Big Idea Daily | The Checklist Manifesto
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How to Get Things Rightby Atul Gawande |
“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.”ATUL GAWANDE |
BIG IDEA
Why We Err: Ignorance + Ineptitude
FROM THE BOOK“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.
The question they sought to answer was why we fail at what we set out to do in the world. One reason, they observed, is ‘necessary fallibility’—some things we want to do are simply beyond our capacity. We are not omniscient or all powerful. Even enhanced by technology, our physical and mental powers are limited. Much of the world and universe is—and will remain—outside of our understanding and control.
There are substantial realms, however, in which control is within our reach. We can build skyscrapers, predict snowstorms, save people from heart attacks and stab wounds. In such realms, Gorovitz and MacIntyre point out, we have just two reasons that we nonetheless fail.
The first is ignorance—we may err because science has given us only a partial understanding of the world and how it works. 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. The second type of failure the philosophers call ineptitude—because in these instances the knowledge exists, yet we fail to apply it correctly. 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.”
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Brian's Notes
That’s from the Introduction where Gawande walks us through the philosophical underpinnings of why we err.
Quick recap: First, we have “necessary fallibility” in which we fail because we are operating in the sphere of our mysterious universe that is simply out of our control. Then we have failures within domains that *are* within our control.
There are two reasons we fail in these situations according to Gorovitz and MacIntyre: Ignorance and Ineptitude.
Sometimes the knowledge isn’t there on how to succeed. That’s ignorance. On the other hand, if we *know* what we could do to succeed but don’t do it, that’s ineptitude.
We can apply that wisdom to surgery, meteorology, construction and, of course, to our own lives.
In fact, this really gets at the heart of all of our work together.
Optimizing our lives is rarely about IGNORANCE per se and more about INEPTITUDE. If we simply more consistently applied even a fraction of the stuff we already know, we’d be doing pretty darn well, eh?
We need to move from theory to PRACTICE. From knowing to DOING.
One of the best ways to do that?
Checklists.
Big Ideas
01: WHY WE ERR
02: FLYING AN UNFLYABLE PLANE
03: REDUCING MORTALITY
04: BROWN M&M’S
05: YOUR KEYSTONE INITIATIVE
“Everywhere I looked, the evidence seemed to point to the same conclusion. There seemed no field or profession where checklists might not help. And that might even include my own.”ATUL GAWANDE |
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