The 90-second problem A power outage lasting 90 seconds caused chaos across the UK rail network recently. Ninety seconds. That is all it took to strand thousands of commuters and expose just how fragile the system actually was. When I read about it, I thought about how often I see the same pattern in small businesses. Not power outages, obviously. But a single weak point that, when it fails, takes everything else with it. Maybe it is the one person who knows how the invoicing works. Maybe it is the spreadsheet that calculates pricing. Maybe it is you, doing something manually that should have been automated two years ago. The problem is not that these weak points exist. The problem is that most people do not know where theirs is until it breaks. What the 5 Whys actually does The 5 Whys is a diagnostic method. You start with a problem and ask why it happened. Then you take that answer and ask why again. You keep going until you hit something you can actually fix. It sounds simple because it is. But simple does not mean easy. Most people stop at the first or second why. They find a surface-level cause, fix that, and wonder why the same problem keeps coming back in different forms. I worked with someone last year whose client onboarding kept falling apart. Deadlines missed, information lost, clients frustrated. Their first instinct was to blame their project manager. The second was to blame the software they were using. We ran through the 5 Whys together. By the fourth question, we found the real issue: there was no standardised handover between sales and delivery. Every new client started with incomplete information because nobody had defined what "complete" actually meant. That single point of failure had been causing problems for eighteen months. Fixing it took about four hours of documentation work. How to run it properly You need a specific problem to start with. Not "things feel chaotic" or "we are not growing fast enough". Something concrete. A missed deadline. A lost client. A mistake that cost money. Write the problem down. Then ask: why did this happen? Write that answer down too. Then ask why that happened. Keep going. Five is not a magic number. Sometimes you find the root cause at three. Sometimes it takes seven. The point is to keep pushing past the obvious answers. Here is what trips people up: they ask "why" and get multiple answers. That is fine. Pick the one that seems most significant and follow that thread first. You can always come back and explore the others. The goal is not to create a perfect diagram of causality. The goal is to find something you can actually change. The patterns I keep seeing After running this exercise with dozens of people building their own thing, certain patterns show up again and again. The first is over-reliance on one person. Usually the owner. They are the only one who can approve purchases, or answer technical questions, or deal with a specific supplier. When they are unavailable, everything stops. I have seen businesses lose £12,000 in a single week because the person who knew how to process refunds was on holiday. The second is undocumented processes. Someone figured out how to do something once, it worked, and now they just do it from memory every time. When that person leaves or forgets a step, the whole thing breaks. The third is technology held together with tape. A spreadsheet that links to another spreadsheet that pulls data from an old system that nobody really understands anymore. It works until it does not. And when it does not, nobody knows how to fix it. These are not dramatic failures. They are slow leaks. They drain time and money and attention in ways that feel normal until you add them up. Why surface-level fixes do not stick When something goes wrong, the pressure is to fix it fast and move on. Understandable. You have other things to do. But fast fixes usually address symptoms, not causes. You patch the immediate problem without asking what created it. This is how businesses end up with layers of workarounds stacked on top of each other. Each one made sense at the time. Together, they create a system so fragile that a small change in one place causes unexpected failures somewhere else. The 5 Whys forces you to slow down long enough to find the actual source. It is not glamorous work. But it is the difference between fixing something once and fixing it repeatedly for years. Running this for yourself You do not need a consultant for this. You do not need special software. You need about thirty minutes and the willingness to be honest about what is actually happening in your business. If you want a structured way to work through it, there is a 5 Whys tool on alira.london that walks you through the process step by step. I built it because I got tired of explaining the method from scratch every time. But the tool is not the point. The thinking is the point. Pick a problem that has happened more than once. Something that frustrated you or cost you money or time. Work backwards from there. You might not like what you find. The root cause is often something you have been avoiding or something that requires real effort to change. That is normal. Finding it is still better than not finding it. What to do this week First, write down the last three things that went wrong in your business. Not vague frustrations. Specific incidents. A missed deadline, a client complaint, a mistake that needed fixing. Second, pick the one that bothers you most and run the 5 Whys on it. Write each answer down. Do not stop until you hit something you can actually change. Third, decide whether you are going to fix it or accept it. Both are valid choices. But make it a conscious decision, not a default.