new era of blogging discipline

Many readers have complained about the random images that are used in this blog. On some occasions, the images have nothing at all to do with the text. I will do my best to maintain better discipline in my selection of images and to ensure that there is a clear link between the image and the blog topic. But, not yet.

I recommend without reservation, Atul Gawande's book: The Checklist Manifesto. He refers favorably to the AEC (Architecture/Engineering/Construction) profession because of its reliance on an orderly, widely recognized and logically consistent organizational system. Gawande does not describe the intricacies of this system--which is the 16 division CSI Masterformat--but he immediately grasped its significance and indispensability when he visited a building construction site in downtown Boston.

Gawande makes some observations about checklists that are encouraging and humbling. What hit home for me was that they derive their power from a type of stupidity, which despite the pejorative associations of that phrasing is the most effective way of describing how a checklist works. The modern human gets so full of himself that it takes a piece of paper with a few basic, but critical, instructions to reset a course of action so that things go right.