“What Changed?”

A lot of times–a very lot of times–when something that was working is not not working, folks will ask, “what changed?”

“What changed” is not troubleshooting. You are not proposing a theory (other than, “something changed,” which is pretty obvious), and you can’t usually run any tests to tell you what changed. Sometimes, “what changed” can cue some good troubleshooting.

That’s a statement of what changed, but it’s also a valid, testable hypothesis. You may have internally asked yourself “what changed?” but you didn’t actually spend a lot of time trying to answer that question. Instead, you worked through what you knew about the system’s workings, and stated a theory that you can now test.

With more complex systems, people can spend more time figuring out “what changed,” and attempting to on-change it, than they might have spent just troubleshooting the actual problem. “What changed” is a shortcut; an alternative to troubleshooting, and when it’s a question quickly answered and quickly resolved, it’s a good shortcut. But it’s still not troubleshooting; it’s an alternate way of solving the problem. On the plus side, it often requires less knowledge of how the problem system actually works, which is a reason I suspect people kind of default to “what changed” in the first place: they don’t know enough about how the system works to actually troubleshoot it, and so the “what changed” shortcut becomes their primary mechanism for resolving the problem.

I don’t mean to come off as being anti-“what changed.” I’m not. It can be a useful mechanism, especially–again–when it’s a true shortcut that’s quickly answered and quickly resolved. I just want you to recognize that being able to answer “what changed?” does not make you a good troubleshooter, and troubleshooting is the more valuable skill. Here’s why: sometimes, “what changed” was something intentional. Yes, it make have broken something, but simply “undoing” the change isn’t an option. In those cases, the shortcut isn’t as useful for solving the problem. Troubleshooting still would be.