By Mike Schultz

Q. Why did the chicken cross the road?
A. Jack Bauer: Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I’ll find out.

The first time I heard the five questions I’m about to put forth as the five most important for services marketing, they annoyed me. Actually, the person who introduced them to me tended to annoy me in general. By proxy, I threw the important-question baby out with the annoying-lady bathwater. I shouldn’t have done that, but didn’t realize it at the time.

The concept is the Five Whys. Popularized by Taiichi Ohno, the architect of the Toyota Production System, the Five Whys is a root cause analysis technique, helping business leaders get past amelioration of the symptoms of a problem, and instead address the underlying causes. Regardless of my former colleague’s surface-level delivery of this fairly profound concept (she asked the Five Whys like a child who asked for ice cream and mom said no…WhyWhyWhyWhyWhy!?!), she does get credit for introducing the idea to me.

Essentially, the Five Whys is to problem solving and critical thinking as removing weeds by the root is to gardening. Fix a symptom in business but not the underlying cause, and the symptom is bound to recur. Fix the underlying cause (i.e., address the problem by the root) and you can gain lasting improvement.

In a manufacturing environment the Five Why’s might work like this:

Example Problem: The production line stopped again.

Why (#1) did the production line stop? Answer: We blew a fuse.

Why (#2) did we blow a fuse? Answer: Because the bearings overheated?

Why (#3) did the bearings overheat? Answer: Because there is insufficient lubrication on them.

Why (#4) is there insufficient lubrication on the bearings? Answer: Because nobody oiled them.

Why (#5) did nobody oil them? Answer: Because we don’t have a preventative maintenance schedule.

Why (#6) don’t we have a preventative maintenance schedule? Answer: Silence.

(True, this example has six Whys. The number five is directional, not absolute…)

The idea is that once you’ve gotten to silence, you should be near your root cause. The temptation by many managers pressed for time (who isn’t) is to solve a problem at the first chance they see something they can tackle. Perhaps in our scenario above, the folks might have pointed a fan at the bearings, keeping them at a cooler temperature and lessening the overheating problem.  Or, perhaps, someone might just switch the fuse, and then be ready to switch it again (and again and again). But they won’t get the deeper, more permanent fix.

In services marketing, too many activities are engaged, and too many decisions made, without asking enough Whys.

Example problem: We don’t have enough leads.

Why (#1) don’t we have enough leads? Answer: Because the partners aren’t getting enough referrals to build their practices.

Why (#2) aren’t the partners getting enough referrals? Answer: Because the partners and the marketing group aren’t taking the actions needed on a regular basis to generate referrals and new business leads.

Why (#3) aren’t they doing what they’re supposed to do to generate leads and referrals? Answer: Because work expectations focus on keeping them billable, and lead generation isn’t a top priority in the marketing department.

Why (#4) are the partner jobs aligned so narrowly to billing, and why doesn’t marketing focus on lead generation? Answer: Because the managing partner hasn’t historically perceived revenue generation as an issue, and so across the board—from marketing to billable staff—there’s not much concerted lead generation effort, and, in marketing, there’s no budget.

Why (#5)? Answer: Now that it’s an important business problem to solve, why hasn’t he addressed this?

Why (#6)? Answer: Silence.

I’ve seen firms stop after Why #1 and conclude that the partners need training. One year later…no discernible change in referrals generated. (Why? Skills may or may not be an issue, but even if the partners have all the skills, other factors, as we know, prevent them from generating leads.) Some firms stop after #2 and conclude that partners need personal action plans to generate leads, and that marketing must make lead generation a priority! 12 months later, even if action plans are built by the partners and the marketers, the actions aren’t taken. (Why? Compensation drivers, expectations of billing, and lack of budget win out over good intentions to get it done.)

No matter what might change to support referral and lead generation efforts, if the managing partner doesn’t have his heart and actions in full support over the long- term (see answer to Why #4), the initiative will head (without passing go, and without collecting $200) to the “flavor of the month” graveyard.  Without leadership support, success for any kind of corporate initiative is in serious jeopardy from the get go.

Of course, there could be other Why factors that are affecting referral and lead generation. Perhaps the firm’s delivery of service isn’t as strong as they think it is and thus their reputation is suffering. Perhaps a major rainmaker retired and the slack was simply never taken up by the rest of the team. Perhaps over the past five years the other firms have established themselves as thought and market leaders, and you’re still the “best kept secret” firm with partners who rarely publish and speak? Perhaps the economy is down and every firm is suffering. Any one of these are possible root causes that would lead to different solutions.

Indeed, don’t ask the Whys, don’t get the problem solved.

Crossing the Road

Assuming you’re interested in getting to the root of a problem, and you’ve already decided you’re not going to take the Jack Bauer approach to getting to the bottom of the issue, here are some suggestions for how to employ the Five Whys in a professional services environment:

• Get problem agreement. Gather a team of people and agree on the specific problem you intend to solve. Lack of agreement on the problem happens more often than you might think, so make sure you come to unambiguous agreement on the problem before you get started.
  
  
• Involve the right team. Ask if you have all the people in the room you need to solve the problem. For example, if you’re solving the problem of “Our direct mail efforts aren’t working well,” then you need to have people around that know how to make them work well, that have the data on your past campaigns, and so on. The blind leading the blind doesn’t work very well in root cause analysis.
  
  
• Employ good logic. Don’t make specious cause/effect conclusions. Much like a geometry proof gone awry, make one mistake in the middle and you can find yourself on the wrong path for the duration. In one situation for this very same problem (direct mail not working), a professional service provider once told me that because their direct mail campaigns didn’t work…thus direct mail doesn’t work for services. I told him that I once tried to bake a cake but it didn’t rise. My conclusion: cakes don’t rise. Imagine my surprise when I learned that cakes do indeed rise, I just didn’t know how to bake. In the same vein, not everyone knows how to run a mail campaign.
  
  
• Ask the first Why. Like our previous example, you might find there are a number of plausible answers. Take care not to shoot any of them down at this early stage. It’s not a contest to see who’s the smartest person in the room. You might not know definitely why something is happening right off the bat. The idea is not to answer the Five Whys in five minutes, but to answer them correctly in the appropriate amount of time. (Not sure where to start? See below for some first Why examples.)
  
  
• Ask the rest of the Whys. If you came up with a number of possible answers to the first Why question, you may find yourself asking well more than five additional Whys. (Five is a good rule of thumb for the number of why questions to ask, but, as noted earlier, five is more directional than absolute.) It is also common that there is more than one root problem. In this case, focus on one string of Whys at a time.
  
  
• Determine which Whys to confirm. As you go through the possible answers to the Why questions, you might find that some look more plausible than others, and that some are outright incorrect. Remove any Why answers you know aren’t worth investigating, and discuss which answers you should continue to investigate and confirm.

On the Other Side

Assuming you’ve determined the root cause of the problem, you can now move to solve it. Understand, though, that solving the root cause of a problem will often take much more effort than patching up one of the symptoms. For example, it’s straightforward enough to train and coach professionals to develop the skills needed to build relationships and generate referrals, but it’s usually a much bigger effort to change compensation plans for a partner group, or develop a culture of business development where there isn’t one.

Not only do you need to find the root cause, you need to make the decision as to whether solving the problem is or is not enough of a priority, given the effort it will take to get it done.

Meanwhile, employ the Five Whys and you’ll know that if you solve the problem, you’ll solve the root cause and not a symptom. And while this method might take you longer than Jack Bauer’s, it won’t land you in the midst of a Senate investigation.

If the Whys are good enough to get you started crossing the road, don’t forget to worry about how you are going to get across. Decide to cross and don’t build the right action plan to get there, and as much as you would like to get to the other side, you might end up like the possum.

"First Why Question" Starter Ideas

If you’re keen to give the Five Whys a try and looking for a place to start, here are some ideas:

• Why didn’t we reach our revenue goals?
• Why is our marketing budget set at its current level?
• Why haven’t we been able to implement (insert tactic or initiative here), even though we keep saying it’s a priority
• Why hasn’t (insert tactic or initiative here) worked as well for us as we might have liked?
• Why haven’t we tried anything new or innovative in our marketing?
• Why aren’t our marketplace messages resonating?
• Why are we (or aren’t we) launching new practice areas, geographies, industry specialties, etc.?
• Why don’t more of our partners develop business and bring in new clients?
• Why don’t we have a culture of business success?
• Why haven’t we been able to build a brand like we believe we can and should?
• Why are our competitors outmaneuvering us in the market?
• Why can’t we increase our fees?
• Why do our clients pressure our fees?
• Why have some practice areas of our firm grown so well while others haven’t?
• Why haven’t we improved our repeat business rate?
• Why did we lose a client (or set of clients) that we lost?
• Why did we lose a big new business opportunity?