Atul Gawande works are Harvard Medical School and writes for the New Yorker as well. He is also the author of the famous book " The Checklist Manifesto: How to get things right".He quotes umpteen examples where in he empathizes the importance of following a process, doing a thing repeatedly every time in the same manner. He is the surgeon who introduced the concept of checklist in the medical field.
Our great struggle in medicine these days is not just with ignorance and uncertainty," Gawande says. "It's also with complexity: how much you have to make sure you have in your head and think about. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong." At the heart of Gawande's idea is the notion that doctors are human, and that their profession is like any other. So doctors as well miss stuff. He realized that they could as be inconsistent and unreliable, and in their case it could result extremely dangerous because a life could be at stake. That's when he visited Boeing to see how they make things work, over and over again they fall back on checklist. The pilot's checklist is an important component not only for take off and landing, but also during emergency situations where in they have very little time to take decisions, checklists come in handy.
Atul came up with a very similar 2 min checklist for the medical fraternity. Today it has become a norm for lots of hospitals across the globe. He also quotes statistics which proves the success rate of following a checklist.
The second of the examples notable in his book is that of a patient who came with a stab wound and it wasn't very serious, but his situation detiorated very quickly. "About 10 minutes later, he crashed," Gawande says. "When they got him open they found that the wound had gone — this is a pretty big guy — straight through more than a foot into him, all the way into his back and sliced open his aorta. And so afterwards they asked a few more questions of the family. 'How did this happen?' 'Well, it was a Halloween party.' 'What exactly went on?' And then they learned that the guy who had stabbed him was dressed as a soldier carrying a bayonet. And if they had understood it was a bayonet, they would have thought about it quite differently."Gawande uses this anecdote, a simple miscommunication with the potential to cause so much tragedy.
I just feel both of these examples one emphasizing the use of a Checklist and the other on the prominence on communication applies to any industry at large. Even to our very own IT industry. Where in lot of times there is a strong push to follow the process but there are lots of managers who would resist the implementation of a thing like process or a checklist, they would say they are already doing fine and this is a definite overheard. But statistically there is already enough evidence on the net about the benefits/savings of using a checklist/ following a process.
A part of this resistance is ( as Atul states in his book also) has to do with our unwillingness to accept our weakness, that's human nature. And the second point is we need to accept that we are fallible only then we will be able to adapt to such things.
To wind up, one of the very simple checklist items they had was to have very body in the room made short introductions before the surgery and this brought down the complication and mortality rates by 35%. "Making sure everybody knew each other's name produced what they called an activation phenomenon," Gawande explains. "The person, having gotten a chance to voice their name, let speak in the room — were much more likely to speak up later if they saw a problem."
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