Here you’ll find articles about my theory of fixing things, economic considerations, tools, and the origin of the project:
- The Starting Line: why I decided to begin the blog (and how it relates to the book).
- The Big Idea: explains my troubleshooting philosophy of “strategies, virtues, and cleaning up” and why the content is divided along those lines. A call to arms and a bird’s-eye view.
- One-size-doesn’t-fit-all: matching problems with strategies. Why there isn’t a single troubleshooting script for all situations.
- The Economics Of Troubleshooting: choosing the right repair within the constraints of your resources. Being aware of what you are giving up by pursuing a particular fix (“opportunity costs”).
- The Right Tool For The Job: the correct tools are crucial for discovering the cause as well as executing a fix.
- 10 Troubleshooting Lessons From Discovery’s Gold Rush: a reality TV show about gold mining has much to teach us about failure, repair, and the value of taking action.
- Industrial Past And Present: thoughts on the industrial revolution and its relationship to troubleshooting, prompted by a visit to The Henry Ford.
- There’s A Fine Line Between Engineering, Invention, And Troubleshooting: the Machine Model binds these disciplines together in a fascinating and complicated way.
- Beginnings, Middles, And Ends: the problems encountered during the various stages of a machine’s operation and lifecycle.
- When Documentation Becomes Art: the record of a fix-it project is turned into an inspiring creation.
- You Won’t Guess The Hard Part: why it’s difficult to predict what’s going to trip up a repair project.
- Is Troubleshooting A Science?: how the scientific method interacts with repair.
The strategies below are time-tested, practical recipes for troubleshooting:
- The Order Of Things: changing the sequence of a machine’s startup or workflow can make a big difference.
- Skillful Questioning, Part 1 and Part 2: when interviewing people about breakdowns, learn how to find clarity and uncover hidden information in their statements.
- Put It Down And Come Back To It Later: the need to step away from a project–you can’t always force a solution.
- Follow The Chain: tracing a problem through a workflow.
- Bare Bones: paring it back to the bare essentials.
- Does It Need To Be Fixed?: making sure a repair is necessary.
- The Phone Is Ringing, So Answer It: listening to what a machine is saying.
- Duplicate The Problem, Part 1 and Part 2: if you can make the failure happen at will, you’ll also know when it’s fixed. Also, Black Boxes and intermittent problems.
- Defaults And Reboots: the advantages of taking a machine back to a more primitive state.
- Change Just One Thing: the need for minimalism so that information can be derived from your actions.
- The Way It Is And The Way It Was: keep track of things as you make a repair.
- Is It Plugged In?: prerequisites for operation. Troubleshooting’s most famous question.
- A Different Point Of View: seeking other perspectives to help you out of a rut.
- Same Symptom, Different Causes: when problems look the same, but they’re really not.
- Improving The Environment: managing when and where you troubleshoot.
- Copy One That Works: a working model can be as good as a manual.
- Let’s Be Reasonable: logical principles and the law of simplicity.
- Know Your Limits: when to call in a pro.
- Where Do I Begin?: starting points for the troubleshooting process.
- What’s Changed?: recent modifications or additions often point the way to the cause.
- Dedicated And Shared Resources: getting your machines to play nicely together.
- A Common Problem: paying attention to context. Pinpoint causes by noticing shared symptoms.
- Clear Up To Here: use the half-splitting method to quickly pinpoint the cause.
- Team Spirit: how to organize a team during a crisis. Plus, the benefits of teamwork for everyday problem-solving, with lessons from the world of “pair programming.”
- Bottlenecks: pinpointing why a system is slow, and making it go faster.
- How Is It Supposed To Work?: knowing how a machine is supposed to function allows you to plot a course between “broken” and “working.”
- Repair Or Replace?: things to consider when deciding whether to fix or replace a broken machine.
- The 50 Percent Rule: problems with a popular rule of thumb used to make the repair or replace decision, along with my suggestion of a better way to resolve the dilemma.
- Talking About Your Problems: how to interact with other troubleshooters. Unexpected upsides when dealing with Customer Service.
- Starting Over: ins and outs of rebuilding and reinstalling.
- Border Lines: boundaries you may find yourself crossing when fixing things. They’re not all technical…
- If You Have To Force It, Something Is Probably Wrong: what should be hard about fixing things.
- What We Bring With Us: “I Want One Of These”: how to prevent those annoying repeat trips to the hardware store.
- What Else Could I Be Doing?: a good question to ask before you start a repair project…
This section is devoted to the behaviors and mindset of a great troubleshooter:
- Skepticism: not getting sucked into other people’s false beliefs.
- Listen Up: using all your senses.
- Curiosity: become interested in the world around you.
- Out Of Your Vulcan Mind: the importance of being organized, systematic, detail-oriented, and logical.
- Creativity: recognizing the difference between machines and the purposes they serve. The many paths you can take to a repair.
- Be Present: keeping yourself externally focused is critical, especially at the beginning of a troubleshooting exercise.
- Setting Boundaries: deliberately choosing your commitments, setting expectations.
After you’ve fixed it, be sure to learn from the experience and make improvements for the future:
- Is This Normal?: an ode to data collection.
- Zen And The Art of Routine Maintenance: eliminate trouble before it arises.
- Storm’s A-comin’: averting disasters.
- Troubleshooting Trees: a method to document and communicate your hard-won repair knowledge.
- Is It Really Fixed?: how to know when you’ve nailed it for good.
- Down To The Roots: using root cause analysis and the 5 Whys method to prevent failures from recurring.
- Moral Authority: using the emotion of a disaster to make meaningful changes.
- Making A List, Checking It Off: the checklist is a simple, yet powerful, way to guide the fix-it process. As a means to prevent trouble, it puts the best way of doing something in the hands of machine operators and designers.
- Failure Most Foul: the unfortunate reality of failures caused by fraud and sabotage.
- Release The Chaos Monkeys: learning important things about machines through stress testing and seeing them “at their worst.”
- You’re Not Done Until You Tell Someone Else: the final step is communicating what was learned.
- The Boy Who Cried Wolf: improperly tuned alerting systems will eventually be ignored.
- Found Objects: my Dad finds a mysterious object in the driveway…
- Did It Ever Work?: questioning a machine’s past performance.
- Network Effects: a meditation on the challenge of scaling networks (both machine and human-based).
- On Selfies And Showboating: Troubleshooting The Imminent Dangers Of “Look At Me!”: social causes of accidents, with strategies for prevention.
- Accident Causes ≠ Preventative Measures: the difference between an accident’s processes and the infinite ways to avoid them in the future.
References:
- Header image: Catalogue Hall at the University Library. [Photograph] Retrieved from the National Library of Norway on Flickr Commons, https://www.flickr.com/photos/national_library_of_norway/9575575220/.
THE ART OF TROUBLESHOOTING 