How Checklists Can Combat Task Saturation

Checklists are not for Dummies: Combatting task saturation on a page

 

Of all the things you’ll read about on my page, two things stand out as commonplace in the air force, and rare as hen’s teeth in our personal and business lives: the debrief and the checklist. Of the two, the checklist is like the poor cousin at the ball. Everyone we talk to gets excited about nameless, rankless debrief, with all the impact on learning and culture it can carry. Very, very few people get excited about a checklist.

So let me explain why we get excited about a checklist. Using a checklist means we’re getting ready to fly. Far from being a poor cousin, our checklists are our wise elders. Working through a pre-flight checklist calms our nerves and puts us on the same frequency as our crew, our team, and our commander. Picking up an emergency checklist gives us time to think and to respond. We know from our checklist that all the basics are in order, so that our mind can drill down to the complexities of our mission and the creativity we’ll need to solve its problems.

If I could write another book, it would be ‘Checklists are not for Dummies’. Three examples come to mind. One of my mates flew without his book of checklists just twice in his 30-year military career. Both times, nothing went wrong, there were no emergencies, no accidents. There was no cause for him to look up a checklist, and if he did he probably knew it by heart anyway. But our pilot could not do what he set out todo. Totally missed the mission’s objective. Why? Not having his checklists totally derailed his performance. He felt task saturated the whole flight—just a perception that all was not in order.

The stats don’t lie

He’s no dummy, and nor are the surgeons at the hospitals who were introduced to checklists for a 2008 study by Harvard public health professor Atul Gawande and his team. The researchers had a hypothesis that simple checklists might help reduce avoidable  deaths and complications. But nobody expected by how much. After excluding other factors, they found that deaths occurred in 0.8 percent of operations that used checklists, against 1.5 percent of operations that didn’t—a 47 percent reduction. Literally hundreds of lives were being saved. They also found that serious complications fell from 11 percent to 7 percent of operations—a 37 percent improvement. Needless to say, checklists are now mandatory for surgery in those and many other hospitals. Professor Gawande was so astounded he wrote a book, not on public health but called The Checklist Manifesto.

The Apollo 13 example

Finally, let’s go back to the movies. Apollo 13 captured the moment when aviator Jim Lovell found himself in command of a spacecraft 200,000 miles (321,800 kilometers) from earth, with barely enough battery power to light a torch. NASA was looking at its greatest disaster,and the end of its space program less than a year after the 1969 moon landing. Flight director Gene Kranz, he of ‘Failure is not an option’ fame, helped keep Lovell and his crew calm, while trying to solve the problem. Ken Mattingly, the astronaut originally slated to fly the mission, was put into a simulator to work out how to fire up Apollo 13 on a AAA battery. He worked for hours in a race against time, trying sequence after sequence, failing again and again. With everything in the simulated spacecraft turned off and next to no time left, he finally got there. The sequence was transcribed into a simple, step-by-step checklist, and sent to Lovell. It saved Lovell and his crew, the mission,and the NASA space program.

The Apollo 13 landing proved once again that a checklist beats task saturation under stress. Simplicity beats complexity. Checklists get you home. They have been standard for flying planes since 1935, when a prototype Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress crashed at Ohio’s Wright Field Due to a stunningly simple pilot error. After take-off, the plane’s nose just kept angling up—it didn’t level off at all—and eventually the plane was almost vertical, stalled, and dropped back to earth. The air force’s best test pilots had just forgotten to unlock the plane’s elevator controls—one switch in a hundred steps.

The military realized that even their best people would make mistakes when confronted with the forest of procedures and instruments needed to fly a modern warplane. Checklists have been mandatory ever since. With them, young and inexperienced people can operate rare,expensive machinery in complex situations. Without them, mistakes are certain.

Using three types of checklists

There  are three  types of checklists you  will call upon through your mission— normal, emergency, and reference. Each is just one page,but is different in format and use.

1.   Normal checklists are condensed memory-joggers of standard operating procedures, so assume that your team knows those procedures. They will also be used in the mission if that procedure is used in the mission. A pilot before take-off will talk his- or herself through the checklist, step by step, to make sure and to ease nerves. That’s the sort of checklist you’d want to use before a presentation, or a product launch. Often, the actions can be confirmed to a wingman. In a two-person Do–Confirm: one person does the action, another person verbally confirms it’s been done. Not in a narky insistent way, but because it’s the natural way the team operates to add confidence and clarity. Do–Confirm, and initial the confirm.
2.   Emergency checklists, as the name implies, are there at the ready if the team needs them, in a handy case or folder for that purpose. Ideally, the team knows what these procedures are, but it’s not necessary—what they have to be able to do is recognized when the checklist is needed, and where to find it. Usually the checklist is in a Read–Do format, for either one or two people. Read The step, do the step, then initial its completion.
3.   References are just that: a source of more detailed information you can refer to when you need to. They are comprehensive stores of standard operating procedures, and can be as long as they need to be (and no longer).

Note that these checklists are standard operating procedures: meaning they don’t have to be mentioned in the brief, it’s assumed that the team will use them. Would that assumption be true of your team? How much work would you have to do to make checklists the norm?Factor in quite a bit: to get buy-in and follow-through— all the things that a change in culture and behaviour might need.

Rules for all checklists

There are two critical rules for a checklist: keep it simple, and use it. The best way to ensure a checklist is simple and used, is for the people who use it to be the ones who write it. Say you’ve got a team who has done more than their share of product launches and launch events, but there’s been a few simple errors of late and you want them to consider a checklist. Or perhaps you’ve got teams of experienced, frontline operators working on shale oil fracking, offshore wells, coal mine draglines, geoseismic testing. If you rock up one day to any of these teams with a nice sheet of laminated paper and say, ‘Hey Guys, could you follow this checklist from now on’, would they take any notice? It would be much better if you explained that checklists were proven to save lives, time and money, and that it was up to them to create the checklists that worked for them.That’s how the best checklists are created, and why they are used. Get specialist help by all means, but don’t just deliver the end result.

Failures in offshore drilling have received a lot of warranted publicity in the last decade. Failures on land are more common, if less damaging.In the same period, one international energy company tested the blowout preventers on its active drill pipes every two weeks. Until one day one of the company’s best drill operators accidentally sheared the pipe during the test. On investigation, the company found the operator had survived 38 close calls in fewer than a hundred previous tests. The tests were routine, and so dangerous. The operators just didn’t focus.After implementing checklists, their focus has returned, and there have been no incidents or close calls since.

Rules for Checklists

•    Trigger points that clearly determine when they are used.
•    One page. These are memory-joggers, not phone books.
•     Nine steps or less, including cross-checks. Your team through their standard operating procedures will know what, if anything, makes those steps possible. There’s no need for ‘breathing steps’, as in ‘Remember to breathe’, steps that state the obvious.
•     Clear, concise language. Really push the meaning-to-ink ratio. If you don’t need a word, cut it. If it’s not clear to the operator what it means, replace it.
•     No distractions. Only what has meaning, and no more. Basic fonts, no borders, no decorations, no emojis, no arrows to large words saying ‘This is important. Please read’, no such large words.
•    Test with other operators. Not only the team that developed the checklist, but  others. They’re the ones who will use them, and who will know if they’ll work.
•     Keep with the operation. If it’s a checkout checklist, keep it at the checkout. If it’s a pipe-testing checklist, keep it with the pipe. If it’s a perforation gun,keep it with the gun.
•     Read them aloud. The checklists are designed for an operator and wingman, whatever the task. Steps, cross-checks, and confirmations are always verbal, and if possible also visual.

 

The post How Checklists Can Combat Task Saturation appeared first on Afterburner Australia.

source https://www.afterburner.com.au/using-checklists-combat-task-saturation/

Combating the silent killer | Task saturation

Combating the silent killer | Task saturation: the biggest risk to flawless execution

What do people do when they feel they have too much to do with the time and resources they have? First up, the good endorphins in our body kick in, and we feel good, energized, ready to climb that mountain and skip down the other side. It’s a great feeling, but it lasts as long as this sentence. Before long, our bodies’ natural ways of dealing with stress get oversaturated. The nervous tension locks you up, and you’ll done of three things: you shut down, you flitter from task to task, or you fix on one thing and one thing only. Trouble is not far away.

The first and most harmless coping mechanism is to shut down. You look at your desk, your emails, your to-do list, and just go blank. Anything else becomes more important, no matter how trivial, as long as it’s not part of that mess. Go for a walk, visit the gym, do your monthly receipts, play a game on the smartphone. That’s fine every now and again, we all need a break. You might even be happy about it,and walk about the office looking for a pointless chat or an evening drinks buddy. But when the next day ticks over with no change, check in with yourself—is this OK, or have you shut down? Any luck, someone will have already noticed. The one good thing about shutting down is that it’s easy to spot.

Flitterers, on the other hand, are bad news. They’re risky because they act busy but do little, and kill you while they’re doing it. Everything they do is part of their job, and they’re not shutting down. They’re not waving that flag that says ‘It’s all too much for me’. But they’re not doing anything important, and not finishing anything at all. Compartmentalizers are specialist flitterers, flitterers with form. Have you ever wanted to get everything in order? Just put everything into nice, neat, calming piles and lines while just beyond your vision the world is burning? Rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic?

Compartmentalizers will make lists, re-plan their project (again, by themselves), file papers, go from top to bottom, and become obsessively linear. Again, that’s OK as a regular routine, keeping things in order so they never get out of control or need a year’s cleanout. But if you’re doing it when your team really needs you to be doing something else, then there is a problem. And the sign is that you’re letting a team down in an uncharacteristic way: a missed deadline, a late arrival, or a communication that just doesn’t make sense.

Finally, there are the channellers. As the name suggests, channellers have tunnel vision, focussed or fixated on one thing to the exclusion of all others. Most of us are potential channellers when things go wrong—80 percent of all people—and the examples are almost too many and too painful to recall. The cable company so determined to plant their new advertising campaign on the airwaves that they didn’t think through whether their connection staff were able to meet the new demand. The day we just have to get something ‘out the door’, and close our ears and minds to any distraction, any phone call, any unplanned event that might interfere with getting the job done.

Keeping people to the plan

Whether it’s task saturation or overconfidence, the result is the same: a lack of focus that can be fatal to missions, personal dreams, careers,and even lives. Pilots know that threat, and prepare for it as part of their plan. They use their checklists, focus on their central indicator,cross-check on the others, and use their wingmen. Wingmen check for blind spots and signs of task saturation, and pilots never go anywhere without a wingman. It’s all part of their plan.

In this post we’ll look at the use of a central indicator and cross checking as a means to overcoming saturation.

Your dashboard, with primary (attitude) indicator and cross-checks

There are about 350 indicators in the cockpit of a fighter or a commercial jet. Nobody can keep track of 350 indicators. The  answer is to be able to see four or five indicators clearly at all times, and if there’s anything unexpected with them, start looking at the relevant others. Still,how would you or a business keep an eye on four, five, eight, or twelve indicators at a time? We would humbly suggest the dashboard layout of our cockpit. It’s been designed, tested, and improved over billions of flying hours by millions of pilots flying under direct combat, safety and commercial pressures.

The dashboard has all the indicators you need to see, in a hub-and-spoke layout. The center hub is the primary indicator. For pilots, that’s the attitude indicator or ‘artificial horizon’. If you can only do one thing, you keep the plane level. (One look at the attitude indicator would have saved Flight 401.) The secondary indicators form the spokes. They’re all important, so a pilot will scan the dashboard constantly, and every scan passes over the centre hub. It’s the hub-and-spoke layout of the cockpit cross-check.

Many businesses  use dashboards, but there are  three standout features to the cockpit-style dashboard that aren’t often seen. First, the primary indicator is the largest image and is at the center: you can’t miss it. Second, all of the indicators are visual: You don’t have to read anything when your eyes are rattling. You can quickly scan across the dashboard and see that the indicators are where they should be. Third and most importantly, if the indicators are not where you want them, you will

know what you should do to adjust, correct, guide, and get the indicator back where it should be. For each dial, there is a corresponding action to take to move the needle.

Your business will have its own key performance indicators, and these will make up the company’s dashboard. Because it’s the CEO’s dashboard, it will show the CEO’s priorities. Some dashboards will have the share price as the central attitude meter, others will have profit, or revenue, or margin, all depending on the company’s current strategy and priorities.

Should everyone in the company be focussing on that dashboard? No. People at different layers and within different teams will have their own missions with their own objectives. The indicator that shows whether their own objective is being met should be that team’s primary indicator. Other indicators should reveal factors that may contribute to that objective. The CEO’s profit indicator, for example, may appear as a secondary indicator to be cross-checked, because that may reveal whether unbudgeted resources are available (or not) to help meet your objective.

Many companies want their employees to have one universal dashboard. But that implies everyone in the company should have the same priorities as the CEO. Would that distract them from their daily mission, the one they’re assessed and paid on? You bet. Keep it on the side, but not centre. It’s not their priority.

In my next post we’ll look at one of the most underutilized tools in business – the checklist.

Read the previous post in this 3 part series – Managing Task Saturation | How People Lose Focus

 

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source https://www.afterburner.com.au/combating-task-saturation-part-ii/

Managing Task Saturation

Too much to do, and not enough time?

One reason that few plans survive contact with reality is that people are human and don’t always stick to the plan. People lose focus, get overwhelmed, think that the situation has changed when it hasn’t really or, for whatever reason, they just make mistakes. Most often, that’s due to task saturation—too much going on, too much interference and interruption for one mortal to manage. Alternatively,accidents happen when there’s not really much going on, not enough to keep the mind active and focused. Either way, you need to protect against that loss of focus, and keep people to the plan. We’ve Worked for example with a terrific sales team who supported each other to the hilt. Being millennials,they used live messaging for everything, sharing new leads and information, giving each other encouragement and congratulations—a stream of positive reinforcement and useful data. Yet when they sit back and looked at what was happening, they realized the cost of that interaction may have outweighed the positives. Yes, the new information was coming ‘live’, but was it distracting them from their immediate task? Yes, they were responding to each other and changing their course in real time,but was that thoughtful or reactive?

How people lose focus

We  all know what  it feels like to be overwhelmed,  to lose focus on doing the important things,even to lose track of what the important things are. Our minds just can’t take it all in. Surprisingly,though, it’s more common for us to experience lack of focus when our minds are, quite literally, bored from inactivity. No matter how good a book or a film or a storyteller is, you might find your mind drifting off to other thoughts. That’s because your mind can absorb information far more quickly than the speed of normal reading or speech. So the trick is to feed the mind just enough information for it to be fully engaged, yet not overwhelmed. That way, you can avoid both the “sophomore” and the saturation risks.

The sophomore risk

Sometimes, people who ought to know better just aren’t paying enough attention to what’s going on.Overconfidence leads to cut corners, false assumptions or just bad judgments. Research into air force accidents reveals a curious statistic. Errors are more likely to be made by pilots with four to seven years’ experience—not the new or ageing pilots you might expect. Here’s why. Pilots are building up their skills and experience all the time. Unfortunately though, their confidence and lack of focus rises even more. When they begin, they’re fully engaged in the new experience, and can make quite good decisions while facing very new situations: what many call ‘rookie smarts’. But from four years in,they’re in a danger zone—until they come to their senses and again realize you have to pay attention if you’re flying a 20-tonne machine with 22-tonne of thrust at 1200 miles per hour. Maybe they’re a couple of close calls, maybe they learn from an error of a classmate—hopefully it wasn’t fatal.

That’s not so uncommon. We go through the same cycle at university. As a first year student, you’re a little clueless and therefore cautious. Having survived that, you look down from the heights of second year at the new blood coming in. You’re confident, cocky even. You’re a “sophomore” —literally a ‘wisefool’ in ancient Greek. Same thing at work—come in and we’re eyes wide open, looking for opportunities, for traps, and for assurance. As soon as we’re comfortable, we start to take things a little too much for granted. We get called into line a couple of times, because for the first time our performance doesn’t match our potential. But nothing’s fatal, we can keep going. And if we do, the wisdom of experience kicks in and we can begin to lead.

The saturation risk

The standout, biggest risk to flawless execution—to any execution—is what pilots call the silent killer:task saturation. It is totally avoidable. As it is insidious by nature you have to watch out for it, to be able to recognize it, and to respond.

Task saturation is the perception that you have too much to do, in not enough time, with not enough tools or resources. Whether that feeling is real or imagined doesn’t matter. Once it takes hold, you will not act the way you and your team need you to. You will let someone down, or worse.

In business, too many people wear overwhelming ‘busyness’ as a perverse badge of honour. The all-nighter before the killer presentation. Being three places at one time—two virtual one physical—with those in the room with you getting the least attention. The cross-continent flights to chase one more meeting, to make up for the problem that was someone else’s fault. That’s one hell of an important person right there. It feels good to be so valuable. No matter that as task saturation increases,performance decreases, that errors track saturation like ants track honey. Task saturation in business is a sugar hit; it’s nothing to be proud of.

Pilots learn that lesson the hardest way of all, seeing a comrade and mate lose their life for no good reason.

The good news is, fighter pilots have developed techniques to avoid the onset of task saturation. In my next post I’ll discuss how to spot task saturation before it’s too late, and go through my top tips for keeping you and your team to the plan

The post Managing Task Saturation appeared first on Afterburner Australia.

source https://www.afterburner.com.au/dealing-with-task-saturation/