My sister Barbara, a management science/operations management professor, recommended this book. Onto my Kindle it went, and I read it on a recent business trip.
Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto. Metropolitan Books, 2009. When I first heard the title, I thought, booooorrring. I was so wrong! Gawande, a surgeon, starts out with a couple of hair-raising real-life medical stories, and uses them to make the case that although we will always fail sometimes because there are things in the world that are beyond our knowledge or our control, we often fail because we fail to apply our knowledge correctly. He builds an evidence-based case that in complex environments, particularly where teams of people are working together, simple, well-designed checklists significantly increase the likelihood of getting things right. He shares vivid examples from aviation, architecture, medicine, and a range of other areas, and identifies principles for effective checklists (short, simple, and specific!) It’s definitely got my mental wheels turning…
It reminded me of a book I’d read long ago: Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press, 1996. This one is much more theoretical and abstract, but no less interesting. It’s about human cognition and its inextricable connectedness to social and cultural context; the author is an anthropologist and an open ocean racing sailor and navigator, and he uses ship navigation as the setting for his analysis and insights.