Ishikawa diagram

A friend of mine was building a house which involved a couple of workers from different companies. He was not happy with the progress and how they did that. He didn’t really had any idea of how to construct a house, but he was a 6sigma black belt quality manager. One day, he showed up at the construction site, got all the workers together, created a fishbone diagram with them and led the rest of the constructing like a typical project.

Great if you’re genuinely in the world of cause and effect, but most interesting problems aren’t really like that. You’re either experimenting (“sending probes”) to test the impact of different things, or focussing somewhere more productive, like the outcomes achievable were the problem to be overcome, bypassed, or simply ignored.

I'm a huge fan of CAPA (corrective and preventive action) which is like a mini-version of root cause analysis and planning. One of the things that I struggled with when I was younger was if there was a problem, a lot engineers have different ideas on the root cause but getting the data is usually too time consuming. But asking the 5 why's really help you focus on the highest probable root cause.

> Interrelationships between causes are not easily identifiable

This.

Ishikawa diagrams (aka Fishbone diagrams) aren't always the right tool to use, (see other comments) but when they are useful, they are very useful. I'd never used them before my time at Lenovo, and while I was there I gained a considerable appreciation for their utility. Note that I consider the bulk of that utility to be in communicating to upper management. They are useful in and of themselves, but only at a certain level of detail.

I also came to appreciate using WBS diagrams (Work Breakdown Structure) for pretty much the same reason(s) and largely with the same constraints.

Interestingly, a friend of mine in a writing group recommended these to me as a way of organizing ideas for the plot of a novel, specifically the reasons that things happen in the story. They're not at all specific to business or any other field in their essentials.

At least a great step forward from the default notion that everything has but one cause (maybe two).

People often question whether philosophy is still worth “doing” in this age of ConvNets and cryptocurrency.

But one of the things I learned studying philosophy is that there is no root cause.