Challenge Assumptions - Five Whys

As part of their regulatory compliance work, a client I’ve been working with identified a project to clad areas of their facility with fresh hygienic wall finishes with the aim to aid cleaning and improve aesthetics.

At What Cost?

The work would involve the removal of multiple existing services from walls, preparing existing wall finishes, installation of fresh hygienic cladding and finally reinstalling the wall mounted services – a significant amount of investment in time and money and impact on production

Start With Why x5

We started our conversation with the question Why?

• Why do the walls need to be clad? – To provide a clean finish to comply with regulations
• Do the current wall finishes meet regulatory requirements? – Yes they do, they are just dirty and can be difficult to clean if certain materials splash on to them.
• Why are the walls dirty in the first place? – Our cleaning routines are not capable of removing this mess, it's really difficult to remove.
• Why is the substance on the wall? – It splashed during a filling activity
• Why does the filling activity cause splashing? – Well, the filling wand used is heavy and cumbersome and difficult to handle.
  
  

Ok so the wall finishes meet regulatory requirements, the cleaning procedures, if followed would be able to clean the walls, however this particular mess has been caused by the quirks of our filling process? - Yes

And if you install new wall finishes they will likely still get dirty and be difficult to clean due to the nature of the material and the process? - Yes

What do we have to do with the process to prevent it splashing in the first place ?

Purpose and Clarity

Through questioning the purpose of the installing the wall finishes, using the 5Whys technique to further pull at the thread of responses and testing the logic of the responses the team delve deeply into their process and understand the root cause of the issue being experienced enabling them to focus their improvement efforts on the real problem at hand.

This simple questioning technique helped the team loo a the problem from a different perspective and provided them with some great wins, they saved downtime and money, they were reassured that the compliance requirements were already being met and the resulting improvement project helped build a solution owned by team.