To accelerate, Lean Startups need a process that provides a natural feedback loop. When you're going too fast, you cause more problems. Adaptive processes force you to slow down and invest in preventing the kinds of problems that are currently wasting time. As those preventive efforts pay off, you naturally speed up again.

Let's return to the question of having a training program for new employees. Without a program, new employees will make mistakes while in their learning curve that will require assistance and intervention from other team members, slowing everyone down. How do you decide if the investment in training is worth the benefit of speed due to reduced interruptions? Figuring this out from a top-down perspective is challenging, because it requires estimating two completely unknown quantities: how much it will cost to build an unknown program against an unknown benefit you might reap. Even worse, the traditional way to make these kinds of decisions is decidedly large-batch thinking. A company either has an elaborate training program or it does not. Until they can justify the return on investment from building a full program, most companies generally do nothing.

The alternative is to use a system called the Five Whys to make incremental investments and evolve a startup's processes gradually. The core idea of Five Whys is to tie investments directly to the prevention of the most problematic symptoms. The system takes its name from the investigative method of asking the question "Why?" five times to understand what has happened (the root cause). If you've ever had to answer a precocious child who wants to know "Why is the sky blue?" and keeps asking "Why?" after each answer, you're familiar with it. This technique was developed as a systematic problem-solving tool by Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System. I have adapted it for use in the Lean Startup model with a few changes designed specifically for startups.