Posts Tagged ‘malcolm gladwell’
Making A List, Checking It Twice

Dr. Atul Gawande's "Checklist Manifesto" makes a compelling argument for making that list and checking it twice, even in the most expert of white collar professions.
I’m a big fan of checklists.
I’ve been attempting to properly drink the Robert David Allen Getting Things Done Kool-Aid for a couple of years now.
Inherently, I think knowledge workers like myself have to find improved ways of managing their time, projects, responsibilities, etc., and I’ve discovered that even the most basic and mundane checklist (whether or not you use GTD methodology) increases my productivity and helps me maintain my sanity.
At minimum, I feel as those it’s helpful in offsetting whatever Alzheimherish proclivities I may be developing.
But checklists aren’t just limited to personal productivity. They’re also a great way to share and implement knowledge, often in the most dire and life-altering of circumstances.
Just ask Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, a 2009 tome on how checklists can assist even the most modern of professionals in its approach to providing a disciplined adherence to essential procedures “by ticking them off a list,” often preventing fatal mistakes and corner cutting.
As Publisher’s Weekly observed in its own review of the book, Gawande examined checklists across a wide range of industries, including aviation, construction, and investing, along with his own medical profession, and was able to demonstrate that even the most simply mandated checklists (hand washing in hospitals) dramatically reduced hospital-caused infections and other complications.
Though I’m all for the medical folks washing their hands to the extreme, particularly if I’m the one going under the knife, I’m even more excited to report that Dr. Gawande will be speaking at the upcoming IBM Information on Demand Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, October 24-28.
Dr. Gawande is a MacArthur fellow and a general surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, as well as a staff writer for The New Yorker. In his spare time, he’s also an assistant professor at Harvard Medical school and the Harvard School of Public Health.
In his own Amazon-published review of Gawande’s checklist approach to life, last year’s Information on Demand keynote speaker Malcolm Gladwell had this to say about the book:
Gawande begins by making a distinction between errors of ignorance (mistakes we make because we don’t know enough), and errors of ineptitude (mistakes we made because we don’t make proper use of what we know). Failure in the modern world, he writes, is really about the second of these errors, and he walks us through a series of examples from medicine showing how the routine tasks of surgeons have now become so incredibly complicated that mistakes of one kind or another are virtually inevitable: it’s just too easy for an otherwise competent doctor to miss a step, or forget to ask a key question or, in the stress and pressure of the moment, to fail to plan properly for every eventuality.
Gawande then visits with pilots and the people who build skyscrapers and comes back with a solution. Experts need checklists–literally–written guides that walk them through the key steps in any complex procedure. In the last section of the book, Gawande shows how his research team has taken this idea, developed a safe surgery checklist, and applied it around the world, with staggering success.
Even before I downloaded the first chapter of Gawande’s book on my iPad and started reading about the helpfulness of checklists, I’d already become an adherent.
Now, I would recommend you make your own list and include Dr. Gawande’s keynote talk at the top of yours for the 2010 Information on Demand conference.
In the meantime, you can learn more about Dr. Gawande via his “Annals of Medicine” column for The New Yorker here.
Malcolm Gladwell IOD Keynote: Social Power is You
This morning’s keynote session was superb across the board.
IBM Information Management VP of Asia Pacific, Mark Register, kicked off the day but putting the first few days in context, advising the crowd it was high time to focus on taking the learnings from days 1 and 2 and put them into practice and lead change as key individuals in their organizations to deliver on the promise of information management.
Merv Adrian, founder of IT Market Strategy, later joined to explain that now was the time for information management to take its place at the head of the queue.
It’s no accident that business intelligence once again tops Gartner’s CIO list of focus areas, Adrian explained.
But now it’s time to deliver on business expectations, and for the IT folks to get in the driver’s seat and forge that relationship with the LOB that’s been far too elusive for far too long.
To deliver on their expectations, we need to move beyond automation and move into a more transformative IT, one where information is the raw material, but the tools, processes and approaches we take deliver new and actionable intelligence based on that raw information.
Analytics should guide the priorities, and recorded, specific executable processes become the enabler.
Logic is moving closer to data, and big data drives new workloads: We’re collecting it, so why not use it? And it’s the discovery tools that facilitate the stewardship of that insight.
Adrian also explained that the art of the possible has been radically changed by stream computing. I
got a full debrief on stream last night from some IBM researchers that I’m still digesting, but I have to say I think he’s absolutely right.
Think of all the data out there available today, even on your drive to work, that if it were collected and analyzed in real-time, could prove extremely beneficial (our friends with the City of Stockholm are doing just that with their smarter traffic system, which has lowered emissions and traffic substantially).
After Adrian, Mark Register introduced the featured speaker of the morning, noted author Malcolm Gladwell.
Gladwell kicked things off by joking that it struck him ironic that IBM was hosting a business analytics conference in….Las Vegas.
What were the odds?
Gladwell went on to explain his big themes, that radical change happens far more quickly than you could ever imagine (instead of seeming to be dragged out into inevitable perpetuity).
He reminded us that radio took off as a medium once the “tipping point” was reached, the tipping point being the radio announcing of a key boxing match in New Jersey back in the early part of the 20th century.
Suddenly, there was a compelling reason for people to buy a radio, and it was David Sarnoff’s energy and enthusiasm, the sheer force of his persuasion and connectedness to key players in his community, that brought about a transformation that changed the world forever.
A boxing match.
Gladwell explained that key acts of transformation almost always start with a reframing of sorts.
Think seat belts.
When adults were encouraged to wear seat belts, nobody bit. When they were reframed as a way to protect kids, their use took off like crazy.
The iPod: MP3 players existed before the iPod, but Steve Jobs reframed the iPod as a single, simple device with a simple interface and simple advertising.
The music world, and how we consumers consumed music, changed almost overnight.
In addressing the key concerns of this audience, he posed the question as to how you frame the discussion about information transformation in your organization?
He explained that they, the audience, are not bringing their organizations a big black box. They are bringing them the democratization of intelligence.
How do you do that more effectively? You do it the way David Sarnoff brought RCA that radio opportunity: by sheer force of will and persuasion.
Sarnoff was basically just some Jersey kid…RCA gave him no money, no resources.
But he was the kind of kid who know someone who knew someone who had a radio, and knew someone who know someone who knew some boxers…and everything got connected and a transformation reached its tipping point.
What did Sarnoff have?
Simple.
Social power, the most underestimated factor in any transformation.
A person who has it is able to win the respect of his peers because of a unique skill, of persuasion and personality.
A person not unlike Malcolm Gladwell.
(BLOGGER’S NOTE: I had the opportunity to conduct a 1-1 walk and talk interview with Malcolm just after his keynote. Keep your eyes here on the Turbo blog to read that interview in the very near future!)