Wish # 6020 - make a check list - standardize repetitive decisions

My partners are sick of hearing me preach on 'STANDARDIZE REPETITIVE DECISIONS' - which means --lets find the best way to do something - and keep doing it that way ( until something better comes along )

I also like various authors ( Tom Peters, etc ) and enjoy watching Charlie Rose for the quality of his guests (most of the time)

I just happened to watch this interview .... make a check list  and really liked the part of the B17 bomber test flight story

CHARLIE ROSE:  You told me that story.  Tell me about the B-17 story,  about the checklist.  

 ATUL GAWANDE:  Well, this was part of what I get to think about by  being this mixed role.  I had a project for the World Health Organization  where they asked me to lead a team trying to come up with ways to reduce  deaths in surgery.  

 And what we looked to is we weren’t finding answers in our part of the  world, so we looked to the aviation world.  And there was a moment where  aviation changed.  There was a request by the army for a new long-range  bomber in 1935, and Boeing came up with a plan to put four engines on the  plane.  

 This was a massive breakthrough.  That plane could fly higher,  farther, faster.  It was clearly the answer for the military.  They did a  test run, they actually had a flight competition, and the plane crashed,  killing the crew onboard.

 And the investigation showed nothing wrong mechanically with the  plane.  The pilot had forgotten to release the elevator controls, and so  the plane could climb and climb but couldn’t level out, and so it just lost  air and crashed to the ground.  

 And the reason he forgot was that putting four engines on the plane  increased the complexity of how many things he had to remember so much that  the army deemed it too much airplane for one man to fly.  

 What did they do to try to solve that problem?  When Boeing built the  first production models and the pilot said "I think we can fly this," they  did not make a three-year specialty fellowship in flying the B-17 airplane.   They did not throw more and more technology into it.

 They just made a checklist.  A, before takeoff a few checks on one  page, and following those basic checks they were able to fly that plane  over almost two million miles without a single mishap and ended up having  13,000 of these planes in World War II.  It was the backbone of our air  superiority.  

 And what I realized following that story was that not only in surgery  but all across medicine, we’ve hit our B-17 moment.  Medicine has become  more complex than one person can remember for themselves, too much airplane  for one person to fly.    

so -- where am I going with this story ??  Wish # 6020 - all further installs need a check list --and update that check list after every install to see what was missed so  you finally make the last install a PERFECT install.  We tried very hard to make our install a PERFECT install- but with 3 stores and the lack of advance training - we can say we had a good install - but we certainly in hindsight could have done better.