[MUSIC] How do we get to delve deeper and understand wicked problems? One of the tools which was actually developed by Toyota is called the 5 whys. Some people say it's the 3 whys or the 7 whys, but it's a tool heuristic, rule of thumb, an exercise that we can use to try and unpack problems and get to deeper levels of understanding of the nature of these problems. So I'll give a recent example from last year. I was taking my son to school and run out of petrol and we're stuck on the road and we have to walk more than a kilometer to the gas station, to get us on road to school. And clearly, he was very late and we were dangerously walking on the side of the road with cars whizzing by. So if I ask myself, well why did I run out of petrol? The first set of whys I might say well, there no petrol in the tank. And why was there no petrol in the tank? Well, I didn't look at the fuel gauge. Well, why didn't I look at the fuel gauge? Well, I was distracted and rushed. Well, why was distracted and rushed? Because I'm trying to do too many things in my life, I'm too rushed and too over committed at work and trying to be a good father and trying to do all of these things. And ask myself, why have I designed my life in that way? I could start to get to some much deeper level questions of understanding the nature of why I ended up on the side of the road in a dangerous situation with my son. And start to think about ways in which I might prevent doing that in future, other than just well, I need to fill up my tank. Yes, I need to fill up my tank, but that might not be helpful when all all these other things in my life continue to be happening. So it opens up different kinds of solutions and something that maybe more long lasting than setting a note for myself that says fill your tank in front of my steering wheel. The 5 Whys can also be applied to kind of much greater problems. So let's take another example. Let's take an example of literacy in the world. So there are many children who don't have the opportunity to learn how to read. And we can ask ourselves well first level of why, why can't they get the opportunity to learn how to read? Well, first answer could be well there are no schools or teachers near to where they live. Well, why are there no schools or teachers near to where they live, or libraries? The next question might be answered by saying well, the government does not have enough resources to build schools and employ teachers in these regions. And ask ourselves well why does the government not have resources? Well the answer might be, well education is quite expensive. Ask ourselves, well why is education so expensive? Well the ways we've designed education systems is very human resource intensive, lots of infrastructure. And so we get to some deeper level questions about what might be a simple answer. Well, let's teach children to learn how to read by giving them books and someone to help them read. If we go back to the top level again and say, well, why do children not have the opportunity to read? We might start answering the question different ways and start exploring and exposing different parts of the system. So we might say well children who are not well nourished don't have the ability to concentrate sufficiently in order to gain the tools of literacy. And we might be getting down to questions about biology and nutrition and access to adequate food supplies and other parts of the economy, that might be an important part of answering this question of literacy. And so we might find that else working on many different aspects of the system to look at the issue of literacy, economics, politics, education for examples. Finally, what we seem to do in the human world is develop lots of complicated solutions to these complex problems. And that leaves us, sometimes, with very inadequate ways of solving these wicked problems. And inadequate in ways that sometimes we might be having marginal improvements to very small parts of the systems at best. And at worst, actually worsening situations and further entrenching some of the root causes of why these problems exist in the first place. In our next video, we're going to be looking at a case of mothers2mothers to start to look at what solving what might be a simple problem preventing the transmission of HIV from mothers to children. But really start to unpack the complexity of the problem and the kinds of ways that this organization mothers2mothers started to approach it. [MUSIC]