The Evolving Excellence blog is usually a good read. It's sort of a company blog, but it focuses on Lean Thinking and people who implement Lean (even if they don't call it that). This post is longer than I want to copy and paste, so I'm just sending you over there. It's about an IT administrator solving a problem on a switch port by asking the "five why's".
In Lean Thinking, the method is to ask why as many times as it takes to get to the root of the problem. In this case, if the admin had stopped at the first why, he would have solved the last symptom. But by probing deeper, he discovered not only the root cause within the switch, but also the business practice that would cause future problems.
By the way, in the 70s Earl Nightengale proposed a similar method for getting good ideas. He said that too many people just don't "think" in fact they may not know how to think. He said you should sit down with a pad of paper. Put the thing you want to think about at the top. Then write 20 things about it. You'll find the first 5 or so come quickly. By the time you get to the last 5 you're starting to come up with some original stuff. I use the method all the time--from headlines for the cover of Automation World to developing story ideas.
8:22:52 AM 
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