![]() (1) Simple problems are ones like baking a cake from a mix. Two professors who study the science of complexity - Brenda Zimmerman of York University and Sholom Glouberman of the University of Toronto - have proposed a distinction among three different kinds of problems in the world: the simple, the complicated, and the complex. And because they do, they raise wide, unexpected possibilities. They catch mental flaws inherent in all of us - flaws of memory and attention and thoroughness. They not only offer the possibility of verification but also instill a kind of discipline of higher performance.įour generations after the first aviation checklists went into use, a lesson is emerging: checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized. Those on the receiving end use other words, like negligence or even heartlessness.Ĭhecklists remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. What do you mean half of heart attack patients don’t get their treatment on time? What do you mean that two-thirds of death penalty cases are overturned because of errors? It is not for nothing that the philosophers gave these failures so unmerciful a name - ineptitude. But if the knowledge exists and is not applied correctly, it is difficult not to be infuriated. If the knowledge of the best thing to do in a given situation does not exist, we are happy to have people simply make their best effort. Such failures carry an emotional valence that seems to cloud how we think about them. This is the skyscraper that is built wrong and collapses, the snowstorm whose signs the meteorologist just plain missed, the stab wound from a weapon the doctors forgot to ask about. (2) The second type of failure the philosophers call ineptitude - because in these instances the knowledge exists, yet we fail to apply it correctly. There are skyscrapers we do not yet know how to build, snowstorms we cannot predict, heart attacks we still haven’t learned how to stop. (1) The first is ignorance - we may err because science has given us only a partial understanding of the world and how it works. In such realms, Gorovitz and MacIntyre point out, we have just two reasons that we may nonetheless fail. We can build skyscrapers, predict snowstorms, save people from heart attacks and stab wounds. There are substantial realms, however, in which control is within our reach. Much of the world and universe is - and will remain - outside our understanding and control. Even enhanced by technology, our physical and mental powers are limited. One reason, they observed, is “necessary fallibility” - some things we want to do are simply beyond our capacity. The question they sought to answer was why we fail at what we set out to do in the world. In the 1970s, the philosophers Samuel Gorovitz and Alasdair MacIntyre published a short essay on the nature of human fallibility that I read during my surgical training and haven’t stopped pondering since. If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed by anything in life, putting it on paper and creating a checklist is going to give you a lot of clarity. As I am writing this, I’m looking at my 24 point work checklist and can’t help but appreciate how much it helps me get done every single day. As a productivity enthusiast, I make a lot of checklists and can vouch for their usefulness in achieving consistent output. The book contains several examples highlighting the importance of checklists and how they can reduce errors in critical situations. ![]() Hi! In this post, I’ve shared my notes from The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande.
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