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I was working at [a large cloud company] a couple of years after this book came out when suddenly all the managers (in my area) started reading it in a very sho
by erentz 7y ago
I was working at [a large cloud company] a couple of years after this book came out when suddenly all the managers (in my area) started reading it in a very short space of time. They became completely prepossessed by checklists, but IMO totally misunderstood what makes an effective checklist. They turned checklists into an oppressive regime of documenting every conceivable step and path to the tiniest detail. Checklists became impossibly long and far to cumbersome to be useful.
These managers wanted to treat engineers as robots and thought these checklists would be the code they fed into other flesh-robots, that then wouldn't need to know anything about what they were doing. Meanwhile the real engineers among us wanted to write actual code that would run on actual computers to do automation and scale instead. But the managers couldn't read code so didn't trust this desire of these engineers and stifled it for a considerably long time. It was a frustrating interpretation of a book I otherwise enjoyed.
- adolph 7y agochanging practice is not a technical problem that can be solved by ticking off boxes on a checklist but a social problem of human behavior and interaction successful system change requires demonstrating the need for change, engaging institutional leadership, collecting data, and most important, providing training in teamwork so that everyone feels respected and accountable https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1315851 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1315851
- js2 7y ago> They turned checklists into an oppressive regime of documenting every conceivable step and path to the tiniest detail. That‘s a shame since this exact pitfall is covered in the book when the first list he comes up with for an operating room fails spectacularly because it’s over-detailed. He has to circle back and revisit the checklists used by pilots and realized they only cover the most essential steps. He also discusses the difference between a pilot’s checklist and the checklists used in construction projects and why they have different levels of detail.
- throw0101a 7y ago> They turned checklists into an oppressive regime of documenting every conceivable step and path to the tiniest detail. Isn't this what things like Ansible/Chef/etc are for? You write the minutiae of certain checklists into code, and the human's checklist item becomes "execute playbook/recipe X".