By | David Klaasen | Helping You Create Clarity, Inspire Your People & Drive Performance | Retain your best people | Changing Management Mindsets and Behaviour | Practical Behaviour Analytics
Dealing With Increasing Complexity
In a world of ever-increasing complexity it is becoming very difficult to maintain high standards and control mistakes, especially the silly ones that seem to be repeated, even by competent people. There is a surprisingly simple answer to this fundamental problem that many businesses suffer from. But very few people want to implement it because it offends their ego.
On the 30th October 1935 a test flight of the new Boeing Model 299, nicknamed the Flying Fortress, took off in front of an elite group of executives and military top brass to show off its superiority over the competition. To all present it was a given that the new aircraft would easily trounce the other designs on offer. As it took off and soared into the clear blue sky over Dayton, Ohio it stalled, turned on one wing and fell out of the sky into a fiery explosion. The investigation revealed that there was no mechanical failure; it was due to “pilot error”. A local newspaper said that the new aircraft was “too much airplane for one man to fly”. This incident lost Boeing the contract and they almost went bankrupt.
However, a small group of test pilots were convinced it was flyable and would give the US air superiority in any conflict. Instead of implementing more training, which until then had been the answer to improving safety, they set about developing an ingeniously simple approach; a pilot’s checklist. Early planes may have required nerves of steel but they were not very complicated, giving a pilot a checklist for takeoff would have been similar to asking a driver to use one for backing out of a garage. Things had rapidly changed and the new plane was too complicated to be left to the memory of one person; no matter how well-trained they were.
If They Can Do It . . .
In his excellent book “The Checklist Manifesto” the expert surgeon and author Atul Gawande tells the story of how the humble checklist has been used to save thousands of lives in critical surgery around the world. In one impeccably researched test including St. Mary’s Hospital, London and others in Jordan, Tanzania, Canada and New Zealand he recorded a one-third reduction of deaths and complications by using a ninety-second checklist. It was achieved at virtually no cost for almost any operation. This checklist is now being adopted throughout the NHS and around the world.
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