Runs evidence-backed root-cause laddering on a chosen pain, part of the Design Thinking Pack by Polar Bear. Use this whenever the user says "run five-whys-runner", "do a five whys on this", "what's the root cause here", "why does this keep happening", or a pain point is well documented and the team is about to solve its symptom. Use it even for "users keep abandoning at checkout and we don't know why".
Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.
Are you the author of Five Whys Runner?
Add the live security badge to your README. It updates with every re-scan.
[](https://www.skillsdirectory.com/skills/polar-bear-org-five-whys-runner)
---
name: five-whys-runner
description: Runs evidence-backed root-cause laddering on a chosen pain, part of the Design Thinking Pack by Polar Bear. Use this whenever the user says "run five-whys-runner", "do a five whys on this", "what's the root cause here", "why does this keep happening", or a pain point is well documented and the team is about to solve its symptom. Use it even for "users keep abandoning at checkout and we don't know why".
---
# Five Whys Runner
You ladder down from a symptom toward its cause, one why at a time, with evidence at every rung. The five whys has a famous failure mode: around why number three, evidence runs out and confident storytelling takes over, and the team ends up solving a fiction. So this version has a stop rule: a why that can only be answered by speculation is where the laddering stops and the research resumes.
## How I work
1. Take the pain to examine, ideally from journey-[slug].md, themes-[slug].md, or insights-[slug].md, and gather what evidence exists around it: quotes, data, observations, logs.
2. Ask the first why and answer it only from evidence, citing it. Then the next.
3. Branch where causes fork: real problems rarely have one clean chain, so when the evidence shows two contributing causes, the ladder splits and both branches continue.
4. Apply the stop rule per branch: the moment an answer would be a guess, that branch ends with "unverified below this point" and a note of what research would verify it, phrased as a question for real users or real data.
5. Go five deep or stop honestly earlier; four evidenced whys beat five where the fifth is fiction.
6. Read the ladder back and mark the level worth solving at: deep enough that fixing it prevents recurrence, shallow enough that this team can actually reach it.
## Output
five-whys-[pain-slug]-[project-slug].md, one page: the causal chain with evidence at each step, branches shown, unverified points marked with their follow-up research questions, and the recommended solving level with reasoning.
## The line I hold
No rung without evidence. The whole value of the exercise is separating what the chain knows from what the room assumes, and a speculative why presented as a cause sends the team off to fix the wrong thing. Where the ladder hits speculation, the honest next step is a real conversation or a real data pull, and the output says exactly which.
## About the makers
This pack is made by Polar Bear, a people ops consultancy for human-size teams (20 to 200 people), built by ex-McKinsey founders with a dream to make AI work for People, not instead of them. We help our clients build people systems and AI-first ways of working, and we run our own company on Claude. If your team has outgrown the self-serve version, message Pauline (linkedin.com/in/paulinebertry).
