Gawande also looked to the commercial aircraft industry, which has an outstanding safety record. Boeing has been a pioneer in developing checklists that give pilots guidance on what to do in situations ranging from the routine, like starting an engine before taxiing to the runway, to emergency situations arising out of such events as a cargo door coming unsealed during flight at high altitude. It was a checklist that helped insure the safe water landing in the Hudson River of US Airways Flight 1549, which, on January 14, 2009, took off from New York's La Guardia Airport, ran into a flock of geese, and lost power from both its engines.
Motivated by the practices of the construction and aircraft industries, Gawande and his team developed a checklist for the operating room and tested its efficacy over a six-month period in eight hospitals around the world. The results were far better than expected. With the use of checklists, major complications arising out of surgical procedures fell by 36 percent, and deaths fell by 47 percent. Gawande was ecstatic, and the enthusiasm for the practice that he expresses in his manifesto is infectious.
Can there be a checklist for the design process? On the one hand, unlike surgical operations, construction projects, and aircraft maneuvers, which typically follow proven procedures, design is the very act of creating something that cannot be fully proven until it is made and tested. On the other hand -- like surgeons, construction managers, and pilots -- designers can make mistakes that result in failures. It could very well be the case that a properly devised checklist for design could prevent some of those mistakes from being made.
Among the items that might be considered for a design checklist are the following:
Can the design under consideration be manufactured at a reasonable cost?
Can a part of the overall design be installed in the wrong way?
Will the design be able to withstand the environment in which it is expected to operate?
Does the design call for direct contact of dissimilar metals susceptible to galvanic corrosion?
Does the fatigue life of its components at least equal that expected of the design as a whole?
Is the human interface intuitive and unambiguous?
The specific questions to appear on a design checklist would naturally depend upon the nature of the industry involved. In any case, however, designers, like surgeons, can be expected to be skeptical of such an encroachment upon their professional space. But if the results were found to be as good as surgeons have experienced, then designers might become converts as enthusiastic as Dr. Gawande.
It is amazing how much and in how subtle ways cross-disciplinary approach can enhance quality, efficiency, safety... in any given faculty or field of human creation. Learning from each other, and not necessarily within the same science, is the way we progress as humankind. Although I am not saying much new here, in my view, these are important things to underline, and am thankful to a philosopher-engineer-designer who captured this importance in his article. For my part, I am in particular sensitive to one huge "check-list item" in design process: safety of those who are using, operating, or simply get exposed to a final result of design process.
I remember once when I was doing a product commissioning in another country, the customer had a consultant who lived and died by his ever-present check lists. While that made him extremely thorough in his own area of expertise, it caused a certain amount of gamesmanship among some of the others. He obviously couldn't know the details of every component to be checked, so he had to rely on others to furnish the information necessary to create the checklists. I found some people to be very creative in the information they gave him so as to receive very generic responsibilities on the checklist.
Aircraft fly the same no matter what part of the world you live in.
That said, the English language isn't even the same in various regions of the UK and US, never mind Australia, New Zealand, Canada, other parts of the world...
Use whatever mnemonics work for you. They appear to be essentially the same, though it appears you have fixated on one phase of flight with your mnemonic.
I cycle through the GUMPF list several times. One does different stuff at different phases of landing. This is a quick and dirty method to ensure I haven't left anything obvious or deadly on the list.
fixated has negative connotations. BUMPFF was RAF standard finals check mnemonic before landing on propellor driven aircraft. i think 'brakes off' is an important check. not fixated at all...just pointing out something missing in your checklist. however if you feel you do not need to check that the brakes are off prior to landing...well, i guess thats up to you.
JimT I agree with you. As a designer I certainly have a mental checklist but I believe the key word is "written". One of my college professors would always make us write stuff down because he said "if you write it down then that says you have thought about it". I agree most of the time if you write something down you have thought about it.
The problem with medicine is that every doctor is a cowboy. They have license to do pretty much what they can convince the other doctors is standard "operating" procedure.
I think there is great merit in standardizing as much as you can with what has been successful. We all do it in manufacturing, service, and design. Why not the medical community?
And, how about doctors routinely giving drugs to minors that have not been approved for minors, such as mind altering psychotropics? There should be a checklist for that, too!
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