Unintended Side-effect of Checklists

I remember reading Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto and coming away very surprised. Surely having checklists couldn’t possibly be making such a big difference in areas like surgery and aviation, I scoffed. Wouldn’t surgeons and pilots with years of experience have internalized such checks already: why would noting it down make such a big difference?

And yet, such checklists have been found to be effective: studies listed in Gawande’s book proved just that. Ironically, it may be the very effectiveness of these checklists which is making airline accidents more and more bizarre: the Malaysian Airlines flight that zigzagged over the Indian Ocean before vanishing and the German pilot who deliberately flew a plane into the mountainside are prime exhibits. The easy and obvious causes have all been addressed already, argues Steve Coast; which only leaves us with the weird scenarios!

As Coast says, sometimes even the best intentioned rules end up creating new loopholes:
“We created rules to make sure people can’t get in to cockpits to kill the pilots and fly the plane in to buildings. That looked like a good rule. But, it’s created the downside that pilots can now lock out their colleagues and fly it in to a mountain instead.”

So what do we do? We dig deeper and create more rules or update existing rules. But isn’t Coast right in saying that:
“We’ve reached the end of the useful life of that strategy and have hit severely diminishing returns.”

We do accept that reality in some scenarios. Like by creating free trade zones within countries. Coast makes a very interesting point as to why new tech often causes rapid progress and change: because there are no rules to constrain that new tech initially!
“There’s zero restriction on creating a website. Hence, that’s where all the value is today.”
Of course, new tech is unknown and hence unpredictable. And so concludes Coast:
“The world will only get weirder.”

Remember what the Joker told Batman?
“You have all these rules and you think they’ll save you.”
So profound, isn’t it? And here you thought that villains are just dumb brutes!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more