Week 8 - Entrepreneurial Studies

This week, as many weeks are, was good. We started reading a new book called "A Field Guide for the Hero's Journey". That’s been interesting but not what I really wanted to focus on.

I think my favorite part of this week was the short video on the Five Why’s which can be found here.

For me it’s always interesting to see how an organization evolves and progresses and how one might overcome the difficulties and challenges that come with pioneering something new.

The main focus of this video is what the author, Eric Ries, calls “human problems”. He reviews how one might encounter an error and only look at it topically but that we really need to ask additional questions to find the root causes of these problems.

He details them more clearly in other examples such as this one.

He provides a scenario for us in his article.

Let's say you notice that your website is down. Obviously, your first priority is to get it back up. But as soon as the crisis is past, you have the discipline to have a post-mortem in which you start asking why:

1.    Why was the website down? The CPU utilization on all our front-end servers went to 100%

2.    Why did the CPU usage spike? A new bit of code contained an infinite loop!

3.    Why did that code get written? So-and-so made a mistake

4.    Why did his mistake get checked in? He didn't write a unit test for the feature

5.    Why didn't he write a unit test? He's a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD

These are all why questions used to get to the root cause of the error and from my understanding are learned from the Toyota Production System. The method is still the same today and it’s basically just asking why at a minimum of 5 times in order to get to the real reason for the issue. 

Hopefully that was some good food for thought.

Until next week.