Can this skill help with non-technical process issues?

Yes, it is highly effective for analyzing process failures and organizational bottlenecks by shifting focus from 'who messed up' to 'why the system allowed the error to occur'.

How does Five Whys Plus differ from the standard technique?

It adds explicit guards against premature stopping, single-cause bias, and human-blame, while requiring hard evidence like logs or metrics for every answer provided.

When should I use this skill instead of just fixing a bug directly?

Use this skill when the cause isn't obvious, for recurring problems, or for high-impact incidents where you need to ensure the issue never happens again through systemic changes.

Does it support complex problems with multiple causes?

Unlike the standard linear version, this enhanced skill uses 'What Else?' branching to identify and investigate multiple contributing factors simultaneously.

What happens if the analysis loops or becomes circular?

The Five Whys Plus framework is designed to detect circular reasoning and break the cycle by introducing external evidence or looking for third-party contributing factors.

Five Whys Plus Root Cause Analysis

Name: Five Whys Plus Root Cause Analysis
Author: tjboudreaux

bytjboudreaux

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分析与监控

Conducts rigorous root cause investigations for bugs and system failures using an enhanced 5 Whys framework with built-in bias guards.

Five Whys Plus is a sophisticated diagnostic skill that transforms the traditional Toyota "Five Whys" technique into a robust methodology for software engineering and systems analysis. By requiring specific evidence for every hypothesis and explicitly guarding against common pitfalls like premature stopping, single-cause bias, and human-error blame, this skill helps teams move past superficial fixes to find actionable, systemic solutions. It is particularly valuable during post-mortems, recurring bug investigations, and process failure reviews where accuracy and the prevention of recurrence are critical priorities.

主要功能

01Multi-factor branching using 'What Else?' to identify parallel root causes

02Devil's advocate counter-analysis to prevent confirmation bias in conclusions

03Anti-blame guards that pivot from human error to systemic infrastructure gaps

047 GitHub stars

05Rigorous stopping criteria to ensure findings are actionable and fundamental

06Evidence-based reasoning requiring logs or metrics for every diagnostic step

使用场景

01Analyzing organizational process failures or customer support bottlenecks

02Investigating intermittent or recurring bugs that standard debugging hasn't solved

03Performing detailed production incident post-mortems to prevent recurrence

What are Skills?·How to Install

Install with 🐟 Skill.Fish

npx skillfish add tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills thinking-five-whys-plus

For use in Claude.ai and ChatGPT

Download Skill