Troubleshooting Techniques: Asking the right questions | Tech, No Babel

Transcript:I was thinking about troubleshooting in light of an experience that happened to me not long ago. Someone was having a problem, and without thinking, I just asked a question. You really need to think about the power of questions. Questions can really influence the way things are going. One good example of this, is in the movie, The Matrix. Trinity, not the name of this company that I work for, Trinity, not my daughter either, not that Trinity. Trinity, again, not the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but the character in this movie the Matrix, is talking to Neo, and asks, basically she says, “It’s the question that drives us. Do you know the question Neo?”
While it goes into some interesting things from there, that’s a great thing to remember, do you know the question? Let me start off by talking about the question that you should start off your troubleshooting with, because it will influence everything else. That is, what’s it doing, or not doing? Let’s break that down. What’s it doing? If something is broken, it is doing something it’s not supposed to. Magic smoke is coming out of it. I don’t think that LED is supposed to blink, etc. It’s doing something it’s not supposed to, or the opposite. It’s not doing something it is supposed to do. There is no LED on the front anymore. It used to put out video. The audio used to sound good, but now it sounds distorted.
What’s it doing, or not doing? Just by asking that question, you eliminate a bunch of stuff that could be wrong. If you ask, what’s it doing, or not doing, and they say, “Well, the LED is blinking.” You’ve automatically eliminated that this should be plugged into power, but it’s not plugged into power. You’ve eliminated that problem, unless it’s got a battery back up, but depending on the piece, that’s what you’ve done. Troubleshooting sometimes can be like a game of Guess Who. If you are familiar with this game, I was actually pretty good at it, and the reason is, I knew how to ask questions.
As you’re troubleshooting, you can ask questions to eliminate problems. You want to eliminate the biggest things first. Let’s say that you’re troubleshooting a car for example. What’s it do, or not do? It doesn’t drive anymore. Okay, does it turn on? Yes. Okay, that takes you a totally different direction than, no it doesn’t. You’ve just eliminated half of the possible problems. You can narrow it down from there. That’s why questions are so important. It could be that you’re troubleshooting with someone over the phone, over Skype, etc., but it could be that you’re asking yourself these questions.
If this is true, what does that mean? Troubleshooting becomes kind of a logic game. I don’t know if you’re familiar with logic games, but you’re probably familiar with one in particular, and that is one that used to come with Microsoft Windows, Minesweeper. Minesweeper is a classic example of a logic game. You start off by clicking a few places. That’s random. That’s unforeseen, but once you do, you see numbers. A one means, that there is a mine touching the number one in one of the, one, two, three, four, one of the eight possible areas. It could be touching a corner, it could be touching a side, top, bottom, etc. There are four possible places where there’s a mine.
When you combine one number with another number adjacent to it, you start to see a pattern. If there’s a one here, a one here, a one here, a one here, a one here, and right here, that’s not touching anything else other than the one, then it has to be the one catty corner. It’s a logic game. Troubleshooting is a logic game. You have to think, okay, when I’m formulating my hypothesis about what’s wrong, what does that automatically say that I’m not stating? Going back to the power example, if I think, okay there’s something wrong with the power, that can illustrate, or that can tell me a little bit more about other things. If I’m not getting enough power, I might still see something. I might still see some indication, but if I’m getting no power, I shouldn’t see anything. If I do, that’s wrong.
A logic game is putting together disparate pieces to form something that absolutely makes sense. It’s kind of like what Sherlock Holmes used to say that, “You eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains, however improbable, is the solution.” You eliminate the impossible. You combine facts that you know, to eliminate the impossible. That’s what questions do. They are a great tool in troubleshooting. They’re a great tool in life, and they will enable you to figure out what is going wrong in your situation.
I hope that helped you. I hope that now you’re thinking, okay, what questions haven’t I been asking, that aren’t giving me the appropriate information I need to combine to form my hypothesis?