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Home > Binnion Blogs > Business education > The 5 Whys approach to dealing with your social media fails.

February 21, 2015

The 5 Whys approach to dealing with your social media fails.

Last month I wrote about the joined-upness of organisations and the way that we need to see the organisation as a sum of all of it’s parts before we try to fix,what we think is, a problem in one area

I continued with my thinking about the injured body which led to this…

 Often when dealing with a long term physical problem we attend to the symptoms, but because a body adapts itself to protect an injury, after a while what we find is that  the area where pain is being experienced may not actually be the damaged area. In my case I had developed bad posture to protect my cuff rotator. As a result  the pain was presenting around my shoulder blade. It was only when I dealt with that muscular problem properly that I was able to identify the root cause, the cuff rotator, which 5 years after injury had still not healed, as it had not been treated.

Applying this thinking to business I saw that it is all too easy in an organisation to lay the blame for a problem  in an area where there is an obvious fault, without understanding that there may well be a more deep seated root cause.

As a social media trainer I see this a lot. People tell me that social media doesn’t work for them.  When I explore this further it usually means that  the real underlying issue  is that there  been no work put into planning a strategy.

One of the best theories  I have read for diagnosing what is really going on is the 5 Whys developed by Sakichi Toyoda, one of the fathers of the Japanese industrial revolution,  in the 1930s.  Sakichi Toyoda created the 5 Whys technique to stop people solving symptoms. When presented with a problem, you simply ask ‘Why’ 5 times, and you get to solve the root problem.

So when the issue is, for example,   Twitter doesn’t work for us,  if we ask the 5 Whys we will get to something like this…

TThe 5 whys to social media fails

What bits of your organisation aren’t working?  Are you seeing the symptoms, or the root causes?

Before you sack someone, or close something down, it’s certainly worth  taking a step back and asking what is really  behind that issue.

If you would like Jane to help you with your social media and sales strategy planning, drop her an email at jane@janebinnion.com, or tweet her at @janebinnion 

 

 

Filed Under: Business education, Business growth, Social media training

Jane Binnion is an ethical business trainer based in Lancashire UK. To contact Jane, email jane@janebinnion.com

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