Architecture & practice·Incidents and what happens after
you asked why five times and ended up at a deploy process nobody had questioned in two years.
Five whys
A technique of repeatedly asking why to get past the immediate trigger to something more fundamental. It is useful for getting a conversation moving and structurally misleading if taken literally, because it produces a single chain of causes when real failures have several. Treat it as a prompt rather than a method, and stop when the answers become organisational fiction rather than when you reach five.