Checklists Are Not For Dummies, Dummy!
At the OWASP Conference in Belgium this week I had a slide about checklists.
This is the story behind the slide. My boss at Microsoft has a friend who is a pilot. He did his pre-take-off checklist and was cleared to taxi onto the runway by air traffic control. He consulted his checklist one more time which told him to look left and right. He did. A plane was ploughing down the runway at a few hundred miles an hour. The checklist saved his life.
For many years checklists have been used by fighter pilots, A&E surgeons and many other highly evolved disciplines staffed by incredibly intelligent people. It’s beyond me that some people in the security industry seem to be arrogant enough to think they can ignore lessons learned in other industries. I suspect the quality and format of the lists is a big contributing factor but not an excuse.
The Medici Effect is a great related book.
May 24, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Hi Mark,
I think there’s a difference between using a checklist as “steps of performance” vs. substituting the presence of a list of controls for analytical decision making.
In other words, a checklist describes only one aspect of a state of nature (and even then only one part of the landscape of controls). It does not (by itself) produce a state of knowledge, or a state of wisdom.
May 25, 2008 at 7:35 am
Hi Alex
Spot on. Certainly checklists are tools to supplement decision making and not replace it. Spot on as always sir!
May 29, 2008 at 4:35 am
Checklists and similar rote procedures done properly are also a great learning tool for developing a more intuitive and rapid assessment and decision making capability.
Fighter pilots are trained to look at instruments in a certain order and at a certain frequency, so as to not miss critical aircraft state and threat information. However, in a study of actual student and instructor behavior, via measurements of where they were looking and for how long, the results were interesting. The best students were following the scan rules. The best instructors were not.
The instructors were either de-focused but aware, or paying attention to the one particular set of instruments that mattered for the maneuver they were planning or executing. When interviewed about how they got to that state, they insisted that they were following the rules, though trimmed down to only the parts that mattered.
The checklists, once internalized, were a large factor in the development of their decision-making ability.
June 11, 2008 at 1:51 pm
[...] friend Mark Curphey writes an article “Checklists are Not For Dummies, Dummy“ which looks at the use of checklists and how they are important for quality and the [...]
June 12, 2008 at 9:49 am
[...] On Checklists Alex Hutton posted this follow up on my first post about checklists. He is of course spot on. Checklists in my humble opinion don’t provide a State of Nature, [...]