The Right Questions, A Universal Troubleshooting Guide

Ready to practice what you’ve learned from The Art of Troubleshooting? Then grab The Right Questions, my free printable troubleshooting guide! There are 2 versions: a compact 1-pager and one with larger type for double-sided printing. Only the layout is different, both versions contain the same insightful questions that will get you going again. See the bottom of this page for more tips on how to use the guide.

Download The Right Questions, A Universal Troubleshooting Guide
Single-page PDF version	Double-sided PDF version

*** Printing Tip: printers differ in how close to the edge of the paper they can print. To ensure the guide fits properly on the page, look for printing options like “print entire image,” “scale to fit paper,” etc. ***

How To Use The Guide

Answering The Right Questions can eventually bring any troubleshooting problem to its knees. Yep, I said “any!” It was my original thesis and, over the course of writing The Art Of Troubleshooting, I’ve become even more convinced that there is a universal set of strategies that can be applied to any failure that comes your way. This is that list, everything I’ve learned, distilled down to a single sheet of paper. And you can have it for free.

Lucky you.

You may have read “One-size-doesn’t-fit-all,” where I argue that there can’t realistically be a line-by-line troubleshooting recipe for all situations. Therefore, this isn’t a serial checklist type of guide, where you go in order from Step #1 to #2 to #3, etc. Not all of these questions will yield results every time. If a query turns up nothing, simply move on to the next one. However, there’s bound to be at least one question on this list that will set you off in the right direction! I think this “question-based troubleshooting” method is powerful for another reason: as Virginia Satir discovered, there’s nothing like a jarring question to get you out of a rut.

I’ve organized the questions using the same structure as the material on this web site: strategies, virtues, and “cleaning up.” To jumpstart your problem-solving, begin with “Troubleshooting Basics” and then move on to “More Strategy Questions.” As you go along, also pay attention to the “Virtues of the Troubleshooter” listed in blue around the edge. The green section contains questions to ask before you begin a specific repair. The last column is titled “Cleaning Up”: these are the questions you should be asking yourself after you’ve fixed something (to prevent recurrence).

Tell Me What Happened

I would love to hear your feedback, especially if you’ve used the questions to troubleshoot a particular problem. Using the comments section below, let me know how it goes and if you have any suggestions on how to make the guide even better!