On Simple Checklists

This week’s learning draws inspiration from ‘The Checklist Manifesto’ by Atul Gawande-

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I had promised more Checklist learnings from the fascinating piece of work by Atul Gawande. So, here is another..

In 2001, Peter Pronovost, a critical care specialist at John Hopkins Hospital, became frustrated about the incidence of infections that arose after injections in intensive care. He came up with this simple checklist of the steps which had to be taken to avoid infections:

Many of our first reactions to this would probably be smiling at how basic this list is. Pronovost followed it up by authorizing nurses to stop doctors from injecting the patient if they skipped a point on the checklist.

The impact over 15 months?

8 Deaths prevented.
43 infections avoided.
$2 million saved.

“We don’t like checklists. They can be painstaking. They’re not much fun. But I don’t think the issue here is mere laziness. There’s something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment, It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us — those we aspire to be — handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocols and checklists. Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating.” — Atul Gawande

A close friend and I are working on an app on iPhone/Android platforms for easy checklist creation. Will keep you updated!

Until then, hope you have fun making simple checklists at work this week!

The Rice Cooker

Have you observed how a rice cooker works?
You put in grains of rice and lots of water. Then you heat it and the cooker gradually uses the heated water to cook the rice. Required amounts are taken in, the rest is thrown out.
Isn’t it much the same with our days? All the stimulus that comes at us is the water i.e. colleagues complimenting us, colleagues dissing us, other good news, bad news and the like. The heat is similar to the pressure we have everyday to earn, to deliver etc. The rice is what we are building, working on..
We just need to be good rice cookers – take the useful water, throw out the excess/unwanted and become useful in the process.

When you work your butt off for something

You tend to count results. (What happened? Did they turn out in proportion to the effort? Were they deserved etc?)
Results are important – there is no doubt about that. We are measured by them at the end of the day. However, the bigger the stakes, the bigger the chances luck influences those results.
As a result, it is very easy to be disappointed by bad results when they do come our way. And sometimes, a stretch of bad luck may even influence some critical points in life.
In my view, we are probably better placed if we ask ourselves one additional question
What did I become from it?

Many a time, the results may not go our way but the learnings from the experience make it well worth it. Failing a driving test may be well worth it if we ended up becoming better drivers.
I spent a good part of 3 years working on a dot com that didn’t work out. Was the result ideal? No. Do I regret it? Absolutely not. The learnings I got and the people I met gave me a platform to build from, for a lifetime.. Often, it is the 2nd question that saves us from ‘death by introspection’.

Invest in your learning

I always remember the funny joke about how $20 looks extremely big when contemplating a donation to a nearby charity but looks extremely small in a bar.
I remember very clearly the time when a few friends and I decided to engage a tennis coach for $15 per hour last January. I debated it a fair bit – any expenditure as a student was always carefully weighed especially since I had gone bankrupt and lived on loans from friends just two years prior. But, I decided to go for it.
We ended up having 8 lessons and that $120 was among the better investments I have made. I learnt enough tennis to atleast feel comfortable on the court. And today, I played a couple of friends with a Danish friend who was class. He beat me 6-3, 6-3 and deservedly so. His technique was just way superior to mine.
The difference was just that he had invested a fair amount more in his learning than I did. And he still continued to do so.
At this point, I am talking tennis but it’s amazing how easily this can translate to work. Learning at work is often reading voraciously, building up a sense of awareness about the industry, about the world and about people – all of which pay themselves forward. And of course, investing in experiences that broaden our horizons..
The options are all laid out as always. The big question is – do we do it enough?

Rome was not built in a day

This is a reminder to myself.

I spent a significant amount of time this weekend working on my book. I am pleased to announce we have a tentative title. It will be called ’21 Days’ as it is about the 21 day trip that Sarah and Lars (the main characters) take.

I took up this book project for a number of reasons – and one of the most important ones was to give myself a lesson in patience. And I will be the first to admit that I am struggling with this test. For somebody who is just naturally impatient, this is the mother of all tests.
Here’s why –

– It has been 6 months now since I started writing this book and yet, I am only 30% through the 1st draft. The good news is that most of it is sitting in my head (the skeleton atleast) and just needs me to sit down and type it out.
– It takes an incredible amount of time to get into the ‘zone’. I gave up on trying to write 2 hours every weekend because it just doesn’t happen. I need larger chunks.
– Writing is very very very tiring. I feel exhausted at the end of the whole exercise today – satisfied with the progress.
– The thought of only reaching an end many months from now often feels depressing. I am often tempted to just close the project and forget the idea but that’s when I remind myself that this is not so much about the book as it is about learning something. Phew. Tough choice.
– As a way of visualizing the end, I wrote out my ‘Acknowledgments’ page and visualized thanking a whole bunch of people who have supported and encouraged me. That was great fun and I wrote out a chapter all inspired right after that.
All in all, the good news is that I made a decent amount of progress on it this long weekend. Hope to add more on to the progress bar tomorrow. This post is one of many similar ones to follow – a reminder to myself that Rome was not built in a day. Step by step, we make progress..