A highly qualified, intensive care doctor is struck down with appendicitis. So he undergoes keyhole surgery at the hospital where he works. He is now a patient in his own hospital. In the recovery room, post surgery, he is awake but starts to feel light headed. A nurse takes his blood pressure and it’s way down. This triggers an emergency response.
The medical emergency team arrives at the patient’s bedside. Being a doctor himself, the patient argues with them. He can’t believe he’s having a heart attack, because he doesn’t have any chest pain. But the attending emergency doctor shows the doctor/patient his ECG. He is indeed having a heart attack. The attending doctor wants to send the patient for a CT scan to establish what is wrong with his heart.
In the meantime, the situation is explained to the patient’s wife over the phone. She relays the information to the patient’s brother who is also a doctor. The patient’s brother immediately ‘gets’ what’s happening. So he screams down the phone to his brother’s wife: “Don’t let them do a CT scan, he’s bleeding into the abdomen, tell them to get his surgeon!”
So the wife rushes to the hospital and arrives just as her husband is about to be given the dye necessary for his CT scan. She immediately tells her husband what his brother told her. The penny drops. Even though he is gravely ill, the patient/doctor realizes his brother’s diagnosis is correct. He refuses the CT scan and demands that his surgeon be summoned immediately. The abdominal bleeding is stopped. And happily, the patient survives.
No, this wasn’t an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. This actually happened. It’s a TRUE story. And while it is very dramatic, it’s nothing more than a story about a troubleshooting mistake.
So why did one highly trained doctor miss it completely, while another ‘got it’ immediately? Clearly, the E.R. doc didn’t miss it due to a lack of medical knowledge. He missed it due to a failure of procedure; a failure of TROUBLESHOOTING procedure.
When you consider that a lot of troubleshooting occurs in pressure cooker situations, and not just in medicine, it’s easy to see why a mistake is a lot easier to make than an accurate diagnosis.
And this is why an understanding of troubleshooting PRINCIPLES is usually more crucial to fast and accurate diagnosis, than expert knowledge of the system in which the fault lies. And it doesn’t matter whether your specialization is medicine, hydraulics or anything else; the principles of effective troubleshooting are the SAME.
We in the hydraulics biz are fortunate because, unlike doctors, we don’t ‘bury’ our troubleshooting mistakes; ours are not life or death decisions. But still, the objective in any troubleshooting situation is to get an accurate diagnosis in the shortest possible time.
And this is why I’ve put together an online training program which explains the 12 principles that ensure you will NEVER make a troubleshooting mistake like the near fatal one the E.R. doc made in the story described above.
This new training is delivered entirely ONLINE. It combines text, diagrams and simulation videos, which are accessed via a dedicated, password-protected web site. This means it’s accessible instantly, and available 24/7 via your smartphone, tablet, notebook or desktop computer.
As you can see, if you’d like to become a confident and reliable troubleshooter (a.k.a. Go-To Guy) you’ve got nothing to lose and a big chunk of highly sought after expertise to gain. So get in on it here today because you never know when you’ll really need it: