5 responses to “Things I learned from The Checklist Manifesto”
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There’s a danger, here, though – and I’d be interested to know to what degree the book addresses it. Most of the examples you give are processes that are highly complex, frequently repeated and prone to high impact if something goes wrong. Here, a degree of inflexibility is a price well worth paying for the safety that comes with it.
In a less demanding environment, while I can see them helping protect against some error and cognitive bias, I worry that you also start encoding cognitive bias into them in the long-term, especially as new people arrive and start working to checklists developed before they were ever involved.
How do you employ them productively without them leading to corporate calcification?
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We use several internally. They complement automation quite well, one can’t replace the other, and they must be kept fairly simple. We’ve got a lot more in the pipeline. I’ve not read this particular book, but coming from an Engineering background they’re key. Also, US Airways Flight 1549 landing in the Hudson River is a great example of these being used in flights, and NOT during the takeoff stage. The first officer was going through the checklist of what to do in an emergency when you lose power to both engines, while the pilot was using his gut and his last words were “We’re landing in the Hudson” after having clearance to land at two airports, but realised they had no hope of getting those engines started or reaching the airports, but saw the river. And all survived. So there’s also the way they help you stay calm in a life or death situation.
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You raise a sound concern.
I use two Brilliant Noise values, discipline and curiosity together to make sure checklists and other processes encourage supportive rather than sclerotic behaviours. Discipline is about following the process / checklist you’ve laid out (doing what we say we will, in effect). Curiosity means you should critique the process and propose or try out changes to make it work better.
I note that in the case studies around aviation and construction in the book, that the checklist approaches are open to challenge by everyone. That’s how it works in my workplace – new joiners are encouraged to challenge and suggest new ways of doing things – as good processes become habits it tends to be either fresh eyes or new challenges that give us the opportunity to change and refine our ways of working.
I think it is the apparently mundane things that have big aggregate consequences in wasted opportunities and energy – e.g. too many meetings, poorly chaired working groups, unclear objectives or unrecorded actions, miscommunication etc.
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Yes, the book covers the Hudson River incident in some detail – you’d find it interesting, Scott.
And absolutely – simplicity is key.
It’s interesting also that checklists can help when we feel under threat in non-life-threatening situations. Unfortunately, we get similar kinds of threat responses – adrenaline, cortisol, increased heart rate etc. – to being in a plane that’s crash-landing to when we realise we’ve made massive error in a website build, for instance (where, despite the looks on our faces, no one is likely to die). Checklists don’t always give us the answers, but they can get us out of a flight-fight state and into a more helpfully rational problem-solving mode.
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