Debugging People Requires Empathy, Not Playbooks

Your Troubleshooting Guide is Useless for People

There’s a strange comfort in a production outage.

I know, that sounds insane. But hear me out. The alert screams, the war room spins up, and you’re staring at a burning graph. It’s stressful, sure. But there’s a process. You have a playbook. You check the logs. You look at the latest deployment. You isolate the change that correlates with the failure. It’s a logical, deductive hunt for a root cause. You are a detective, and the system, for all its complexity, will eventually confess.

We, as technical people, are addicted to this process. We love it because it works. It takes a chaotic, terrifying problem and reduces it to a series of logical steps. Find the bug, patch the code, write the postmortem, explain the root cause. Order is restored.

The problem is we try to apply this same playbook to people. And it’s a catastrophic failure every single time.

Let’s say you have an engineer, Jen. For the last year, Jen has been a rock. Clean code, insightful PR comments, always willing to help a junior dev. She’s a predictable, high-output system. Then, one sprint, things change. Her commits are late. Her code is a little sloppy. In a design review, she’s dismissive and cynical.

The system is now throwing errors. A bug has been introduced. So you pull out the troubleshooting guide.

First, you check the logs. You scroll through her recent instant messages and pore over comments in her PRs. You’re looking for the delta: the one anomalous entry that explains the new behavior. You see the symptoms (the unexpectedly terse comments and explanation-free closed tickets) but not the cause. Human logs (their private lives, their inner thoughts, their anxieties) are encrypted with a key you will never have.

Next, you try to isolate the variable. Was it the new project she was assigned? Is it friction with the new product manager? Did we change the brand of coffee in the breakroom? You start forming hypotheses based on incomplete data. You are, in effect, trying to A/B test a human being’s emotional state. This is not only ineffective; it’s quietly dehumanizing.

We do this because we are desperate to find a simple, logical root cause. We want to find the one line of "bad code" that’s causing the problem so we can patch it and deploy a fix. We want Jen to go back to being the predictable, high-output system we relied on.

But Jen isn’t a system. She isn’t a microservice with a faulty downstream dependency. She is a person.

The fundamental flaw in our logic is treating people as if their emotional state is simply deterministic. We think if we provide the same inputs (salary, project work, free snacks, “Shoot The Breeze Fridays”) we will always get the same output (great code, positive attitude, eternally high morale). When the output changes, we assume an input must have changed, and we just need to find it.

This is where empathy becomes the only tool that matters. Not the abstract, feel-good kind, but disruptive empathy. The kind that forces you to throw out your entire playbook.

Your debugging process needs to be replaced with a simple, terrifyingly vulnerable act: connection.

You don’t need to "check the logs." You need to talk to her. Not an interrogation disguised as a check-in ("Your velocity was down 15% this sprint, what’s the blocker?"), but a genuine, open-ended question. Go for a walk and say, "I’ve noticed you seem a bit stretched thin lately. Everything okay?"

You don’t need to "isolate the variable." You need to listen. She might tell you what’s wrong. She might not. The point isn’t to extract data. The point is to create a safe connection where she could tell you. The fix isn't a code patch; it's support. Maybe she needs a mental health day. Maybe her workload needs to be adjusted. Maybe she just needs to know that a leader on her team sees her as a human being and not just a resource generating story points.

We love our troubleshooting guides because they give us the illusion of control. But when it comes to people, that illusion is a trap. It prevents us from doing the one thing that actually works.

Put down the playbook. Stop trying to find the root cause. A person’s soul is not just another home directory, and you don’t have root access. All you have is the ability to open a port, send a kind packet of data, and see if they’ll establish a connection.