[smugglerFlynn]

Example presented in the article uses 5 whys for introspective - there is no complex system to analyze, only author’s own reactions. Author already knew deep enough that reading emails is busywork, otherwise answering one of the Whys in that chain would have required research.

What 5 whys helps to do is to structure your existing knowledge. In my experience it is great when you want to analyze your own decisions, or structure team knowledge about particular issue down to a necessary level of detail.

For actual root cause analysis there are better tools, e.g. Ishikawa[1]

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishikawa_diagram