Inexperience and Ineptitude

I’ve been reading The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande recently and it has really resonated with my personal experiences in sailing. For instance, I’ve discovered that I’m not stupid, I’m just inept. How is that for reassurance?

Gawande makes the distinction between a lack of knowledge that results in failures (“inexperienced”) and a lack of application of existing knowledge to the same end (“inept”). His examples are primarily medical in nature, which will give you a sinking feeling the next time you go to the hospital for anything, but the application is broader. His point is that even vastly experienced and knowledgeable experts in various fields make routine, predictable errors of omission even when they know better. I think most of us know sailors, or have read biographies of those, who have fallen into that category.

His solution, as you might guess from the title of the book, is as old as the hills: use checklists so that you don’t forget to do the things you know.

My observation about sailors and checklists is that we tend to fall into one of three categories:

• Doesn’t approve of any sort of regimentation, don’t like ’em, won’t make ’em, won’t use ’em. Docks at full throttle and doesn’t look back.
• Thinks they are a great idea, promptly sits down and creates a number of valuable and helpful lists, then fails to use them. Provides great entertainment for spectators with yells, hand gestures, and wild grabs between wheel and dock lines when coming in.
• Understands checklists intuitively, makes extraordinarily brief yet practical lists, uses them religiously. You don’t notice them coming in; they just sort of appear in the slip.

I fall firmly into the middle category. I think checklists are great, I make them up every time I find that I have forgotten something dumb and obvious, and then after using them for a while as a sort of learning tool, promptly stop referring to them. Until the next time I forget something.

I suspect that, like dieting and exercise, checklist use is more about lifestyle change than the faddish adoption of a cool checklist technique. While changing your lifestyle is a whole separate subject, I think I am ready to get on board with changing mine to move closer to the third category.

This fits in with a broader topic that deserves, and will get, its own dedicated post at some point, risk.

Gawande’s point, however, is that in complex circumstances, even the most highly trained and experienced people routinely forget or disregard sometimes obvious critical steps. These are things that many of us just call “stupid mistakes.” I am forever kicking myself for making these; doing something that I knew, on reflection, I should not have done, or failing to take some precaution that I otherwise might have done as a matter of course.

The thing about checklists is that they are inconvenient. For those ninety times out of a hundred that you would have gotten through just on memory or by winging it, they just slow you down, encumber your time and enjoyment. That is where the risk factor comes in; risk is not simply how likely a bad thing is to happen, but the combination of the likelihood of its happening with the severity of the outcome. The inconvenience of the list can’t be weighed against just all those sunny days on which the pre-departure checklist is an unwelcome nuisance before leaving the dock, but also against that one hairy time the wind comes up and the engine quits and oh boy, did you make sure the anchor is shackled to the rode and ready to drop and did you unstow the boat hook to fend off from that expensive-looking cabin cruiser across the way? But of course, most of us consider this a little too late, and complacency is convenient most of the time.

On this subject, Laurence Shick’s article “Personal Minimums: Making Good Decisions When You Aren’t Thinking Straight” is a great read. As with Gawande’s book, it traces much of its inspiration to aeronautics, where checklists are, as I intimated they should be, a way of life. I suspect it’s not a coincidence that both men hit on this example.

Gawande goes on to emphasize that the use of checklists in aviation is not simply a cultural fluke, but a specific response to evolving complexity. Further, he goes some way toward exploring the aviation community’s efforts and success with avoiding the inconvenience problem. I think that’s probably key to adopting checklists in sailing as well.

He identifies three key points in checklist development that makes them successful:

• Only items likely to be forgotten are included
• Information must be presented in “…a simple, usable, and systematic form”
• Constant refinement

The last may be the most important point. You can’t expect to get it right on the first go; giving up when the first draft is inconvenient or unhelpful is never going to get you anywhere. Instead, modifying the list to fit in better with the circumstances of its use, gradually improving it as deficiencies are noted, will eventually result in a useful, usable document.

And that may be what I have been missing. In my disappointment, or complacency, I tend to just start over, often at a bad time. And without having stuck to it long enough to develop a culture of checklist discipline, it’s all too easy to abandon them.

There are many other excellent observations in the book, and I have almost entirely skipped over some of the most important, so if it’s something you are interested in, I would highly recommend giving it a quick read. At 209 pages, it’s not exactly War and Peace; even if you haven’t previously considered the applicability of checklists in your own sailing routine, it’s not going to take you too much time to check it out and at least decide to implement them or not with a little more information in hand.

Let’s see, what’s that last step on my new “Publish Blog Post” checklist? Ah, yes, that’s right, “Click on Publish button.”