A Love for Troubleshooting: Skill Development through Documentation with David Klee (1/2)

Can writing documentation beef up your troubleshooting skills?

This week in episode 315 David Klee returns to explore the connection between effective troubleshooting and documentation. We’ll discuss appropriate levels of detail for documentation and explore it as a skill building exercise. Listen closely to hear why good documentation can make all the difference in a regulatory compliance audit as well as in emergency situations. Also, we’ll talk through some interview questions you can ask to determine the value of good documentation within an organization.

Original Recording Date: 01-20-2025

Topics – An Exploration of Troubleshooting, Pre-requisites for Effective Troubleshooting, What Should Be Documented, Forms of Documentation and Emergency Preparedness, Interview Questions and Employer Perceptions

2:32 – An Exploration of Troubleshooting

• David Klee is a returning guest and the owner and chief architect at Heraflux Technologies. If you missed the previous discussions with David, you can find them below:
  • Episode 119 – Tinkering into Specialty with David Klee (1/2)
  • Episode 120 – A Time to Build with David Klee (2/2)
  • Episode 309 – The Consulting Life: Managing Travel and Becoming a Better Communicator with David Klee (1/2)
  • Episode 310 – Finding a Better Way: Contracting, Independence, and a Consultant’s Reputation with David Klee (2/2)
• David approached us about an idea for another topic to explore. After many years in the industry (11 of them as a business owner), David began to think about patterns he has seen and what has made him and many others successful.
  • “What has actually made this work? And it’s the art and the science and the luck of troubleshooting…. What makes some of the best technologists arguably some of the best troubleshooters in the world, and then how do you apply that to life? …There’s a lot more than just knowing a technical feature or two or being able to Google faster than the person next to you. I have a lot of fun with this topic.” – David Klee, framing our discussion
• Philosophically, David believes troubleshooting is as much an art as it is a science. There is a foundation one needs to be a good troubleshooter, and David tells us this stems from our childhood curiosity about why things do what they do.
  • David tells the story of learning to use a screwdriver at age 5, taking the family’s VCR apart, and successfully putting it back together again (which may or may not have landed him in trouble).
  • Over time some people have a constant need to know why something is what is / why it works the way it does. David sees this present in some people but not all people.
  • “When you look at those that are truly great at an industry…they want to know why, and they don’t stop until they know why.” – David Klee
  • David mentions the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which speaks to breaking up the things we know and don’t know into 4 quadrants:
    • Unknown unknowns are the things that get people into trouble because they think they know these but do not
    • Known unknowns – David considers this area enlightenment in IT and a way to know where the boundaries are
    • “Unknown knowns are