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!