“I don’t believe it!”
“No, seriously, they saved this girl in Europe who fell into a frozen lake and drowned by using a checklist. She was dead for hours,” I said enthusiastically. I needed this guy to start using his checklist so he’d be better at his job.
A few years ago, this was a conversation when trying to explain the importance of using a checklist and the value it adds to organizations. At the time, my department director asked me to read The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande. At the time, I wasn’t a big fan of checklists either. But this short, like 2-6 hour read drastically changed my viewpoint of checklists and technical documentation.
In the dialog above, the girl falling in the lake is an example from the book. I won’t recount it for you, but the girl lived with a full recovery after being technically brain dead for multiple hours.
Why a checklist?
Every aircraft pilot knows they live a die by the checklist. Every task is documented for a given warning light or emergency. It keeps them focused on the work needed to determine the cause and recover the problem. That isn’t to say pilots haven’t been trained to do the job. Quite the opposite, they have and are proficient. But like anything, when adrenaline is pumping or attention is divided, everyone forgets steps. When you’re flying above 10,000 feet, there is little time for errors, and a checklist ensures the critical tasks are done in the right order when their attention is divided.
The average time it takes to refocus after a distraction, almost 25 minutes. A checklist can shorten that time dramatically by knowing where you left off and quickly restarting without missing a critical step.
Convincing people to use a checklist
Now comes the hard part, convincing someone to use a checklist when they never have before. For me, I found demonstrating the checklist shows the value in it. If it is a complex task with multiple steps, some dependent and some not, odds are someone will miss a step. One example in The Checklist Manifesto is doctors were forgetting to wash their hands, leading to a higher infection rate than those doctors who used a checklist. It was enough for the World Health Organization to start recommending checklist be used in hospitals globally. In short, the best way to convince someone is to show them it works.
Can your organization benefit?
Technical writing is critical to any organization that plans to sustain and grow. A checklist is one of many examples of technical documentation used to capture a process and hold people accountable for the work they are doing. That is the last step to a useful checklist. The person signs their name at the bottom, affirming they did the checklist. It provides some accountability from a managerial perspective, but I’d still recommend trusting your team members but on occasion verifying they did the checklist.
Modern Quill is happy to help with your contract technical writing needs. It may be some process documentation for your business to grow and sustain, develop a checklist, KPI’s, report writing, or even proposal writing. We’ve run the gambit of technical writing, so don’t hesitate to ask.
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