The truth is, many mistakes are avoidable – in the fields of medicine and business, finances and government, etc. However, we should remember there are two sides of a coin: those on the receiving end take it as negligence, while those who actually made the mistake get frustrated because the volume and complexity of knowledge are overwhelming, and they simply cannot handle it. If a person gets sentenced to death – and killed – because of a human error, that is a big deal. While it’s easy to forgive failures of ignorance, failures of ineptitude cause disappointment and anger. Gawande provides the following example: back in the 1950-s, people didn’t know much about heart attacks: when that happened to someone, they would be given some morphine and oxygen, and then “everyone would pray and cross their fingers.” Today we know about many ways of treatment and even preventing heart attacks yet we face a different challenge: what treatment is the most appropriate in this particular situation? More than that, each type of treatment involves further choices to make (testing, diagnosis, and so on), which makes the situation more complicated. What’s interesting, for nearly all of history, ignorance has been the main source of human mistakes – but over the last decades, due to the rapid development of science, we’ve been failing mostly because of ineptitude. In the first case, we, for example, don’t know how to build a certain type of skyscraper, while in the second case we build skyscrapers that collapse. Here we fail either because we are ignorant, having only a partial understanding of things, or because we don’t apply the knowledge correctly (the authors call it “ineptitude”). The second reason concerns realms that we can control, to a certain extent. Our physical and mental capabilities are limited, and many things still remain beyond our understanding (like the secrets of the universe). The first one, they explained, is that human beings are not all-powerful. In their essay about human fallibility, the philosophers Gorovitz and MacIntyre tried to explain why people make mistakes. Lesson #1: Science complexity makes us fail – but there is a way out Checklists give power to those who usually don’t have it Checklists provide discipline, and discipline makes success possible The value of checklists is evident – yet we don’t like them To make a perfect checklist, follow the rules Checklists can be different – so make sure you prepare the right one Some checklists require a special component for a problem to be solved A checklist is an instrument of protection against failures
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