Agendas, check lists, shopping lists. These are some of the most powerful organizing techniques known to man. It just happens that they are so simple that their effectiveness is often overlooked and their usage sometimes tails off – on the assumption that “hey, we all know what we’re doing here.”

The truth is that we forget. You can relate this to the fact that the human mind cannot hold on to more than 5 things at the same time – and to be honest 5 is a stretch for most people (unless they apply a mnemonic technique to link them). Go shopping for 5 things without making a list and, if you’re like me, you’ll find yourself racking your brains in the supermarket to remember one or two of them.

The health sector has recently rediscovered this fact and has implemented a seriously simple procedure which is saving lives and preventing errors. Medical errors, by the way, are usually more serious than errors in other fields. If you don’t believe me, just ask anyone who has had the wrong limb amputated.

The “innovation” that is taking the world’s health industry by storm involves nothing more than reading a list of procedures aloud (19 of them) and checking them off before and after an operation. The evidence suggests that the outcome of this enlightened procedure is to reduce patient complications by more than one-third – and in some countries it has reduced death rates from operations by a half. For more details click here.

The Point

Aside from the enormous consequences of error, there’s nothing special about this technique that confines its use to the health sector. A mistake that is often made in business is to believe that technology on its own solves problems. Technology on its own never solves problems unless (and this is very rare) in involves no human interaction. Technology plus a well-though out process and well trained staff to operate it is what solves problems. And quite often the well-thought-out process is little more than a check list of actions.