4 ms·
Reminds me of another article here on the importance of checklists in surgery. Smart and even dedicated people will fuck up even the easiest and cheapest of so
by siliconc0w 11y ago
Reminds me of another article here on the importance of checklists in surgery. Smart and even dedicated people will fuck up even the easiest and cheapest of solutions when the problem is subtle and the solution requires disciplined application. Introduce a simple checklist - a highly sophisticated piece of paper - and results dramatically improve.
- DanBC 11y agohttp://www.who.int/patientsafety/safesurgery/ss_checklist/en/ http://www.who.int/patientsafety/safesurgery/ss_checklist/en... Go careful though - people who work in patient safety tend to dislike signs and some bits of paperwork.
- siliconc0w 11y agoThere totally is a tradeoff between productivity and discipline. People naturally 'optimize' their workflows - which is usually a good thing. The problem is our pattern recognition sucks at identifying subtleties like the correlation between skipping washing our hands and more patients developing infections. Technology can help here a bit. I don't have a checklist item to 'check hard drive space' - I have automated monitoring and alerting systems. But if I didn't you bet I'd be moaning and rationalizing while I shouldn't have to log into each system every hour to verify it had free space, free-able memory, low IO, etc. Which is why I work with computers instead of newborn babies. Much easier to automate.
- Tomte 11y agoThe same author -- Gawande -- wrote the article about checklists in the New Yorker and then expanded it into a book, "The Checklist Manifesto". Read the article, skip the book. The meat of it, and the most gripping anecdotes, are in the former, as well.