill) and scored it 100/100 (green). The audit ran 55 deterministic rules across Security, Supply Chain, Maintenance, Transparency, and Community; it found 0 high-severity and 0 lower-severity findings. The full rule-by-rule trace and per-finding evidence are below. Free, methodology-open.
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Every scanned point with the score it earned and what moved between them.
First recorded scan — no prior version to compare against.
The primary manifest — the file an agent reads to learn what this artifact does.
Toyota's Sakichi Toyoda popularized the 5 Whys: take any apparent cause and ask "Why?" five times in succession. Each answer becomes the new statement; you drill until you hit a root cause that isn't itself a symptom of something deeper.
In the consulting toolkit, 5 Whys complements issue trees. Issue trees go wide (every plausible cause). 5 Whys goes deep on one branch — the one you suspect dominates. It's especially useful after a Pareto step has named the vital 20%, before committing to interventions.
Five is a heuristic, not a magic number. Sometimes you reach root cause at three; sometimes you have to push to seven. The discipline is asking "why" until the answer stops being a symptom and starts being something structural.
A numbered list of five Why → Because pairs, followed by a one-sentence root-cause statement.
**Starting problem:** [The apparent issue you're drilling into.]
1. **Why?** [First-level reason]
2. **Why?** [Second-level — drilling into #1's answer]
3. **Why?** [Third-level — drilling into #2's answer]
4. **Why?** [Fourth-level — drilling into #3's answer]
5. **Why?** [Fifth-level — drilling into #4's answer]
**Root cause:** [One-sentence structural cause, addressable as a system change.]| Default | When to flex |
|---|---|
| 5 levels deep | Sometimes 3 is enough (the structural cause is shallow); sometimes 6–7 is needed (deep institutional cause). Push until the answer is no longer a symptom. |
| One thread | Drill a single chain — don't branch mid-way. If the answer to a "Why?" is multi-causal, pick the dominant cause and drill that one. Run a separate 5 Whys on the other if needed. |
| Each Why builds on the previous | Don't restart the chain or re-ask the same question. Each answer must logically follow from the one above. |
The root-cause test: the final answer should be something you can change as a system — a process, a policy, an incentive, a data-flow design. If the final answer is "people are bad" or "the world is hard," you haven't reached root cause. Push deeper.
Starting problem: Mid-market sales win rate dropped from 28% to 17% in two quarters.
Root cause: The company has no process owner for commercial document lifecycle management. The MSA degradation is a symptom; the structural cause is institutional ownership of contract templates.
strategy-consultant-7), 5 Whys runs after Issue Trees and before Hypothesis-Driven — drilling the most-likely branch surfaces the testable hypothesis.The 5 Whys is attributed to Sakichi Toyoda and the Toyota Production System; widely adopted in lean manufacturing and consulting practice. Visual contract adapted in the spirit of the Analyst Academy original — see 5 Consulting Frameworks to Solve Any Problem. MIT-licensed; see LICENSE.
~30 seconds. Free. No account. Every finding cites a rule and a line of evidence.