🐟 Fishbone | Toolbox #8

3 min readJun 29, 2021

Go fishing for solutions

The Fishbone is a tool to search for the different causes of a problem.
Also called Ishikawa diagram (after its creator) or cause & effect diagram, this visual tool reminiscent fish skeleton graphically represents the causes leading to a situation or a problem.

🧠 Who: a team or a work group with various profiles
📆 When: before launching a project, when you encounter a difficulty in your activity
⏰ Duration: 50 min
🎯 Objective: discover the root cause of a problem

The course meeting

1️⃣ Define the problem 🚨 (10 min)

The head of the fish represents the problem to be solved. Make sure everyone is on the same page. The clearer and more specific the problem statement, the more effective your Fishbone will be.

2️⃣ Define the causes 🐟 (20 min)

Once the rulesare well defined, you can move on to the brainstorming phase.

To guide participants in generating ideas, you can use categories of potential causes.
Or select more relevant categories based on your business, context and issue.
A category is visually represented by an edge. Choose a color of post-it for each axis to facilitate the discussion phase.

🟨 Environment
— How do your competitors behave?
— How do your customers behave?
— What is the state of the market?

🟧 Employee
— What did you notice about the team members?
— What about the help desk staff?
— Did you notice any shortcomings? (lack of staff, training, skills, communication…)

🟩 Equipment
— What do you think about the equipment that allows you to carry out your activity? (hardware, software, technologies,…)

🟦 Process
— What do you notice about the production process of your product/service?
— What about the methods used to carry out your activity?
— Do you notice any organizational problems?

🟥 Management
— How do you rate the decision-making and team management process?

🟪 Material
— Do you notice any problems with the materials used? (quality, components…)

💡 A detailed analysis will help you better identify the root causes of the problem.

3️⃣ Set priorities 🎯 (20min)

Once the diagram is finalized, you will probably end up with a lot of post-its…

The objective in this last step will be to :
- prioritize the causes,
- identify those on which you can act,
- prioritize those that will have the most effect on the problem.

4 goods reasons to use The Fishbone 👍

Graphically represent and understand the factors that led to an effect.
Order information by prioritizing and classifying it by family.
Improve weaknesses and anticipate problems.
Deepen the understanding of a problem within a team.

The Fishbone workshop is adapted to all the professions of the company. Our advice: it will be more enriching to have people with different profiles or little experience/knowledge of the field.