Troubleshooting Computers Made Me a Better Patient
Unfortunately, I’ve spent the last few days hospitalized. It doesn’t appear to be serious, the type of mundane virus or bacteria that can wreak havoc on the immunocompromised. But my stay here has given me an opportunity to watch the troubleshooting process in a different field. The art of troubleshooting isn’t an innate skill. It’s one that crafts-people develop over time. They can think about the process, they can articulate how they go about it and their process sets up an easy way to refute bad theories or continue investigating theories with a lead.
I’ve always had this issue accepting that where I work is a smaller representation of society as a whole. “Not everyone at work is a great troubleshooter, but that’s not the case in medicine!” Unfortunately, I am wrong. But if you can abstract your troubleshooting process, I assure you it can be applied to any field. Anywhere.
Systems are Complicated, Break Them Up
If you’ve ever had to troubleshoot a large complex system, I think one of the things you find out is that it’s almost impossible to do. What you don’t consider is that with enough examination, any system is likely large and complex. It’s the distance you’re viewing it from that makes its complexity visible.
When you come into a problem, the first thing you have to think about is how that problem breaks up into different spaces or components. Where are the hand-off points and at what moment can we determine where the cause lies. Sometimes you do this innately when you’re well-versed with a system, but when you get into systems you don’t know you often ditch this specific skill. For example, when you’re troubleshooting your web browsing what are the things you check for?
- Am I connected to the Internet? Meaning, can I get anywhere on the web?
This makes you divide the problem in half. If you can’t get to the Internet at all, you’re now thinking that your focus should be on things that are necessary beforeconnecting to the Internet. You might do ask questions like:
- Can I connect to other machines on my local network?
- Can I resolve DNS hostnames?
- Is my router working?
Answering these questions not only moves you steps closer to figuring out the answer, but it also helps you eliminate other theories. Your friend says “I can’t get to that website either!” That’s fine. But you can’t get to any website. So obviously you and your friend have two different issues. Once you solve your issue with Internet connectivity, you might be on the same page, but for now you’ve got your own sets of problems.
It also helps you to gauge how many problems you might be dealing with. In addition to the Internet connectivity problem, let’s say you have an issue launching Power Point. It throws a weird cryptic error.
- Is it possible that the Internet error is causing this?
- Have you seen this same error before with Internet connectivity?
This helps set the stage for future questions about symptoms that are happening at the same time but might have different sources. It might be easy to conclude “Fix the Internet and PowerPoint should start working.” But if you know that PowerPoint isn’t dependent on the Internet, then it could be a bad idea to tie these things together.
After you break them up solve the individual problems
Once you break the systems up, you might have a bunch of separate problems. If you’re well-versed in the system, you might be able to separate the problems into contributing and non-contributing issues. For example, our PowerPoint issue isn’t something we need to solve, because we know it isn’t contributing to our core problem.
You have to order the problems in order to solve them in the correct order. If you don’t have Internet connectivity at all, then it doesn’t make sense confirming that you can resolve server names. If you solve the Internet issues, what are the things you’re expecting to clear up? What does it mean if they don’t clear up? What are the next steps for that?
Before you begin solving the individual problems, have a theory on what solving that problem should do to the system. What symptoms are you expecting to clear up? What does it mean if specific symptoms don’t go away and how does that alter your troubleshooting plan?
You can use this in everything
I used technology in my examples because it’s what I know. But if you think abstractly you can use these same processes to generate questions about your car repair, your home fixes, your medical care.
“What do we think are causing these symptoms? Can we test for that? If we confirm that’s the cause how do we treat that? How soon do we expect symptoms to subside? If they don’t subside what could that mean?”
When you can stop being a passenger in these sorts of engagements, it can help you feel more confident about the outcomes, more reasoned in your decision making and more at peace with whatever money you’re shelling out.
