By Douglas Kruger
THIS year, there have been a great many conversations about “raising productivity” in the Island. I spoke on the topic for a Jersey Business event in April, and there have been several more since then. It seems the local business community is hungry for useful tools in the fight.
I picked up an interesting one recently. It’s simple, easy to use or teach, costs nothing, yet appears to be highly effective. I thought I’d share it. It’s nothing more complicated than the humble “checklist”, but stay with me. Specifically, these are checklists designed to perpetuate good habits.
There’s research to back it up.
At Johns Hopkins University in the US, a director once introduced a simple checklist for his doctors. He was trying to find a behavioural hack that would aid in the battle against avoidable infections whenever intravenous lines were inserted into patients. Frustrated by these preventable errors, which could create dramatic health complications, he came up with a five-point list. Here’s how simple the items were:
1. Doctors should wash their hands before inserting a line.
2. A patient’s skin should be cleaned at the point of insertion.
… and so on.
Over a period of 18 months, this spartan checklist saved the hospital an estimated $175 million. Not a bad return on investment for the time it took to write out five steps – and the cost of a few sheets of paper.
For something so simple, checklists are surprisingly powerful. Many agile organisations have adopted them into their culture. They help us to avoid blind spots during complex procedures and keep us from getting caught out by silly missteps in stressful environments. Greater effectiveness, reduced cost. The very heart of the productivity equation.
They are also amazingly powerful teaching tools.
So I decided to try it out. All I needed was a willing guinea pig.
I work as a professional speaker, which means that from time to time, aspiring speakers ask me for advice. I had coffee with a man who was struggling to get quality video footage for marketing purposes.
In his first attempt at filming a speech before a live audience, several things had gone wrong.
His tie was out of his jacket and he hadn’t noticed. He’d worn a high-quality radio microphone pinned to his lapel, but under pressure, he’d forgotten to turn it on. The cameraman had even noticed, but presumed that he didn’t want to be stopped.
If they had discussed the importance of this one thing, led by a checklist, the speaker could have told the cameraman that, actually, the video footage was much more important to him than the smooth running of the event.
His lighting and backgrounds were bad, too. He moved around the stage and ended up in poorly lit areas. He spoke in a decent-looking hall, but someone had opened a curtain behind him, revealing a colourful mural that looked juvenile on his video.
So we designed a checklist together. We gave it two headlines: “Things I want” and “Things I want to avoid”. He populated it with items like: “high-quality sound”, “good lighting”, “my outfit to look good”, “a professional looking background”, and so forth.
The next time he spoke at a live event, he took his checklist along, and showed it to the cameraman. They smoothed out every wrinkle in advance, and the cameraman also knew what to emphasise. And bingo, he got his footage.
This surprisingly simple tool allowed him to maximise the quality of his footage, while still permitting him to think about his presentation, which can be extremely stressful for new speakers.
Checklists help us to ensure that we get what we want, and avoid what we don’t want.
I’m a big fan of this two-fold format: what do I want, and what do I want to avoid? With simple guiding principles, you can send even your junior members of staff off to battle in the rough seas. And, as with the example of the doctors, this technique can be used at the highest levels of specialisation. It’s not just for junior staff.
Imagine, for example, an editor guiding her journalists. Instead of repeatedly lecturing them on silly mistakes, she could provide a checklist with all the basics: “What I want”, and “What I want to avoid”.
She might even add a few aspirational items to the checklist, ending with something like: “You’ve covered all the basics. How can you make this outstanding?” When “outstanding” is a standard item on a checklist, it will always be a part of the thinking. Even under pressure. And that’s the beauty of the system.
I don’t believe there is a single magic-bullet for productivity in Jersey. Instead, it’s about a myriad of small habits. Clever little tweaks. Intelligent techniques, honed, refined, and shared with the team. And checklists are a great one to add to your arsenal.
Could they help you to standardise brilliant behaviour? Why not try it out this week?
- Douglas Kruger is an author and “Hall of Fame” speaker, who lives in St Helier. His books are available from Audible and Amazon. Meet him at douglaskruger.com.
