The key story in the book is the World Health Organization's development of a Safe Surgery Checklist. The checklist consists of a series of items to confirm as part of the surgery process. The are all fairly basic things, and they are put into three groups that are asked at three natural pause points in the surgery - before the anaesthetic is administered, before the first cut is made, and before the patient is taken from the operating room. They address very basic issues that you would think wouldn't be missed, but which often are: confirm that patient's name, confirm which side of the body the surgery will take place, confirm the procedure, ensure that all surgery team members have introduced themselves by name and role, discuss key concerns for patient recovery, and several others.
After the checklist was developed, WHO tested in eight hosptials around the world - four were in developed countries, and four were in developing countries. They ran the gamut from well-funded hospitals with all mod cons to rural hospitals that had so few resources that they had to sterilize and re-use surgical gloves until they wore out. In the test study, they gathered data from about 4,000 surgery patients across all eight hospitals for three months, then they introduced the checklists into the surgical procedures, and gathered data from another 4,000 operations.
The results are astonishing. Major post-surgical complications fell 36% with the use of the checklist, deaths were down 47%. All eight hospitals saw major reductions in both categories, and from a statistics standpoint, the relationships are statistically significant. The outcomes were published in the New England Journal of Medicine at the start of 2009.
Gawande is a terrific writer, and I recommend the book highly (his earlier books Complications and Better are also great). I think there are several things that we can learn about innovation from this story, including:
The application of these ideas to innovation is fairly obvious. When you look at innovation as an evolutionary process, it quickly becomes apparent that a number of ideas need to be selected out before we invest too much into them. Most organisations do not spend too much time thinking about the ideas that didn't work. One of the things that we need to get better at is learning from our ideas that fail. If we do this, then we can build a checklist.
Gawande has a couple of business examples in the book. He talks about three investment firms that have developed checklists to help them evaluate investment opportunities. And he talks about a study by Geoff Smart that looked at what made Venture Capitalists most effective:
Smart specifically studies how such people made their most difficult decision in judging whether to give an entrepreneur money or not. You would think that this would be whether the entrepreneur's idea is actually a good one. But finding a good idea is apparently not all that hard. Finding an entrepreneur who can execute a good idea is another matter entirely. One needs a person who can take an idea from proposal to reality, work the long hours, build a team, handle the pressures and the setbacks, manage technical and people problems alike, and stick with the effort for years on end without getting distracted or going insane. Such people are rare and extremely hard to spot.
Which VCs are most successful? According to Smart's study, the ones that use a checklist. Checklists are simple tools that can help us filter ideas and opportunities. They help us outsource complexity, leaving us more mental capacity to connect up ideas in novel ways - which is the key to innovation.
