Quotes About Precision

It is common to misconceive how checklists function in complex lines of work. They are not comprehensive how-to guides, whether for building a skyscraper or getting a plane out of trouble. They are quick and simple tools aimed to buttress the skills of expert professionals. And by remaining swift and usable and resolutely modest, they are saving thousands upon thousands of lives. *

You want people to make sure to get the stupid stuff right. Yet you also want to leave room for craft and judgment and the ability to respond to unexpected difficulties that arise along the way.

He wanted no careless errors; the stakes were too high.

Precisely when and how many such procedures would be necessary over the years they could not say.

So you want to keep the list short by focusing on what he called "the killer items" — the steps that are most dangerous to skip and sometimes overlooked nonetheless. The wording should be simple and exact, Boorman went on, and use the familiar language of the profession. Even the look of the checklist matters. Ideally, it should fit on one page. It should be free of clutter and unnecessary colors.

Faulty memory and distraction are a particular danger in what engineers call all-or-none processes: whether running to the store to buy ingredients for a cake, preparing an airplane for takeoff, or evaluating a sick person in the hospital, if you miss just one key thing, you might as well not have made the effort at all. A

Medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity.

But now the problem we face is ineptitude, or maybe it's "eptitude"—making sure we apply the knowledge we have consistently and correctly. Just making the right treatment choice among the many options for a heart attack patient can be difficult, even for expert clinicians.

It is common to misconceive how checklists function in complex lines of work. They are not comprehensive how-to guides, whether for building a skyscraper or getting a plane out of trouble. They are quick and simple tools aimed to buttress the skills of expert professionals. And

but the best surgeons retain a deep recognition of the limitations of both science and human skill.

I asked Byrnes Shouldice, a son of the clinic's founder and a hernia surgeon himself, whether he ever got bored doing hernias all day long. "No," he said in a Spock-like voice. "Perfection is the excitement.

Surgeons are so absurdly ultraspecialized that when we joke about right ear surgeons and left ear surgeons, we have to check to be sure they don't exist

Effort does matter; diligence and attention to the minutest details can save you.

The neurosurgeon had already gone over them in detail.

Good checklists, on the other hand, are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations.

But now the problem we face is ineptitude, or maybe it's "eptitude"—making sure we apply the knowledge we have consistently and correctly.

I did not say that the line was eight inches long and would go into his vena cava, the main blood vessel to his heart. Nor did I say how tricky the procedure would be.

As one surgeon told me, it is a rare but alarming thing to meet a surgeon without fear. "If you're not a little afraid when you operate," he said, "you're bound to do a patient a grave disservice.

The wording should be simple and exact, Boorman went on, and use the familiar language of the profession. Even the look of the checklist matters. Ideally, it should fit on one page. It should be free of clutter and unnecessary colors. It should use both uppercase and lowercase text for ease of reading. (He went so far as to recommend using a sans serif type like Helvetica.)

Operations like that lap chole have taught me how easily error can occur, but they've also showed me something else: effort does matter; diligence and attention to the minutest details can save you." .

Every woman has a well stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.

The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves agains the manner of saying. When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar. I have tried to learn my anger's usefulness to me, as well as its limitations.

It [ballet] projects a fragile kind of strength and a certain inflexible precision.

This proximity of chaos and precision somehow jarred the mind: the proximity of waste and creation, both governed by a uniform design, implying simultaneously a mathematical perfection and the anarchy of death. He turned his gaze upward. The Sun Gap was still spewing a torrent of white fire.