It’s not your imagination. It’s not because you are getting old.
There is a reason you, and everyone around you are making more mistakes than seem reasonable. The intellectual content of our world and professional lives are complex, and continue to become increasingly so.
More extensive training and more advanced technology has had little effect on the cumulative error rate, and medical mishaps (for example) continue to leave millions dead or severely injured throughout the world.
Things that were once done by a single person (such as “Master Builders” in previous centuries) can no longer be held in the memory of one person, and require the coordinated efforts of many to successfully complete goals.
Atul Gawande is a surgeon who has made a study of the pursuit of excellence, and in this book, he presents compelling evidence that a remedy for error reduction is available in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist. Checklists have enabled pilots to fly aircraft of mind-boggling sophistication, and in the immensely complex world of surgery, a simple ninety-second application has cut the fatality rate by more than a third. “An intellectual adventure in which lives are lost and saved and one simple idea makes a tremendous difference, The Checklist Manifesto is essential reading for anyone working to get things right.” (Malcolm Gladwell)
Gawande begins by making a distinction between errors of ignorance (mistakes we make because we don’t know enough), and errors of ineptitude (mistakes we made because we don’t make proper use of what we know). Failure in the modern world is usually about the second of these errors, and Gawande presents dozens of examples from the worlds of medicine, building, finance and aviation, showing how routine tasks have now become so incredibly complicated that mistakes of one kind or another are virtually inevitable. The supporting anecdotes make this an easy, captivating read, including stories about Walmart’s response to Hurricane Katrina, and the real reason why Van Halen demanded that there be a bowl of M&M’s with all the brown ones removed in their backstage dressing room.
I had a tough time putting this down, especially as it dovetails so beautifully with my recent training in Six Sigma.
The Checklist Manifesto
Atul Gawande
Metropolitan Books (December 22, 2009), 224 pages
ISBN-10: 0805091742
ISBN-13: 978-0805091748