Sometimes the simplest tools, such as the "three whys" exercise, bring the most value. Simply asking “why?” can make or break a new venture or help an established social impact project achieve its goals.

When I teach systems-led leadership to students, organizational leaders, and budding social entrepreneurs, I sometimes take them through a “triple why” activity as a means of surfacing values, root causes, and barriers to their goals. This process takes inspiration from the “five whys” process developed in the 1930s by Sakichi Toyoda as a means of identifying the root cause of mechanical issues. It takes that root cause usage and spreads that line of questioning into different areas: Why do you care about something, why is something happening, and why hasn’t it been solved yet?

You could ask the “whys” three times, five times, two times, 12 times—it’s really up to you! The process is not designed to get to perfect answers but instead to drive future learning and to spark conversations about overlooked assumptions or priorities. Therefore, the exercise is most valuable when done in a team, so people can compare and contrast answers, revealing individual biases, opinions, and hopes in the process. You might choose to do all three questions in a row, focus on the one that your team needs right now, or spread the activity over time. It’s up to you!

Here are the questions for the "three whys" exercise:

Why do I care about this?

This question reveals underlying motivations, values, and goals, and can help reframe action through secondary questions like if those are our motivations, is this work really what would best serve us at this time?

Why is this happening?

This question begins the process of revealing some of the causes of a problem, areas for deeper exploration, or possibilities for problem reframing.

Why haven’t we solved it yet?

This question can be framed to reveal further root causes and external barriers to change, or it can be used to reveal internal systems issues that need to be addressed within an organization or team.

Read the full article about the "three whys" exercise by Daniela Papi-Thornton at Stanford Social Innovation Review.