11b-The Cause and Effect Diagram
11b-The Cause and Effect Diagram
11b-The Cause and Effect Diagram
Page 1
At this point its time for your team to get busy as you develop a list of factors that could be
causing or contributing to the problem. Again there are many ways to go about this.
One way I personally find effective is to hand out the same colored post it notes and pencils to all
team members. I then ask the question, Whats causing this problem? I then give everyone 3
to 5 minutes to write down as many ideas as they can on their post it notes, which is sometimes
referred to as the nominal group technique.
After 3 to 5 minutes I ask everyone to place their pencils down. I then go around and ask each
person to share their results by reading them aloud. And as they read a post it note the team agrees
where it should be placed on the fishbone. And if it looks like a cause fits on more than one category
we create a duplicate and place it in both places.
Once this initial brainstorming process is complete the discussion the team has had will usually drum
up additional ideas so I let the team write down additional causes followed by the same process of
reading them aloud and placing them on the fishbone accordingly.
You can actually repeat this process as many times as you need until it seems the team is out of ideas.
The next step of the process is to create the second level of causes. To do this we go through each
post it note and ask, Why does this happen?
N/3
Once this process is complete well have identified numerous root causes possibly too many to
attack at once. So, at this point the team will need to select the root causes they wish to initially
focus on.
As youve probably guessed there are a number of ways to facilitate this process but one method
weve found to be effective is to seek out root causes that may be similar and group them together.
You should also use the same priority setting questions we learned about in an earlier module by
assessing each root causes level of importance, urgency, and potential for expansion.
Also, depending on team dynamics you can also use a powerful technique called N over 3. To do
N/3 you simply count up the number of root causes identified and divide that number by 3.
Page 2