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The Checklist Manifesto
We recently heard an interview with Atul Gawanda, who's written a new book that expands on something reported in Directions. The book has grown out of research he conducted in late 2007, at eight hospitals around the
world. The surgical teams at these hospitals agreed to a 19-item checklist, and over 12 months it was credited with reducing the average patient death rate by 40%.
In The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Gawanda moves beyond medicine to consider the use of
checklists in other fields, including some very early adopters. In 1935, the US Army held a competition to develop a new long-range bomber. Boeing's model 299 was the winning entry, but the prototype
crashed during its demonstration flight. Investigation showed that the crash hadn't been caused by a mechanical failure, but by pilot error. Essentially, the 299 was too complex for a single person to
fly. This complexity problem was solved with a team-based checklist, and the 299 today is what we know as the Flying Fortress.
In Gawanda's view, ignorance used to be one of our biggest problems. Today, the situation has reversed. There's now so much to know that it can't be managed by a single individual. More training
and more technology is not the answer. We need a kind of "external brain" to be sure we don't miss the simple things -- something like a checklist. Unfortunately, hospitals still resist using
them. Among medical professionals, at least, they're seen as a sign of weakness.
A Failure to Communicate
It’s hard to see these words without thinking of Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke: "What we’ve got here, is failure to communicate..." Our notion of communication is evolving,
though, thanks to the constant pressure of technological change. Today, people expect to retrieve information, wherever it's stored, whenever they want it. They expect to be able to connect to other
people at any time of day, and even check on what folks are doing in near real-time. For that, you can thank (or blame) Twitter and the somewhat odd notion of posting your "status" at sites
like Facebook.
Making communication work today requires more than the enabling technology. It takes changes in human behavior and business practices, too. Over the last 20 or so years, most of us
have learned how to "do" email. We've learned not to write in all caps, never to Reply to All unless without good reason and to use a BCC to protect the confidentiality of a mailing list. These
principles of good email etiquette are not inherently obvious, but we're working them out as we go. We're learning from each other.
We're not there yet with social media platforms, and it's
something we need to do. This article suggests that making it work involves four key areas: information accessibility, skills inventory, activity transparency and customer communication. It's interesting reading.
Visual Illiteracy
It's hard to say when people started telling their stories with the help of visual aids. The
Pleistocene, maybe? In the last 50 years, the technology has gone pretty quickly from chalk boards, to white boards, to overhead transparencies, to slides and finally, of course, to PowerPoint. Along the
way, bad things have happened. PowerPoint is so easy to use, it seems to bring powerful presentations within the reach of anyone. But of course, it doesn't.
The phrase "death by
PowerPoint" returns over 1,000,000 hits in a Google search. There's even a Wikipedia page of this name, which credits the phrase to Angela R. Garber. There have been studies that suggest PowerPoint actually interferes with comprehension by
reducing complicated messages to bullet points. Others point out that virtually everything it does is a matter of style over substance. It makes a poor presentation seem better, and that's one of the
reasons it's so popular. People use PowerPoint when they should be using other kinds of productivity tools, producing "slideuments" instead of documents.
Ranting about the problem is a
waste of time, though; PowerPoint is certainly here to stay. There’s an abundance of resources out there,
offering tips for better presentations. Knowledge managers should step up to the plate on this. We have a role to play in improving the level of visual literacy and helping people use PowerPoint more
effectively. Somebody has to!
KM at SAS
Last month, we suggested that Fortune's coverage of some top US companies implied that KM played a role in their success, even if the article didn't use the term "Knowledge Management." And we have a second on this idea from Frank Leistner, long-time Directions reader and Chief Knowledge Officer at SAS. In fact, he has a book coming out in the next month or so that examines this very concept, and he sent us a link to a short blog post that summarizes his observations.
He points out that while people
often cite the individual perks that make a company like SAS the kind of place you'd want to work, the perks are really just the tip of an iceberg. They are the visible manifestation of a deliberate
strategy to enable and support people... to "get stuff out of their way so they can make a difference." There's a shared understanding that SAS not only believes its people can make difference, it believes they want to make a difference. That establishes a level of trust that is genuinely empowering. This trust makes human interaction and knowledge sharing easier, leading to a "virtuous cycle" of creativity and innovation.
We've been saying this for years, of course. KM is all about culture, not technology.
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