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No signup, ever
The fastest way to ruin a tool that’s supposed to help you think is to make you create an account first. You open the tool, it works, you leave. That’s the entire user journey.
5xWhys is an independent library of root cause analysis tools and guides. One practitioner, 10+ years in operations and quality consulting, zero VC money, zero signup walls. Everything here exists because someone needed it on a Tuesday and couldn’t find a decent version online.
I love the 5 Whys method. It’s simple, it’s teachable in ten minutes, and when done well it cuts through noise faster than any other problem-solving technique I’ve seen.
It’s also, in practice, done badly almost everywhere. Teams stop at symptoms. They blame people instead of processes. They skip straight to solutions they already wanted to implement. They ask “Why?” four times, run out of steam, and call it done.
The software market has made this worse. Most RCA tools are locked behind enterprise platforms that cost thousands per year, or they’re dressed-up text boxes that ask “Why?” five times and call it a day. Neither of them teaches you to think more clearly.
So I built the tool I wanted — guided, opinionated, fast, honest — and then I kept adding the things I wanted next to it.
Every tool on this site is shaped by real consulting engagements, real shop-floor post-mortems, real operating-room near-miss reviews. Every article is written from practice, not from a content calendar. When a worked example shows specific numbers, those are numbers I or someone I worked with generated in a real project.
Not negotiable, and not up for redesign at the next board meeting — because there is no board.
The fastest way to ruin a tool that’s supposed to help you think is to make you create an account first. You open the tool, it works, you leave. That’s the entire user journey.
Your problem descriptions, diagrams, and analyses never leave your browser. Nothing is stored on a server I run. I don’t even want that data — it would just be one more liability.
Articles are written by a human with domain experience and AI-assisted editing — not AI-drafted slop rewritten by a human. Every worked example is real. Every rubric has been used in a real project.
No VC money means no growth pressure means no feature velocity theatre. Tools ship when they genuinely help a team solve a real problem — not when a sprint ends.
Everything below is live, free, and usable from any browser. All articles link to the matching tool, and vice versa.
I’m a solo operator with a decade-plus of operations and quality consulting across three worlds: regulated manufacturing, healthcare operations, and SaaS reliability. The thread across all three is the same — teams with real problems, real time pressure, and not enough structured methods for diagnosing what actually went wrong.
Root cause analysis sits at the centre of that. Done well, it cuts weeks off an investigation. Done badly, it gets the wrong person fired. The tools and articles here are my attempt to make “done well” accessible to any team with a browser tab.
If you want to talk — feature requests, article suggestions, or consulting inquiries — the contact page is the fastest route.
Dates are real estimates, not marketing. If something slips, it slipped because it wasn’t ready.
Most recently the 8D Report Generator, the RCA Method Selector and the Cost of Poor Quality Calculator, plus downloadable worksheets for all seven methods in Excel, Word and PDF. The FMEA / RPN Calculator (S × O × D with auto-flagging and CSV export) has been live since April.
The one paid thing on this site: agendas for 1h / 4h / 8h sessions, matching slide decks, eight facilitator crisis cards, and the pre/post-workshop system — for people who have to run the analysis, not just document it. Join the waitlist and you get it at half price when it opens. No date promised here, because it depends on how many people actually want it.
A D0–D8 workflow with embedded 5 Whys for D4 and a PDF export ready for customer submission. Deliberately not committed to a date: the free 8D template already covers most of the need, so this gets built only if search data shows people actually want an interactive version.
Print-quality PDFs with the problem statement, full analysis, and timestamp — suitable for audit trails and corrective-action documentation. Today both tools export PNG.
Four to six new pages a month, currently weighted toward templates, comparisons and interactive tools rather than more explainer articles. Books list reviewed annually.
Yes. Every tool, article, and template is free to use. No signup, no trial, no freemium tier. The site is funded by a small number of non-intrusive display ads and affiliate links on the recommended-books page. If the ads are ever enough to retire on, you’ll know because I’ll remove them.
One person. A solo operator with 10+ years of operations and quality consulting across manufacturing, healthcare operations, and SaaS reliability. No team, no investors, no roadmap pressure — which means the tools only ship when they’re actually useful.
No. Your problem descriptions, diagrams, and analyses never leave your browser. Everything is stored in localStorage. The only third-party tools on the site are Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity for anonymous page-traffic measurement, both under consent-mode v2 and both declinable.
The articles are written by a human practitioner with AI-assisted editing — typo correction, tightening, and fact-checking — not AI-drafted. The tools are hand-written JavaScript with no LLM calls. If you see a worked example or a scoring rubric, it comes from real project work, not from a model hallucination.
Yes — the free templates are provided under no license restrictions for internal team use. If you re-publish or rebrand them for a product or service you sell, a link back is appreciated but not required.
Use the contact form. Real requests from real practitioners get prioritized. Vague feedback like “add more features” gets filed under encouragement.
Open any of the eight live tools and start a real investigation in under ten seconds.
Have to facilitate this with a real team? The RCA Facilitator’s Workshop Kit turns the method into a ready-to-run session. Launching soon · waitlist gets 50% off.