It’s a common misconception that chief architects know everything better
than “normal” architects—why else would they be the “chief”? Such
thinking is actually pretty far from the truth. Hence, I often introduce
myself as a person who knows the right questions to ask. Wrangling one
more reference from the movie The Matrix, visiting the chief architect
is a bit like visiting the Oracle: you won’t get a straight answer, but
you will hear what you need to hear.
Five Whys
Asking questions isn’t a new technique and has been widely publicized in
the “five whys” approach devised by Sakichi Toyoda as part of the
Toyota Production System. It’s a technique to get to the root cause of an
issue by repeatedly asking why something happened. If your car doesn’t
start, you should keep asking “why” to find out the starter doesn’t
turn because the battery is dead because you left the lights on because
the beeper that warns you of parking with your lights on didn’t sound
because of an electronics problem. So, before you jump-start the
car, you should fix the electronics to keep the problem from happening
again. In Japanese the method is called naze-naze-bunseki (なぜなぜ分析), which roughly translates into “why, why analysis.” I therefore consider the “five whys” more of a guideline to not give up too early—you surely ...
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