The Checklist Manifesto_ How to Get Things Right - Atul Gawande [70]
The results showed up in their bottom lines, too. The Airline Captains had a median 80 percent return on the investments studied, the others 35 percent or less. Those with other styles were not failures by any stretch—experience does count for something. But those who added checklists to their experience proved substantially more successful.
The most interesting discovery was that, despite the disadvantages, most investors were either Art Critics or Sponges—intuitive decision makers instead of systematic analysts. Only one in eight took the Airline Captain approach. Now, maybe the others didn’t know about the Airline Captain approach. But even knowing seems to make little difference. Smart published his findings more than a decade ago. He has since gone on to explain them in a best-selling business book on hiring called Who. But when I asked him, now that the knowledge is out, whether the proportion of major investors taking the more orderly, checklist-driven approach has increased substantially, he could only report, “No. It’s the same.”
We don’t like checklists. They can be painstaking. They’re not much fun. But I don’t think the issue here is mere laziness. There’s something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us—those we aspire to be—handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocols and checklists.
Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating.
On January 14, 2009, WHO’s safe surgery checklist was made public. As it happened, the very next day, US Airways Flight 1549 took off from La Guardia Airport in New York City with 155 people on board, struck a large flock of Canadian geese over Manhattan, lost both engines, and famously crash-landed in the icy Hudson River. The fact that not a single life was lost led the press to christen the incident the “miracle on the Hudson.” A National Transportation Safety Board official said the flight “has to go down as the most successful ditching in aviation history.” Fifty-seven-year-old Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III, a former air force pilot with twenty thousand hours of flight experience, was hailed the world over.
“Quiet Air Hero Is Captain America,” shouted the New York Post headline. ABC News called him the “Hudson River hero.” The German papers hailed “Der Held von New York,” the French “Le Nouveau Héros de l’Amérique,” the Spanish-language press “El Héroe de Nueva York.” President George W. Bush phoned Sullenberger to thank him personally, and President-elect Barack Obama invited him and his family to attend his inauguration five days later. Photographers tore up the lawn of his Danville, California, home trying to get a glimpse of his wife and teenage children. He was greeted with a hometown parade and a $3 million book deal.
But as the details trickled out about the procedures and checklists that were involved, the fly-by-wire computer system that helped control the glide down to the water, the copilot who shared flight responsibilities, the cabin crew who handled the remarkably swift evacuation, we the public started to become uncertain about exactly who the hero here was. As Sullenberger kept saying over and over from the first of his interviews afterward, “I want to correct the record right now. This was a crew effort.” The outcome, he said, was the result of teamwork and adherence to procedure as much as of any individual skill he may have had.
Aw, that’s just the modesty of the quiet hero, we finally insisted. The next month, when the whole crew of five—not just Sullenberger—was brought out to receive the keys to New York City, for “exclusive” interviews on every network, and for a standing ovation by an audience of seventy thousand at the Super Bowl in Tampa Bay, you could