Ask the 5 whys

The post by Molly is a very significant one because we all experience unhappiness at work. And it seems like as the organisation (on the external) gets more successful, happiness at work seems to be decreasing. During our course today, we discussed a little of this and we used the 5 whys concept to find out the underlying reason.
The 5 whys is actually a simple process to continue asking "why" until you hit the root reason of the phenomenon. This is neccesary because the phenomenon we observe is probably just the symptom, and not the real cause. For example, if a student always comes late to class, the obvious think is just to think that the student is not disciplined and punish him for that but is that really addressing the cause?