Bookworm Transcripts

00:00:00

I have a cup of coffee with me.

00:00:02

Nice.

00:00:04

I had my coffee already.

00:00:06

Yeah, this is...well, this is the coffee you gave me.

00:00:08

Nice.

00:00:10

I'm a fan, and I think my wife is a fan too, enough so that she is trying to figure out where to find it.

00:00:15

So you need to help me figure out how I can find it.

00:00:18

All right.

00:00:19

Is this a local thing to your area?

00:00:21

It's roasted in Wisconsin.

00:00:24

There's another Wisconsin-Roster that I...

00:00:28

They have a subscription service that I get coffee in the mail once a month, and that is Ruby coffee.

00:00:34

Okay.

00:00:35

So that's another one that I would recommend.

00:00:37

It's pretty similar to the one that I gave you.

00:00:40

Okay.

00:00:41

I like the one that I gave you a little bit better, but I am an ultra coffee snob, so...

00:00:47

You may not care, and the other one I know for sure will deliver to your door, so...

00:00:54

Fair enough.

00:00:55

Because I know the first morning I made it, I have this tendency to not tell my wife whenever I've swapped bags of coffee,

00:01:05

because we tend to open one, work our way through it, and then when we're done with that one, I go into the next.

00:01:11

But I don't tell her when I've done that, so it's always part of a game to see if she can figure out when I've made that change,

00:01:19

and see if she can pick up the differences in it.

00:01:21

She caught this one right away.

00:01:22

Nice.

00:01:23

Oh, you must have done something different this morning.

00:01:25

Well, no, I didn't do anything different.

00:01:27

I just used good coffee that might give me.

00:01:30

You're in a new coffee bracket.

00:01:33

That might be true, more so than I care.

00:01:38

So I'm looking through our list of follow-up.

00:01:40

Holy cow.

00:01:41

Yeah, there's a lot.

00:01:44

This might...

00:01:45

We might have to do this one rapid fire, just because there's a lot here, and I'm looking through the list of things for me

00:01:52

and realizing, "Wow, this is a bad round for follow-up for me."

00:01:57

Whoops.

00:01:59

Well, I didn't hit 100% either, so I'll go first, I guess.

00:02:06

Okay.

00:02:07

So the first one you have on here for me is reading my strengths finder with Rachel.

00:02:12

I have not done that yet.

00:02:14

She still needs to take it, and then we need to sit down and compare, so you can hold me accountable to that one again.

00:02:19

Taking responsibility for relationships, this was one that I didn't really expect to be on the follow-up list because there wasn't anything specifically actionable with this, but I'm trying.

00:02:30

So I'd say progress is being made, but there's still definitely room for improvement as just about anybody who deals with me on a daily basis will probably confer.

00:02:40

Enough.

00:02:41

I have been so close to implementing this so many times, and I haven't really figured out exactly how I want to do it and which accounts I want to do it with yet.

00:02:51

I did, though, get rid of email on my phone completely.

00:02:55

Awesome.

00:02:56

So I used to have dispatch, airmail, and the Apple Mail app on my phone.

00:03:00

None of them are on my phone at the moment, and it feels great.

00:03:04

Wow, I'm impressed.

00:03:07

Yeah, and it hasn't been super long, so time will tell, I guess, but so far, I haven't missed it.

00:03:16

Okay, so with your out-of-office replies, help me out again.

00:03:22

What was the intent behind that? Because this is something I've played around with in the past, but for me, it feels like I can't pull it off.

00:03:30

Yeah, so really what it comes down to is me putting in an out-of-office reply that sets the tone and the expectations for the email communication going forward.

00:03:39

So, for example, Chris Bailey did this where he says, "I only check email at 3pm, so it may take me a little while to get back to you."

00:03:46

Sorry of a thing.

00:03:48

And I guess I've just been too chicken to actually do that because I think I, at least some of the accounts and the relationships that I have over email,

00:03:59

I need to tread carefully with this one.

00:04:01

So, I just haven't found a nice way to do it yet that I am okay implementing, like, system-wide.

00:04:09

So, that one's still in progress. I don't know if that one will.

00:04:13

Yeah, I really like the idea. I just don't know if it's going to work for me.

00:04:16

But I'm in the track.

00:04:17

So, here's where I land, because I think there's a lot of appeal to it, so it's something that gets me a little excited.

00:04:22

It's like, "Oh yeah, I can set this up." And then people understand what to expect from me before they ever get a response from me.

00:04:28

I totally get that.

00:04:30

My hangup is that I do enough support, and I have enough clients that, you know, my website went down.

00:04:38

Well, I kind of need to know about that.

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I think that's a big deal.

00:04:42

And those are things that require not, like, not notification level checks.

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But there's a group of people, you know, you hit a certain level within the support structure for me, and there's a series of emails that I'll check roughly once every hour.

00:05:02

I've got my own ways of doing that.

00:05:04

But if I set up some sort of an auto-office reply, I'd have to have a lot of granularity on who that goes back to,

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in which email addresses it goes out on, and in some cases, one email address has different ways of being responded to,

00:05:19

depending on who you are and what our relationship is in the past.

00:05:23

So I really struggle with this.

00:05:25

I'm with you in that I think there could be a lot of benefit there, but just figuring out how to pull it off in reality is not as simple as it sounds.

00:05:35

Right.

00:05:36

Really, the hangup for me with this is that I feel like I need to get people to respect boundaries in other areas of life

00:05:48

before I can take that a step further and apply it to email.

00:05:52

I don't think I've really found the sweet spot for that yet in terms of just like,

00:05:58

this is the time on my calendar that is completely off limits.

00:06:01

You know, so I think I need to really figure out how to achieve that 100% before I apply it to email.

00:06:09

Fair enough.

00:06:10

The other things here, use technology to be a producer, not a consumer and teach my kids.

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This one probably doesn't have a definition of done.

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This is just something that I want to apply this mindset going forward.

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And I think I've done an okay job at this so far.

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Like for example, my kids don't use a computer a lot, but when they do, they're using, we use Bitzbox.

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So it's like teaching them to code.

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And that obviously fits the definition of being a producer, not a consumer.

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You know, they're not sitting there watching YouTube videos.

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Was that one of those things that came up at Mac stock?

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Maybe Adam Christensen mentioned some other stuff I know which I ended up getting some of that also.

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But I think somebody in the audience, maybe...

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Yeah, definitely.

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I think maybe somebody in the audience brought up Bitzbox.

00:06:58

Okay, got it.

00:07:00

And then the last one, "Make you read the sleep revolution with me."

00:07:03

I believe that one is now on the calendar for Bookworm.

00:07:07

So I guess that one's done.

00:07:09

Awesome.

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Cool.

00:07:11

I suppose that means you're done with your list and I have to do mine.

00:07:15

Yep, your turn.

00:07:17

Okay.

00:07:18

Well, first one on this list is writing down my expectations for projects before I start them.

00:07:23

And this goes back a few books, but I still haven't closed any of those.

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So I can't really report on the outcome of them.

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So I'll bring that one up again probably next time because I know I've got a couple projects that should finish between here and there.

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So I'm just kind of curious to see how that goes.

00:07:41

So not a lot to report there other than it's still in progress.

00:07:45

The next one on this list is, "Avoid my phone in the early morning."

00:07:49

Depending on the day dictates how successful I am at this.

00:07:54

If it's a day where I know I'm going to be spending the morning in my office and I'm going to be writing and I'm going to be coding or something, it's pretty easy for me to delay.

00:08:05

It's pretty easy for me to delay picking up that phone.

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If it's a day where I'm going to go into our church and do some work in there right away or I've got a meeting first thing in the morning, keeping that phone out of my hand when I first get up is kind of a challenge.

00:08:21

Because I feel like I'm trying to check some things before the day gets going and it takes off on me.

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So I feel like I'm trying to just keep an eye on, you know, do I have any websites that went down that I need to fix before I leave?

00:08:32

I think that's what I'm doing, but I haven't fully nailed down why I need to do that.

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It's just a reaction at the moment.

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So I better leave that one on the list because I think I still need to work on that one.

00:08:46

All right.

00:08:47

So I've got, "Know the task before grabbing my phone."

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So make sure I know what I'm going to do before I grab my phone and do something with it.

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This is one that I think is similar to focus and that you have to continually work at it in order to improve it.

00:09:03

And for me, I've learned that I can pick my phone up and know what I'm going to do with it, go grab it and do that.

00:09:10

Sometimes I end up getting distracted after I've done that thing.

00:09:14

And sometimes I pick it up knowing what task I'm going to do, but then there's a notification on the screen and I immediately fall into that, fall into that trap.

00:09:23

And the next thing I know I'm closing my phone and then I'm like, "Wait, I grabbed this for something else and I don't know what it was."

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So I've got a bit of an issue there that I'm still trying to work out.

00:09:34

But again, I think that's something that you have to build that over time, I think.

00:09:39

That's my perspective. That's my excuse, maybe.

00:09:43

The last one on my list is telling my kids that I'm going to be doing something on my phone and what I'm going to be doing before I pick it up.

00:09:51

This is a bit humbling.

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And I'm not very good at it yet, but I do it on occasion.

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And my oldest is very good about, because she's such a creature I have it like I am, that whenever I told her that I was going to try to tell her what I was doing with my phone before I picked it up, she now asks me.

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"Daddy, what are you doing with your phone?"

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She'll ask me if I haven't told her.

00:10:15

Oh my gosh, that's humbling. I'm goofing around on Twitter.

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That's not something you want to tell your kids.

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I'd rather say, "I'm closing a business deal." That's what I would love to say, but I'm not.

00:10:29

So it's, yeah.

00:10:32

So there we go. That's my follow-up.

00:10:34

A whole bunch of failures there for the most part. A couple delays, but I'm doing all right.

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It's a learning process, I think.

00:10:42

All right. It's my excuse for now.

00:10:45

So all of that completed.

00:10:51

Well, step into today's book. I really like this one, Mike. I'm a fan.

00:10:59

I thought you might. This book was not at all what I expected from it, to be honest.

00:11:04

No, not at all. The book we're covering today is the Checklist Manifesto by, I still don't know how to pronounce a guy's name, a tool, Gawande.

00:11:13

So I apologize. Yeah. I apologize if I mispronounced that.

00:11:19

But this was very interesting. He starts off by telling the story of kind of miraculously how they saved this little girl's life.

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We brought her back to life after she'd been underwater for a considerable amount of time.

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She fell through a hole in the ice.

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And system by system, they brought her back basically from the dead, and they did that because of Checklist.

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And that really grabs your attention right from the beginning.

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And you feel like you have to read the rest of this because if it can be used in this scenario to accomplish this specific purpose,

00:12:00

then it's like, I have to apply this to my own life. Whatever you're going to tell me in the next several chapters, Mr. Gawande, you now have my attention.

00:12:07

And yes, I'm already drinking the Kool-Aid. Just let me know what I need to do.

00:12:12

No kidding. And what you said about this not being what you expected. I really was, in my mind, what I was planning to see whenever I go through this was,

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why should you have a Checklist? How do you go about writing one? What's your process whenever you use it? That's what I was expecting to get.

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But instead, we got this story of his journey of bringing Checklists into the world of surgery and how that's used to save lives.

00:12:41

Oh, well, knowing that it can be used in that way, and he's very convincing through this whole process, left me wanting to create Checklist for everything, Mike.

00:12:55

And it's like there's some areas like, "Oh, I could do a Checklist here. Oh, I could do one here. Oh, I could do one here."

00:13:01

And I know my wife is going to hate me for having Checklists for everything.

00:13:07

So the one thing, I didn't write this down, but I think there's ends up needing to be a balance between what do you use a Checklist for and what do you not?

00:13:17

So I haven't thrown that balance yet.

00:13:19

Yeah, one of the things that I wrote down was that the medical examples that he uses because he's a surgeon, they really iterate the fact whether he's explicitly saying this or not,

00:13:31

that Checklists are the difference between life and death.

00:13:36

He used another story which I thought was really interesting about the B-17 bombers. Do you remember that one?

00:13:44

Oh, yeah. So I'm a bit of an airplane, crazy. I like airplanes.

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I haven't got my pilot's license yet, but that's on my bucket list.

00:13:53

So, yes. I'll let you tell the story though.

00:13:55

Well, it probably resonated more with you then, so you can fix all the details that I messed up.

00:14:00

Okay.

00:14:01

The basic idea was that the military was trying to decide between a couple different types of planes and what became the B-17 flying fortress.

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That was expected to be the one that was going to be the technological marvel that was going to change the course of history.

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It could fly twice as far. It could carry twice as much.

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And when they brought it to the airbase for testing and basically to show it off, they had this guy who was really like the top of the line in terms of pilots who flew this thing.

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And he took off and everything was going great till he got several hundred feet in the air.

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And then the plane just turned left and crashed into the ground. And obviously him and I forget if there were other people on board, but they died.

00:14:51

And they deconstructed what happened and they've identified that he had forgotten to flip a switch basically, which was really basic.

00:15:02

And the reason that he forgot is because it had four engines instead of two.

00:15:07

It was one of those things where a simple checklist, "Did you do this for all four engines?"

00:15:12

Literally would have saved the guy's life. But at that point what they decided was that this wasn't safe for pilots to fly, so they went with the other ones which were more manageable before they understood that it was really something very, very simple.

00:15:26

And the way to fix that was with the checklist.

00:15:30

This is a story that I love because it's a bit morbid to say that you love it because a couple people died.

00:15:37

I think there were five crew members and two of them died in the process.

00:15:40

And the part that's interesting to me is that instead of assuming that there was something that could be done to make the plane flyable, they just assumed it was unsafe and went somewhere else.

00:15:53

That's interesting to me that we just discarded this marvel of a machine simply because we don't understand it and it's too complex.

00:16:02

And that's a recurring theme in the book that I found fascinating in that he pulls out a lot of highly complex situations.

00:16:11

He talks a lot about airplanes in general just because the flight preflight checklist, we're all familiar with how airlines have checklists for everything.

00:16:21

And it's mostly because the systems are so complex that there's no way you're going to remember it all.

00:16:27

Like in this particular case, the pilot who was flying this plane was one of the best test pilots in the world and he couldn't fly this thing.

00:16:35

So if he couldn't fly it, then how on earth are they supposed to expect just their everyday pilots to jump in and do it just fine?

00:16:45

So that's where they come up with the whole checklist process and figure out how do we make this thing flyable?

00:16:51

How do we make this thing safe?

00:16:53

And whenever you go through this simple process of a checklist, which it's a very simple thing, just put together a checklist.

00:17:01

But it's so much more than that and I've got some thoughts on how this ties into the last couple books we've had.

00:17:07

There's some power in having things to remind you of things that are easy to forget.

00:17:13

And I think that's the moral of this whole story and of the whole book in that our minds, when we're doing something the first time, can help us remember things quite well.

00:17:22

But when you do it repeatedly, it's hard to recall all the little details because you can't remember if you did it this time or not.

00:17:29

One of the things I was very vivid in my mind is, and it's kind of a cliche at this point, but did you close the garage door when you left the house?

00:17:39

Did you do that?

00:17:41

I remember I did it, but was that today or three days ago?

00:17:45

I don't know how many times do I drive back to the house just to see if the garage door is shut.

00:17:51

So it's simple things like that that you do repeatedly that it keeps you from forgetting the small things, and in this case, saving lives.

00:18:01

By the way, not to go off on a tangent, but the garage door problem that resonates with me, and one of the things that I did to fix this, is I installed, we needed a new garage door opener.

00:18:13

So what I did is I bought a Chamberlain myCue, it's a Wi-Fi garage door opener.

00:18:19

Of course you do.

00:18:21

Yeah, there's an app which will tell you your garage door is open, your garage door is closed, it's been closed for two hours, whatever.

00:18:27

You can have it said you notifications if it opens unexpectedly, whatever.

00:18:31

You can also open and close it from your phone.

00:18:33

So I have more than once left the house forgetting to close the garage door, and at a stoplight, open up the phone, hit the button, and closed it for my phone.

00:18:45

So that brings me a lot of peace of mind and is totally worth it in just the way my brain works, but you may want to check it out.

00:18:53

So here's a question for you, if you didn't have that, would you remember to close it more often, or do you forget it more now that you have it?

00:19:03

Does that make sense?

00:19:05

Yeah, I think that the actual number of times that I have forgotten to close it is not very great.

00:19:12

So it probably wouldn't make a difference in terms of whether I actually close it or not, but it definitely makes a difference in the peace of mind that I would have.

00:19:20

So I'm leaving for a meeting, I don't have time necessarily to run home and check if I close the garage door by the time I think of it.

00:19:27

And so in those situations, it's great to just look, confirm, okay, it's closed, and then I don't have to worry about it anymore.

00:19:34

Fair enough.

00:19:36

Versus calling your neighbor. Can you look across the road and see if I can.

00:19:42

Yeah.

00:19:43

To be honest, I don't even have phone information for a lot of our neighbors.

00:19:49

Oh, really?

00:19:50

Yeah, I think our neighborhood is a little bit different. Of course, I'm also not just outside a lot of times making those connections, but my wife knows most of our neighbors.

00:20:02

I know a couple of them, but not well enough to be like, "Hey, go close my garage door for me."

00:20:08

Yeah, no, ours are. So where we live across the road is a series of duplexes, but they're town home, you know, HOA, if you're familiar with all of that.

00:20:20

Which means that most of our neighbors are retirees, and it's an older generation than us, so they love having our girls around for sure.

00:20:28

But they often would call us or say, "Hey, can you come check our house? We're going to be gone for a week.

00:20:34

Can you just go run through it, make sure everything's on and running?" Like they would get a hold of us that way.

00:20:39

Well, that meant that we get into where we call each other.

00:20:43

"Hey, there's a box in your front step that got there last night. Oh, okay, I'll go get it." Like we do that type of thing quite a bit.

00:20:49

So I think we have kind of a unique relationship with our neighbors, but honestly they initiated it, not us.

00:20:55

Like, we're not that good. We're not good neighbors. We're just nosy neighbors.

00:21:00

We just answer the phone when they call us.

00:21:05

Anyway, I digress.

00:21:07

So the garage door problem, I would argue, would be the first type of problem that he articulates in the book.

00:21:13

There's three different types. The first one is simple.

00:21:16

And so the example he used there was like baking a cake following the recipe, remembering to close the garage door.

00:21:24

The second one is complicated. And that example he used was like launching a rocket.

00:21:29

It can be really difficult to figure it out, but once you figure it out, you can just rinse and repeat.

00:21:35

And then the third type of problem is complex.

00:21:39

And the example he used there was raising a kid where every single one is a little bit different.

00:21:46

And it's really easy to see how a checklist can be used in the first two.

00:21:52

But the third one takes a little bit of understanding the complexities of how basically checklist function as efficiency mechanisms to help us make right decisions.

00:22:08

Like he talks about that the rest of the book. But the complex problems, that's what he deals with all the time in surgeries and things.

00:22:16

There's things that will happen which are outside the norm and you have to figure out on the spot what is the thing that we do in this specific situation.

00:22:25

So I really liked how he applied the checklist principle to just about anything that you can encounter because I hadn't really thought about it that way previously.

00:22:38

And I think he does a good job of it too. There's so many stories he tells of situations where a checklist saved the day or where it could have saved the day.

00:22:48

So it's interesting. I think he has a really good way of bringing this out. And it's one that he hit me home for me quite a bit because he's talking about construction and building skyscrapers and airplanes.

00:23:01

And those two industries he reiterates a lot of scenarios from.

00:23:06

And those are two that I understand quite a bit and I enjoy.

00:23:11

So it was pretty easy for me to get engrossed in this book.

00:23:14

I really appreciated it. But the one part that he brought up about building skyscrapers was the correlation between what used to be called master builders to, and I forget what he called the newer model.

00:23:32

But essentially the way the master builder thing worked was that it used to be that someone was in charge.

00:23:37

They did a lot of the design, they did a lot of the architecture, the engineering and pieces, and then they led the crew to make it all happen. They did all the little plumbing pieces, they did the structural supports, they did everything.

00:23:48

And things have gotten so complex now that it just can't be done that way.

00:23:55

You know, he showed some examples of how they built skyscrapers, which just first off the technology involved, just to do typical reporting and say, "I have an issue with this beam.

00:24:05

The holes don't line up to put the support beam in."

00:24:08

And the crew member just puts it into their device. I don't even remember what it was.

00:24:13

And it kicks out the emails to all the people involved with that particular part of the building.

00:24:17

"So you've got to be kidding me. How on earth do you get this to where I have a hole that doesn't line up and it knows who to send information to?"

00:24:25

That just blew my mind that that was even possible.

00:24:28

But I guess if you're going to build a skyscraper, you need it to be in line.

00:24:33

And it's so bad. It's so dependent on it not falling that you really can't have a mistake.

00:24:39

And he brings up the point that very few of these things fall if they ever fall.

00:24:43

So I just, I don't know, I thought it was really interesting the correlation he made there.

00:24:47

Yeah, I have to admit that when I read the term "Master Builder" as I instantly thought of the LEGO movie.

00:24:52

But I haven't seen it. It's still on my list, but I haven't seen it. I really want to, though.

00:24:57

Yeah, you should definitely check it out.

00:25:00

My boys love it.

00:25:02

And the Master Builders in the LEGO movie are people who know how to build anything.

00:25:08

And so that's kind of the how I interpreted that term.

00:25:13

In the past, he mentioned that Master Builders were the people who would oversee the entire project.

00:25:18

And they would oversee all the different systems and make sure that they were all functioning the way that they were supposed to.

00:25:24

And nowadays, like you don't do that. You have an electrician come and figure out the electrical systems.

00:25:30

And you have a plumber come and figure out the plumbing systems.

00:25:33

Like you don't have to have all the domain knowledge for all the things in order to build a skyscraper.

00:25:40

And then obviously the software and stuff like that that supports it.

00:25:43

Like that's the implementation of the checklist.

00:25:47

And really what the point that I got out of that section of the book is that the checklist are great not to make sure that something is done.

00:25:53

But to make sure that something is done correctly.

00:25:55

But to make sure that discussions take place.

00:25:58

I thought that was really cool where it's just like it the checklist, the points in the checklist weren't necessarily that this outcome had been achieved.

00:26:06

But that they had talked to this specific person about this thing.

00:26:10

I think there's a lot of application in that in a lot of different arenas where the communication is the thing that causes the breakdowns.

00:26:22

And it causes in the case of a skyscraper, it might be the cause of the thing being structurally unsound and falling down and lots of people dying.

00:26:30

The ramifications of not following a communications checklist like that in some of the stuff that I'm involved in isn't so life and death.

00:26:39

But it definitely causes additional friction and it causes the momentum and the movement in whatever direction, whether that happens to be in my marriage.

00:26:48

If my wife and I are not on the same page, if the communication hasn't taken place on specific things, it can just make everything just stop.

00:26:56

And when that happens, it drives me crazy and I can usually trace it back to, "Oh yeah, we didn't communicate about this thing or the other."

00:27:04

Which is frustrating, isn't it?

00:27:06

Yes.

00:27:07

I was going to say it's so frustrating because it's so simple to fix.

00:27:12

And that's the whole idea behind the checklist is the things that need to happen are basic.

00:27:17

You know them already, but you gloss over them and you don't do them a lot of times because your brain just doesn't pay attention to those little details.

00:27:27

And so the checklist really functions as a support system just to make sure that, "Okay, we focused on this.

00:27:32

Okay, now we can move on to the next thing, focus on that, move on to the next thing."

00:27:35

Rather than trying to balance all this stuff in your head, it kind of goes back to the very first book we did, "Getting Things Done with David Allen."

00:27:42

And if you're having ideas not holding them, that's what I view like not having a checklist as.

00:27:47

As you're trying to remember all the different things that you have to do, all the eyes you got to dot, all the teas you got to cross, and invariably you're going to miss something.

00:27:57

I made the correlation to brain chains pretty quick because he, in brain chains, Theo talks about the reflex versus reflective reflection brain,

00:28:08

and your reflexes where you just operate off of instinct and your gut reaction to things, whereas your reflective mind is one that you really think through things.

00:28:19

And when you do something new in brain chains, he talks about how when you're getting into a new habit or you're doing something for the first time,

00:28:26

your reflective mind is taking over.

00:28:29

It's the one that is in control because it requires a lot of focus and thought.

00:28:34

The more you do it, it gets transferred over to your reflex brain because it's just a habit at that point.

00:28:39

You don't have to think about it anymore.

00:28:41

And when it moves over to that, you don't always notice, you don't have all the triggers and the memory points to recall if something happened or not.

00:28:49

You just assume it did because it's habit and it always happens.

00:28:52

So I made the quick jump to think that when we do something new, we're putting together a checklist for the first time.

00:28:58

It seems a bit ludicrous to need it because you go through it so often, and it's like, "Well, this is just second nature. I just do it all the time."

00:29:06

And it doesn't necessarily work that way because eventually it moves to your reflexive thinking, and you may think that you did something, but you may not have, because you've done it so many times.

00:29:18

You just assume it's been done, but it may not have actually happened.

00:29:21

That's where that checklist comes in to make sure it actually did happen because it gives you a point to stop and think about it, and as opposed to just assuming it happened.

00:29:30

At least that was the correlation I made.

00:29:32

Right. He says, "Do not assume things will work properly. Assume the worst and plan accordingly."

00:29:38

And that's really the purpose that the checklist is supposed to...

00:29:44

The role it's supposed to play. And you see that in a lot of the medical examples that he mentions. Like, something is going wrong.

00:29:51

The patient is on the operating table, and if they don't act quickly, they're going to die.

00:29:58

And they have a checklist in place because they've already assumed the worst and they plan accordingly.

00:30:02

And they know they need to do this, this, this, and this to make sure that they can save the patient's life.

00:30:07

And then the other thing in this section which really just iterates the whole...

00:30:13

Like encapsulates the whole conversation that we've been having recently about this is trust the power of communication.

00:30:19

Like, that really jumped out at me. All that needs to happen is that the communication needs to happen.

00:30:25

And then the fact that you're communicating, assuming that you're doing it right, and there's very clear understanding, and everybody's on the same page,

00:30:35

but if you follow the forum and you actually have the communication, then it's amazing how much of the other stuff just takes care of itself.

00:30:43

Did you make the correlation? And I'm going to go back to master builders and try to make a correlation here.

00:30:49

Because I got to thinking about this, and it hit me that there's a lot of folks who build online businesses that this applies to very directly.

00:31:00

So if we can kind of translate this away from skyscrapers and surgery down to websites and productivity, essentially the way I saw it was that most blogs and most websites start with a master builder.

00:31:14

You've got a simple blog, you've got one or two products that you're doing, and you may hire some pieces off to have like some design work done.

00:31:22

But for the most part, you're in control and you're the one doing everything up front.

00:31:26

Eventually, you get big enough that you need to start outsourcing or bringing in more people and it becomes a bigger complex system.

00:31:36

And then you end up with something kind of like what Asian efficiency does, where you've got a bunch of products, you've got a lot of different people doing different pieces of it.

00:31:44

So it requires a lot of people, but it's complex.

00:31:47

And this is where some of the agile structures come in handy because they force the communication piece.

00:31:54

You may have your checklist of things that you're putting together for the next week, but then it always ensures that you're having the communication points.

00:32:01

At least that's how I started to see it, because it's interesting how if you start with something where one person is in control of everything and you start to bring more people in and you add more to it and the bigger and hairier it gets, the more complex it gets, which requires

00:32:16

the checklist process and the communication points.

00:32:19

Do you see that with Asian efficiency specifically?

00:32:22

I know you've worked on both sides of that.

00:32:25

Yeah, one of the things that I wrote down is that checklists are essentially SOPs.

00:32:31

And that's something that we've really emphasized for a long time at Asian efficiency is the standard operating procedures or SOPs.

00:32:39

And so that was kind of the light bulb moment for me. It was like, yeah, we are implementing checklists. We are trying to make sure that the communication happens regularly.

00:32:47

And every time that something goes wrong, it's because that communication didn't happen.

00:32:53

It's because I knew that I should talk to the team about this specific thing before we just move ahead with it.

00:33:00

But maybe I didn't do that.

00:33:02

And so I get into the middle of a situation. And once you make that initial decision, it goes downhill from there because then it's like, well, now I have to justify the fact that I did this.

00:33:12

And a lot of times that can lead to even more trouble.

00:33:15

And that's getting away maybe specifically from Asian efficiency, but just in general my experience with the checklist or lack of checklist and the breakdowns in communication.

00:33:26

In fact, one of the quotes I wrote down that I loved from this book was that the biggest cause of serious error is a failure of communication.

00:33:34

And that I can definitely attest to.

00:33:37

Yeah.

00:33:39

So recently I've taken on a role as director of IT at our church.

00:33:45

And our church has gotten big enough that we've got a ton of cables and computers and just stuffs everywhere.

00:33:51

And something I did almost immediately whenever I took that role was set up an internal forum.

00:33:58

And if you follow me at all, you know I'm huge on discourse.

00:34:01

So I set up a discourse instance.

00:34:03

And we started using it internally as a tech team.

00:34:07

So I'm ahead of that tech team.

00:34:08

There's a few volunteers that work underneath the me in that.

00:34:11

And all it did, the only thing this system does is create topics that we can talk about.

00:34:19

And I simply asked the team to just check in on it roughly once a day or every couple days.

00:34:26

And they get emails about it too so they can respond to things quicker if they want.

00:34:29

But I just asked that they check in on it once every day or two.

00:34:32

And that process by itself single handedly meant that we have accomplished literally about 15 times more in a period of about a month than what we did in the past year.

00:34:48

It's just ridiculous how much stuff got done just because we could sit and talk about it in a unified place and have a number of conversations going on all at one time that wasn't overwhelming.

00:35:00

That's all it is.

00:35:01

It's purely communication and it allows us to do the asynchronous thing where we don't have to do it at the same time and we can just do it whenever.

00:35:10

So it works out really well.

00:35:12

And purely just so we can talk about something, someone's got an issue with something they tag us in it.

00:35:17

Oh yeah, this is the answer to that because I know that or I don't know it.

00:35:20

This person does.

00:35:21

That simple process gets things done so much faster than just making an assumption or trying to make a decision.

00:35:27

But you don't have the power to make a decision.

00:35:29

You get this.

00:35:30

I mean it gets to be a nightmare if you don't have some communication or conversation about something that's going on.

00:35:37

So I totally get it. Having points in a checklist that is maybe a bit big and hairy just to ask the question, do we have everything covered here?

00:35:44

Anything someone's concerned about?

00:35:46

That simple question can go really, really far.

00:35:49

Yep.

00:35:50

And the checklist is written communication.

00:35:53

Like my experience wants something in writing.

00:35:56

There's a lot more clarity around something because you can refer back to it.

00:36:00

And so like if you're, you could apply this to any area of life.

00:36:05

Like if you are trying to get your organization, your team, your family, whatever to move in a specific direction, write it down.

00:36:14

Because the fact that you have a vision, it's not the responsibility of everybody on your team, everybody in your organization, everybody underneath you so to speak, to understand your vision.

00:36:27

It is your responsibility as the owner of the vision to communicate it to other people.

00:36:33

And I was at the Sean West Conference and he mentioned that the point at which you know the vision has been communicated is when you start to hear your vision coming out of the mouths of other people.

00:36:47

And that is really, that's a revelation to me is that like I don't communicate my vision enough.

00:36:58

I need to get it out there because if I don't get it out there, if I don't write it down more consistently, if I don't keep it front and center in the different teams and organizations that I'm a part of, then I can't expect other people to remember that.

00:37:15

He talks about how memory and judgment are unreliable.

00:37:19

If you communicate the vision one month and then you wait three weeks and you ask somebody, "Hey, what was that thing that I told you in our last team meeting?"

00:37:26

It's going to have morphed and evolved because they're not going to remember it correctly.

00:37:30

And I'm not going to remember it correctly if likewise if I'm in the other situation.

00:37:33

If I'm a leader who wants me to be on board with a vision, then I need to make sure that I completely understand it at all times if I'm going to run with this thing.

00:37:43

And that comes back to my follow up of taking responsibility for the relationships.

00:37:48

I could say, "Well, yes, my leader's responsibility to make sure that they communicate the vision to me."

00:37:53

But I can't control whether they communicate the vision to me.

00:37:56

So in that specific instance, what I'm going to do is I'm going to remind myself every week, every day, if I have to check in with the leader, make sure that I'm understanding specifically what's expected of me.

00:38:12

There was a part in this, because I get what you're saying, and I think it makes a lot of sense to just, "What is the vision and where does it come down through everything that's going on?"

00:38:22

There's something that is extremely helpful that they do really well with planes and the checklist that they do for their pilots, in that when you learn something new or say your vision or mission changes or something, a new piece of knowledge comes up that they need to adjust.

00:38:39

They need to make a course correction because of.

00:38:42

And what they do in the airlines is they simply change the checklist that they're using for that specific scenario.

00:38:49

And then they distribute that checklist.

00:38:51

People make some slight revisions to it if they need to, and they run with it from there.

00:38:55

And that's how they distribute all the scientific knowledge that they come up with things.

00:38:59

He gave a couple examples of how they do that.

00:39:01

But I found that interesting that if something changes, how do we go about getting it throughout the industry?

00:39:09

And most industries, it just disappears.

00:39:11

It's like, "Oh, that's a fun article. I've got this thing for scientific articles."

00:39:15

You see all this stuff and you read it.

00:39:17

It's like, "Oh, that's fascinating. I wonder why no one does anything about it."

00:39:21

Well, no one knows about it. There's no way to get it across the system.

00:39:24

If I think about agriculture, there's zero for checklist because one, they're all opinionated farmers and they don't want to do it.

00:39:30

Someone else tells them to do.

00:39:32

But they've got their own ways of doing things.

00:39:34

But there's no checklist for it because every field's different in that case.

00:39:37

But there are some things that you could do to make that a little bit better and to unify things a little bit better.

00:39:44

But at the same time, there is no way to translate the new research and the new findings down through the sector like they do in airlines.

00:39:54

Because they have that nailed down.

00:39:56

Like, they checklist for the core of how they run a plane. That's just how they do things.

00:40:00

So if something new comes up, you know, I got ice in a fuel tank that appears and it only happens in this one specific scenario.

00:40:07

How do I let all my pilots know about it?

00:40:10

And they have a way to do that.

00:40:12

And that might be the one and only industry that has that figured out is how to translate the knowledge that they come up with the research down through all the people who need it.

00:40:20

True. Yeah. But a totally different example that he used in the book and really an example, in my opinion, of the fact that you don't have to get this stuff implemented necessarily industry-wide.

00:40:34

Like, you could apply this to your specific situation to achieve higher excellence is the story about Van Halen.

00:40:40

So I love this.

00:40:42

And I've heard this before. So I really enjoyed this part.

00:40:45

Yeah. So Van Halen, they had the, I think the point that he made in the book is that they were one of the first ones that really went like all out with their shows.

00:40:56

And they had semis worth of equipment that they would bring whenever they did a live show.

00:41:02

And one of the things that they would put in the checklist that they would give the venue as part of the contract was that there had to be a bowl of M&Ms in the green room with all of the brown M&Ms reading.

00:41:14