How to motivate colleagues to use 8D method or similar

Well, its hard to communicate with no "jargon" at all. I don't think "5-why" or "fishbone diagram" is too terribly jargony or technical. If that's too hard for the folks doing RCA then maybe we have bigger problems.

well this is going to be inflammatory but if your using fishbone diagrams all is lost anyway

I've never liked the tool but it was pitched as a method to identify POSSIBLE root causes among the "usual suspects" when the team was clueless as to where to start - would you please elaborate?

It is opinion driven vs. data/evidence driven. There are more efficient/effective ways to get to the root cause.

fishbone diagrams while well intended, break the cause and effect chain and are really only encourage guessing. Then when you have a bajillion potential causes, it doesn't help you at all decide how to test for any of them. The only strategy it suggests is one factor at a time testing or go fix everything or the dreaded multi-colored voting dots. And most of the time with complex physics problems the actual cause isn't even on the blasted thing. With people problems personal biases often simply keep real causes of it. There is a better scientifically based way to deconstruct a Problem. 5-why is a decent framework of working through the causal levels but why is a weak question and without adequate study designs there is no real way to answer the question. I've attached a paper I wrote several years ago regarding the weaknesses of the f-bone diagram. I have posted presentations here before discussing the alternative approach and if I find time later I will post some of them in the resources section.

Pau Calvo said:

I hope that you could shear your experiences.

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Another thread that derails in the tools advantages/disadvantages. Any organization that is not totally dysfunctional should embrace the concept that significant systemic issues leading to loss of efficiency, quality escapes and customer dissatisfaction should be dealt with, in order to prevent it's recurrence. If your leadership agrees with that basic premise, then they should embrace means to understand the underlying contributing factors of such losses and support the goal of stopping repeat "offenses".

The tools are much less critical than the final goal. So, focus less on the techniques and more on educating the workforce on what the objective is.
But, if you detect that the workforce and the leadership are not really aligned with the goal of prevention of problems, that is a clear sign of organizational dysfunction that can not be overcomed.

Further, every organization goes through a quality maturity journey; in my experience it is counterproductive to attempt the deployment of sophisticated tools in organizations that are still crawling in their quality system development.

Good luck.

Interesting threads often branch. If appropriate we can break out the ‘tool’ discussion in a separate thread.

I agree that without a real commitment to quality we are doomed and the tools don’t matter. Yet once you have a commitment the right tools are make or break. In my experience. Both are necessary and neither is sufficient on their own.

I have a lot of respect for Bev, and usually agree with her. But......

It's not a tool I use often, but IMO to suggest there is never a situation where a fishbone diagram can be helpful is going too far. Same with suggesting that "why" is a "weak question".

I can give an example where almost any of the most popular quality tools are both helpful or unhelpful or even wildly inappropriate.

I don't often use my 90 degree angled Phillips screwdriver or ratchet universal joint, but sometimes it is just the right tool.

Bev D said:

I've attached a paper I wrote several years ago regarding the weaknesses of the f-bone diagram. I have posted presentations here before discussing the alternative approach and if I find time later I will post some of them in the resources section.

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In your paper, you mentioned a Y-X approach. I don't recognize it by that name, but recognize your description of making splits and using a process of elimination. That approach has been used by Shainin and is detailed in the book Statistical Engineering. Is that what you mean by Y-X?

Mike S. said:

It's not a tool I use often, but IMO to suggest there is never a situation where a fishbone diagram can be helpful is going too far. Same with suggesting that "why" is a "weak question".

I can give an example where almost any of the most popular quality tools are both helpful or unhelpful or even wildly inappropriate.

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I am a bit of a heretic in many circles - I try to challenge the normative thinking and get people to really think about things. same here. I think that once you investigate the alternatives you will find them very powerful and you might revisit your opinions. I don't mean this in a pejorative way, but a person who grew up riding horses was against cars until they 'got it'. usually people have to experience a different way in order to see the weaknesses in the current way.