Why Ask Why?

Young kids like to ask the question “why.” There’s a game most of them seem to love to play, and apparently it’s super duper fun for the kids, albeit considerably less fun for their parents.

The game is to ask why, then get an answer, and then ask why that’s the case. Then, get an answer to that question, and repeat ad nauseam.

These annoying kids (myself very much included) might be onto something.

If you’re a Gen Xer (or an elder millennial, or a boomer) you certainly remember this cringe-worthy campaign from Budweiser, about its new beer, Bud Dry:

To be frank, I have a lot of why questions immediately after watching this video. One of them is: why did anyone think “why ask why?” was a good slogan for a beer? As far as beverage marketing fails go, this isn’t New Coke level bad, but it’s still pretty awful.

Still, it’s a great opportunity for me to answer the question posed: “Why ask why?”

So… why?

Wanting to know why something is a certain way is an indication that you’re curious. Zooming out 30,000 feet, curiosity is the spark that leads to all sorts of improvements in the human condition.

We humans were curious about fire, and we eventually figured out how to control it. It’s been largely uphill for us since then.

All of this begins with wondering why, and then seeking to answer that question.

During the 1930s in Japan, a fellow by the name of Sakichi Toyoda developed a simple technique designed to help his Toyoda Automatic Loom Works (the spelling switched to Toyota just before they switched to car manufacturing later in the decade).

This technique came to be known as The 5 Whys. This was a part of a larger principle Toyoda followed called Kaizen, a practice of continuous improvement. The 5 Whys began with a very surface-level question, something like: why did the conveyer belt stop?

Well, see, the conveyer belt stopped because a worker pressed a quality control button, and that button stopped the entire assembly line’s production in an instant.

All right, then: why did they press that button? Well, it turns out that the worker saw a particular type of defect in a part that could prove catastrophic if the car was completed.

Okay, but why did that defected part end up on the line? Shouldn’t that have been caught long before it made it to the assembly line? Well yes, it really should have, but it turns out that one of the machines that manufactured that part was jammed up and not performing up to standards. There was some kind of bug in there.

Notice that we’re now 3 whys in, and we’re just starting to get to the core of the issue here.

You might follow up with another why, like why the machine got jammed in the first place. The further back you go toward the source, the more problems you seem to be able to solve. Asking why in the first place opens the door to further discovery.

Incidentally, this is essentially what science is. By repeatedly asking "Why?", scientists seek to gradually peel away layer after layer. Our underlying reality doesn’t look anything like the surface reality, so we have to continue to refine how we think the universe works.

Our view is always incomplete, too, so it’s helpful to keep in mind that there might be more hidden under the surface with any problem.

Jiu jitsu is a form of science, too. I’m constantly asking why a technique works or doesn’t work, going all the way down to the core of the martial art: anatomy and Newtonian physics. The better I understand these fundamentals, the better I understand jiu jitsu.

Does knowing all this give you a little bit of a different perspective on little kids who endlessly ask why? Do you ever use a technique like this in your daily life?