--- title: "The first five Whys" url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-first-five-whys.md" canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-first-five-whys.html" published: "2009-09-05T16:02:14+00:00" updated: "2014-05-22T22:34:02.887000+00:00" tags: [] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Roy Osherove applies the Five Whys to explain why he started this blog: most software team leads lack the people skills to drive and grow their teams." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # The first five Whys You might also like to: - Read about [the three team phases](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-3-maturity-stages-of-a-software-team-and-how-scrum-fails.html) your team might be in. - Read posts on [the chaos phase](https://www.5whys.com/articles/category/First+Steps+during+chaos), the [learning phase](https://www.5whys.com/articles/category/Learning+Phase), or the [self-leading phase](https://www.5whys.com/articles/category/Self-Leading+Phase).  **1) Why create this blog in the first place?** Because I wanted new team leads and want-to-be team leads (as well as existing want-to-learn team leads) to have a good blog to go to and find out some great techniques for managing and driving software people. **2) Why?** Because 99% of team leads I’ve seen in the wild seem to have no idea what it is that drives people, or how to drive the things that **they** believe in inside the company. **3) Why?** Because lots of people seem to give no importance to the human-to-human techniques it takes to lead a great team, not just technical practices. **4) Why?** Because no one has ever put a great deal of emphasis on this in the software industry. What they did do is put emphasis on the technical emphasis of software leadership. **5) Why?** Because software is a pretty new profession, and we are all learning as we go. We tried to learn from other industries and only in the past few years are the successful practices from manufacturing and production starting to cross over into the software business. And those practices (the successful ones, at least) give high value to coaching and driving people, as opposed to “resources”. **What to do now:** - Read about [the three team phases](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-3-maturity-stages-of-a-software-team-and-how-scrum-fails.html) your team might be in. - Read posts on [the chaos phase](https://www.5whys.com/articles/category/First+Steps+during+chaos), the [learning phase](https://www.5whys.com/articles/category/Learning+Phase), or the [self-leading phase](https://www.5whys.com/articles/category/Self-Leading+Phase). ## Read next - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.5whys.com/articles/elastic-leadership.html): Roy Osherove defines Elastic Leadership, adapting your leadership style to the team's phase, from chaos to learning to self-leading, and why it is scary. - [A simple way to know you're missing some leadership skills](https://www.5whys.com/articles/a-simple-way-to-know-youre-missing-some-leadership-skills.html): Why a team lead who can't get the team to follow even simple practices is likely missing people and leadership skills, not technical knowledge. - [Elastic Leadership Team Survival Vs. Team Chaos Vs. Cynefin](https://www.5whys.com/articles/elastic-leadership-team-survival-vs-team-chaos-vs-cynefin.html): Why the first phase of Elastic Leadership was renamed from chaos to survival to avoid clashing with Cynefin, and how the three team phases are defined. --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/