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 ...