Which of these problems solving mistakes will you make?
Problem-solving is such an interesting and necessary requirement not just in business, but in life, generally.
And I want to share a quick story about my adventures in problem-solving.
Now, for whatever reason, I decided that I wanted to upgrade the audio on these live experiences.
So I was like, You know what, there's one thing that makes a big difference, and that is great audio.
So I looked up on YouTube, how to get better audio with Facebook Lives.
And I discovered setup, somebody had taken a bunch of parts and connected their phone to an external microphone.
I was like, Man, this looks awesome.
And it looks a whole lot like this.
Check it out.
Okay, so that's the gimbal.
That's a DJI on for and then coming off that is this little bracket He thing.
And then this magic arm up to I believe this is called a Rode video mic or something like that.
And then we come to a very interesting part, I'm going to turn this around.
And you can see that this part connects to this little cable here.
And finally into this Samsung S 10.
bought secondhand.
Why? Well, because it has a 3.5-millimeter jack.
Now my usual phone, the one that I'm recording this on, is one plus 70 Pro, it does not have a 3.5-millimeter jack.
The last plus phone I think was the six maybe the six t but the 3.5-millimeter jack is clearly a dying breed.
And yet, the microphone here has a 3.5-millimeter jack.
So I went along when I first got the mic, and I plugged it in to my USB 3.5-millimeter converter.
And nothing happened if you go back to probably I think we deleted it.
But there was actually a Facebook Live where there was no sound because it didn't work.
And so I thought, Okay, well, there's something going on, I research this and I found out that there is a difference.
I'm going to pull this apart.
So you guys, you can listen, you just have to imagine.
But at the end of this, you can see that there is a tip and then a ring.
And they'll figure what the last one is it's like T R S.
But these microphones, let's have a look at this microphone here only has you can see how there are just two rings.
And that apparently is very important that when you plug a microphone directly into a bone, or if it's not good a 3.
5 jack directly into an adapter and into the phone.
What if it doesn't have that third ring, then the phone don't recognize it and it thinks that it's headphones.
Which sucks.
It's like okay, well, that's not going to work.
It's not going to record sound from headphones.
Now I had a different one of these little things.
And what I didn't realize is that it was faulty.
I was like you know what? The problem is that the one plus doesn't accept, for whatever reason doesn't accept the USBC to 3.5.
And so that's what I thought was the problem.
So I went along and bought a new phone.
Eli, what? Why did you do that? Well, I figured hey, it's better to go directly into the 3.5-millimeter jack and so I got this secondhand s 10 To solve that problem.
Now, what do you think happened? Well, the curious thing that happened was I get Yes, 10 I'm all excited.
I'm like, man, it's going to be great, it's going to be great.
This is going to be very exciting.
And I plug in the microphone with the little adapter, not this one, but a similar sort of thing, not the there was a T.SS, whatever it is, I don't know, something like that.
You plug the mic into that then into the s 10.
And nothing happened.
I'm like, man, what the heck.
So I actually plugged the microphone directly into the s 10.
Again, nothing happened.
And at that point, I realized the problem.
Now if you're any good at troubleshooting, then you will also recognize the problem that the problem was not the one plus 70 Pro at all.
It wasn't the USB C to 3.5 adapters.
And it wasn't the microphone what it was, was the T r s adapter.
And I had assumed that part was working.
I had assumed that was the problem.
And I had no other phone at the time and no other perhaps Perhaps I could have tested it with a laptop.
My laptop does have a 3.5-millimeter jack but I'm not sure there is some debate about whether MacBook Pros actually even can receive He was signaling I'm not sure I could have looked that up and tested it.
But I was so certain of my assumption that the problem was that the phone didn't have the 3.5-millimeter jack, that I bought the phone, and it didn't solve the problem.
Now, what can you take from all of this? What can I take from all this? Well, the interesting that thing, in retrospect, would have been that when there is a problem, I need to identify all of the points of failure, not just the most likely.
And this is going to be the same in business systems and business processes because you are going to find that your systems won't give you the results that you want.
And you're like, oh, man, it must be x.
But it may not be x, just like I assumed that it was the phone and not the adapter.
And so I spent 600 bucks instead of $8.
And this will happen to you in business as well.
So taking a little Timeout, what other problems could it be when you are troubleshooting, it is better to get that list, and then with that list, you may be able to rule out some problems and say, Hey, no, it's not that.
And it's not that leaves us with two problems.
And particularly, if you are dealing with systems that have longer feedback by limiting the number of processes that it could be, you get to get to the result quicker, you get to get to a working system quicker.
If you have a one-week lag between making a change and finding out whether that system works.
Now with that change, it is much more beneficial to reduce it to two possible causes, or potentially one cause instead of having to deal with five, because not only with five, will it take five weeks to get through, you're also assuming that there's only one problem, if you've got five potential problems, it could be two problems, it could be three problems.
So your efforts at the beginning to identify all of the possible causes of failure in a system, whether it's like a recording system, or whether it's a series of business processes that get executed for results, that the quicker that you can identify and rule out some of the potential causes, the quicker you can get to great results.
So the lesson out of all of this is when you are troubleshooting, take a moment to identify all of the possible causes.
Don't make the assumptions, then make the testing or the effort to find out hey, could it be any of these, reduce it down to the minimum number of variables, and then solve from there.
In retrospect, if I had thought about the cable adapter, I probably could have gone on and on Amazon, ordered the part, and had my answer within two days, instead of the longer-term adventurer spending $600 Too much.
And finally finding out that wasn't really the problem at all.
That's all I got for you today.
From tomorrow I will be excited to present to you from the SDN with the fancy mic, we'll see whether it makes any difference the sound off certainly hope it does.
Thanks for joining in today's episode about troubleshooting and the benefits of slowing down to identify all of the causes before you go solving a particular assumption.
Alright, hope you got a lot of value out of today if you need help with systems processes, templates, and getting results from those then head over to systemio.dev, look forward to seeing on tomorrow's episode continued journey into the power systems to create results.
See you then.
