Hi Reader,

This is exciting! I know exactly what I'm going to write about today, thanks to all the fumbling of the last few emails.

Now that we got to the deepest part of this journey, it's like I can see clearly. Funny, that's like a mirror of the physical world, where it's clearest from the highest point. There's an interesting rabbit trail about spirituality that's calling to me here, but I'm going to save it for a future newsletter, probably after finishing this tech support series.

Now, I created this graph to attempt to model what I've been talking about up to this point:

The x-axis represents the focus of the knowledge. The y-axis represents the type of knowledge. Tech support agents need to balance the resulting four quadrants, and inevitably have different skill levels in each.

Brief comments clockwise from the upper left quadrant:

• Troubleshooting skills are generally applicable to any problem in life, hence are "external." They are things like noticing differences, imagining possible cause/effect chains, disassembling something to figure out how it works, and being able to reassemble it the way it was.
• Platform knowledge is "internal" in that it will have a bearing on the specific issue being troubleshot troubleshooted looked at, but isn't otherwise very applicable.
• Self-awareness is fairly straightforward internal-emotional knowledge.
• Other-awareness is external-emotional, involving things we've discussed previously like empathy.

Now, let's stack up those quadrants differently:

As soon as I thought to look at it this way I realized why I needed to go into what I did over the past few newsletters. It's because all four of these levels are present in every tech support interaction, and they all contribute to the quality of the conversation and the quality of the resolution.

But which one is virtually ALL tech support training focused on? The easiest one up at the top: platform knowledge.

It's like we think everyone should naturally be good at all the other factors. But in fact, general troubleshooting skills are tricky and often unintuitive. And while a lot of people know how to come across as if they're emotionally attuned to someone else, truly listening and empathizing is difficult and incredibly rare. And as I was hoping to hint at in previous emails, complete self-awareness is essentially impossible if the self is bottomless (as I suspect it is).

So maybe these things aren't taught because it's assumed they aren't important. But I'm willing to bet that we fail to teach them because they're hard; because we don't know how to teach them. And a common human response when we're in a situation where we don't know what to do is to simply pretend like the situation doesn't exist.

"Oh, you're unhappy or uncomfortable or afraid? Well, let me just tell you all about these nice features and hopefully we all feel better soon!"

Ok, there's more to write here, but oh boy does making graphics take a lot of time! So I'll be back next week with more on the "how" of this.