📣 Curious Quotes from the Author
“The checklist cannot be lengthy. A rule of thumb some use is to keep it to between five and nine items, which is the limit of working memory.”
“Checklists seem to provide protection against such failures. They remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They not only offer the possibility of verification but also instill a kind of discipline of higher performance.”
“The second type of failure the philosophers call ineptitude—because in these instances the knowledge exists, yet we fail to apply it correctly.”
“What is needed, however, isn't just that people working together be nice to each other. It is discipline. Discipline is hard--harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can't even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.”
“Man is fallible, but maybe men are less so.”
“Good checklists, on the other hand are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything--a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps--the ones that even the highly skilled professional using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.”
“the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably.”
“We don’t like checklists. They can be painstaking. They’re not much fun. But I don’t think the issue here is mere laziness. There’s something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us—those we aspire to be—handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocols and checklists. Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating.”
“One essential characteristic of modern life is that we all depend on systems—on assemblages of people or technologies or both—and among our most profound difficulties is making them work.”
“There are good checklists and bad, Boorman explained. Bad checklists are vague and imprecise. They are too long; they are hard to use; they are impractical. They are made by desk jockeys with no awareness of the situations in which they are to be deployed. They treat the people using the tools as dumb and try to spell out every single step. They turn people’s brains off rather than turn them on. Good checklists, on the other hand, are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything—a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps—the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.
“You must decide whether you want a DO-CONFIRM checklist or a READ-DO checklist. With a DO-CONFIRM checklist, he said, team members perform their jobs from memory and experience, often separately. But then they stop. They pause to run the checklist and confirm that everything that was supposed to be done was done. With a READ-DO checklist, on the other hand, people carry out the tasks as they check them off—it’s more like a recipe. So for any new checklist created from scratch, you have to pick the type that makes the most sense for the situation.”
“sometime over the last several decades—and it is only over the last several decades—science has filled in enough knowledge to make ineptitude as much our struggle as ignorance.”
“under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success.”
📚 Cognition of the Book’s Big Idea
A checklist is far more useful for specialists and professionals than it is for incompetent people as a to-do list. In complex settings, using a well-crafted checklist guarantees that we discover potentially deadly errors and harmful oversights.
Even with your experience and knowledge, are you still making mistakes on your assignments? Make use of a checklist!
When it comes to creating checklists for ourselves, particularly when we are well-versed in the process, we can be obstinate. Making a checklist, however, is frequently most beneficial for skilled occupations. One of the causes of this is that we frequently ignore or forget the evident "dumb stuff," mistakenly believing that paying attention to more intricate details is of greater significance. On the other hand, the simple things are frequently crucial to the current process. Making considerably fewer mistakes may result from using a checklist, which keeps the important things from falling between the cracks.
🤝Collaborative Insight for Techies
We use checklists as a way to make sure we are following protocols with all the security and backup procedures we do. It’s imperative although boring that we keep to those checklists as law.
But checklists for more personal efforts can be relaxed a bit. There should be flexibility for inspiration and spur of the moment gut decisions. There’s a time and place for Order and a time and place for improvisation. Knowing which is when continues to be an important part of understanding human life.
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