was that even messiahs need to check themselves.
Way before it was quoted by Jesus, the phrase had been an invocation to ward off hypocrisy. It asks us to attend to our own faults before pointing out the same in others. Which is good advice for aspirational leadership gurus, as well as would-be messiahs. It’s also a pertinent consideration for those struggling with a collaboration exercise.
In attending to our own faults, it’s vital that we’re able to recognise those aspects of our nature we may not readily confess to. It’s even more helpful, just to keep ourselves grounded, to sometimes remind ourselves that we have flaws – otherwise we will all end up claiming to be the offspring of a divine entity.
There’s a very simple way to avoid this…
Make a list
I have no qualifications in psychology, but I’m pretty sure most people have enough self-awareness to know their weaknesses. Even if it’s rare to admit those faults to anyone you like or love, it’s the admission to yourself that counts. From there it’s easy to set them down in list order. There are some good reasons why you might want to do that.
Why lists work
Atul Gawande is an American surgeon, health campaigner and writer. In his 2008 bestseller The Checklist Manifesto, Gawande showed how the introduction of tick-box checklists achieved impressive results in aviation, large-scale construction, and his own profession – medicine.
At the time of Gawande’s writing, there were 230m major surgical operations happening annually. On average, 7m people were left disabled and 1m died from complications arising from their care. Gawande attributed this to human fallibility and inattention. Seemingly mundane details were easily overlooked or skipped, which sometimes happens when medical people are confident in their abilities but under pressure because they are elbows deep in their patients.
According to The Checklist Manifesto, there are over 2,500 different types of surgical procedures. The care teams administering these procedures perform, on average, 178 actions every day to every person in intensive care. These are undertaken by a range of specialists often acting in isolation to the others under difficult working conditions. During observation, doctors and nurses only made an error in 1% of these actions – this still amounted to almost two errors daily per person.
For example: a central line is a catheter passed through a vein into the chest portion of the vena cava, the large vein that returns blood to the heart. They are used to administer chemotherapy and other drugs. A five-point list – which included a prompt to wash hands with soap for 30 seconds, clean the patient’s skin with antiseptic, and wear a sterile gown – reduced central line infections from 11% to zero in the hospitals tested. Or, in other words, spared the hospital 43 infections, eight deaths and $2m.
Initially these lists struggled to gain acceptance. That’s because they weren’t technical; they dealt with basic tasks. You can see how that might seem like an insult to the intelligence of experts who have spent years both training and practically applying their knowledge in highly skilled roles.
However, the results spoke for themselves. And one in particular stood out like the proverbial sore thumb (suitably swabbed with antiseptic). This returns us to the problematic theme of collaboration.
A 19-point list, developed by Gawande for the World Health Organisation (WHO), was designed to enshrine collaborative behaviour in the small army of medical experts gathered around their patient stretched out on the operating table. You’d think that, there of all places, the collective weight of medical knowledge would be able to pin down collaboration, to stop it streaking about the firmament to help save a life.
Yet, in a survey of 1,000 operating-room staff in the US, Israel, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, only 10% of anaesthesia residents, 28% of nurses and 39% of anaesthesiologists felt their operations had high levels of teamwork. By contrast, 64% of surgeons – the operating theatre equivalent of the boss – reported high levels of teamwork.
The mismatch is striking to me and reminiscent of my former CEO, who thought going on about collaboration would summon it into existence. Gawande reported the sense of teamwork he’d experienced in theatre was more due to luck than design. He described the lack of it as a consequence of the complexity of his job, which creates a division of tasks by expertise. This resulted in highly skilled people sticking narrowly to their domain.
Here I see the vertical plane of the personal clashing with the horizontal goals of collaboration. Even more so when I learned that surgeons often walked into the room fully gowned, expecting everyone to be in place, including the patient, unconscious and ready to go. If you are a member of the supporting team, the surgeon may not even know your name – a common occurrence. That’s not collaboration; it’s command and control.
It turns out that knowing the names of the people working across any kind of collaboration makes the output more effective, and it is precisely this that Gawande included in his WHO safe-surgery checklist. Before the first incision into skin is made, the checklist requires everyone to confirm they have verbally introduced themselves to each other by name and role. The team are then prompted to confirm they have discussed the details, concerns and goals of the procedure. The patient is included – one item on the list ensures the patient has confirmed their identity, the site (on their own body), the procedure and given their consent to operate.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
