Root Cause Analysis and The Crying Baby

Good problem solving always involves getting to the root of the problem.  Treat the disease, not the symptom.  You can't just pull the head off the weed.  Avoid "Band-Aide" fixes.  You get the idea.

In order to really, truly, solve a problem and not just mask it you need to get to the bottom of the issue.  To the root.

This leads us back to The Toyota Way to look at how to really analyze, understand and solve a problem.

Liker, J. The Toyota Way. pp 256. 2004.

The basis for this process is that you need to first understand a problem and then find your way to the root cause of the problem.  So let's begin.

"It's 2 AM and I'm awake and staring at a crying baby."  This is a problem.  At 2 AM it is seems like huge problem.  It's also a vague problem.  A baby crying unto itself is not a problem.  Baby's cry to communicate.

The first step in Toyota's problem solving process is developing a thorough understanding of the problem and the ramifications of the problem.  They call it getting to the "True Problem".

So what is the problem? 

To get to the True Problem, you need to ask the question "What is the result of this?"

Point of Recognition: Crib, the Baby is crying often during the night.

Therefore: I have to get up, my husband wakes, the baby isn't well rested.
Therefore: Everyone is tired, sleep deprived and frustrated.
You could take this further and look at the results of us being tired, but we'll stop here for now. You get the idea.

So the True Problem is that we are tired, sleep deprived and frustrated. It's possible that there are alternate reasons for this, stress at work, physical discomfort etc.  However, if I were to graph our hours of uninterrupted sleep, you would see a significant drop off right around the time we welcomed Monkey into the world. For simplicity here, we'll only do the root cause analysis on the baby related sleep interruptions.

Ideally to analyze a problem you go directly to where the problem is occurring, Go to Gemba.  In this case, I'm living it.  Every night.  I don't recommend trying to analyze this problem crib side in the middle of the night.  If you do, it will likely go something like this:

Problem: The baby's crying

Why?  How am I supposed to know, I don't speak baby.

Why? She's hungry or wet or lonely or too cold or too warm

Quick! Change her and feed her while singing her favorite song.  Wake up husband to dig space heater out of basement. I have no idea whats wrong, but one of these things will make her stop crying.

No, this is a rational process that requires rational thought.  You are a better person than I if you can achieve this half asleep holding a crying infant.

I suggest instead you use an After Action Review, conducted quietly during nap time or after the little Monkey has gone down for the "night".  But to do this, you need a record of what actually happens.  You will not remember what Monday night was like on Friday.  To gather this data, I created a visual tracking board that looks something like this:

It has the time of day across the top and the days down the side.  It's easy to use, simply color in the boxes.  You can track as much or as little data as you like.  In our case, blue is sleep, green is feeding, orange is activities and the x's are diaper changes.  I also leave notes in the margin for things like vaccinations, illnesses, travel, anything out of the ordinary.  This will allow you to easily see patterns in behavior and quickly identify macro trends.

You can download a pdf copy of the template here: http://goo.gl/2RYS3g

Now we have some data, Let's Get to the Root Cause - On to the Five Whys

Problem Statement:  My family is tired and frustrated.

Why? We are unable to get sufficient uninterrupted sleep.
Why? Baby wakes every 1 - 2 hours
Why? Baby is over tired (I had to consult some sleep experts to figure this one out,  due to a language barrier I couldn't just ask the little Monkey)
Why? Insufficient naping, Too long between last nap and bed time, Too late bed time. (As shown on tracking chart)
Why? Nap schedule not enforced, Bedtime not adjusted for age.

Why? Mama didn't do her homework.

So as you can see, the real cause of the my sleep deprivation is not that Monkey is hungry or tired or cold.
   

It's that I have no idea what I'm doing.