24/08/2026
There's a moment every leader recognises. A problem you solved eight weeks ago is back on the agenda, wearing a slightly different hat. Everyone round the table half-remembers dealing with it. Nobody can quite say what changed. And you have forty minutes to get through six other items.
Nine times out of ten, that problem was never solved. It was patched.
Here is how it happens. A problem surfaces. Someone offers the first plausible explanation. Everyone nods — because it sounds right, and because the meeting is already running long. A fix gets agreed. Everybody leaves feeling productive. Four weeks later you are all back in the same room having the same conversation.
Taiichi Ohno built the Toyota Production System on a discipline that costs nothing and almost nobody sustains: ask why five times before you touch anything. Not because five is a magic number — sometimes it's three, sometimes it's seven — but because you keep going until you reach something that, if you changed it, would stop the problem returning.
Most teams stop at the second why. And the second why is almost never something you can actually fix.
In this free hour, we will work through the following agenda:
• Why it matters — what recurring problems quietly cost you in hours, in credibility, and in the energy of the people who keep raising them
• How to get past the first answer — running the 5 Whys properly, with evidence at each step rather than assumption, and knowing when you've actually reached the root
• How to run the room — facilitating so the team finds the answer, instead of waiting for you to supply it
• How to make it stick — accountability that survives the end of the meeting, and metrics the team owns rather than reports
There is a harder truth inside Module 4, and it is worth naming. The reason teams stop at the second why is very often the person running the room. When the leader supplies the answer, the team stops looking for it. Every time you fill the silence, you are training them to bring you problems rather than solutions.
The strongest teams are not the ones with the fewest problems. They are the ones that solve a problem once.
Sixty minutes. Free. Real content from a live programme. This one runs at 7 PM deliberately, so colleagues joining us from outside Europe can be in the room too. Come and join industry leaders, build your network, and take something home you can use on Thursday morning.
Register for Wednesday, 7 PM: https://campus.kingstowncollege.ie/e/6a45397df398a66358fb14e8?