September 4, 2025 | Loralai Stevenson

Re-examining Troubleshooting

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the beloved Sherlock Holmes books, famously said in the voice of his character, “Eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Doyle, despite only being the writer of a detective series, was considered so talented in his deductive skill that he was occasionally asked to lend aid to real investigations. His tried and true statement remains as useful to today’s investigations as it did to London’s; especially when it comes to troubleshooting.

Why vs What Allowed in Troubleshooting

For troubleshooting, the central focus is proof more than finding root causes. Troubleshooting, the process that proceeds Root Cause Analysis (RCA) in investigations following equipment failures, is centered around understanding why the equipment failed, as opposed to what allowed the equipment to fail.

This may, at first, seem like an unnecessary distinction, as the phrasing is only minutely different. However, one cannot be effective without the other. Troubleshooting is all about collecting evidence, while RCA is about understanding why that evidence was there in the first place. For example, if troubleshooting discovers that a problem was caused because a piece of equipment was installed backwards, RCA would then discover that the piece of equipment was installed backwards because of a labelling issue, or a lack of supervision.

Without understanding what happened, RCA lacks the evidence necessary to be effective. Corrective actions implemented without evidence for the problem they are trying to solve will rarely generate successful solutions. This is what makes troubleshooting such a vital part of the process; without it, RCA falls apart.

Elementary: Finding out What Happened

In order to do effective equipment troubleshooting, we return to Doyle’s quote and first focus on elimination. After listing possible causes for an incident, those causes must be narrowed down by “eliminating the impossible” using the evidence available. Once only the truly possible causes remain, troubleshooters must develop a strategy and gather further evidence via interviews or equipment examination.

As soon as all of the evidence has been collected, the possible causes can be narrowed down even further to reveal the true modes of failure, giving the troubleshooters a well-evidenced place from which to begin their RCA.

When focusing on equipment, it is vitally important to understand precisely what went wrong rather than making guesses or assumptions. Without extensive troubleshooting to discover evidence, equipment could be more likely to fail again due to missed root causes. But how can we ensure that we have asked all of the important questions to “eliminate the impossible”?

Equifactor®

Equifactor® is TapRooT®’s framework for equipment troubleshooting, compiling into one place all of the necessary information to ask the right questions and correctly analyze equipment breakdowns with expert accuracy. To learn the framework for yourself, check out our Equifactor® courses.

To learn more about what Equifactor® looks like, check out our podcast episode, What Is Equifactor®?