HoN

a kind of genius

By pak ⋅ January 16, 2008 ⋅ ⋅ Post a comment

A little while back, I heard a radio interview with Dr. Peter Pronovost. He saved the state of Michigan more than $100 million and saved more than 1500 lives over one 18-month period. He didn’t invent a new drug. But if he had done so and achieved this kind of success rate, he would be heralded as a genius. And actually, he’s not receiving much attention for his achievement at all.

What did he do? He made a checklist.

That’s all. A checklist.

There are so many things to do when saving a patient’s life in the intensive care unit — on average, 178 individual actions per patient, per day — that even the most experienced and competent surgeons and nurses don’t get everything right all the time. They get it mostly right much of the time, but saving lives in the intensive care unit relies on keeping survival odds as low as possible, and even that little bit less than perfection results in infections and other little things that make it less likely a patient will survive.

So to make sure that all the little steps in the procedures happened and were performed correctly, Pronovost made a checklist. Nurses were empowered to correct doctors if they saw them skipping a step or doing something out of order. He did a test at one hospital and the results were so encouraging, Michigan rolled it out to every ICU in the state.

I’m simplifying, but you get the idea. A checklist bred consistency, and consistency allowed significantly more patients to live.

(The radio interview followed on a story in The New Yorker by Atul Gawande. The stats above are quoted from that story. Have a read for yourself — it’s well worth it.)

And that reminded me of another The New Yorker article written by Malcolm Gladwell not quite a decade ago (also a really good read) about geniuses like Wayne Gretsky and Yo-Yo Ma and the nature of their “physical genius“:

This kind of obsessive preparation does two things. It creates consistency. It’s what enables a pianist to play Chopin’s double-thirds Étude at full speed, striking every key with precisely calibrated force.

More important, practice changes the way a task is perceived. A chess master, for example, can look at a game in progress for a few seconds and then perfectly reconstruct that same position on a blank chessboard. That’s not because chess masters have great memories (they don’t have the same knack when faced with a random arrangement of pieces) but because hours and hours of chess playing have enabled them to do what psychologists call “chunking.” Chunking is based on the fact that we store familiar sequences—like our telephone number or our bank-machine password—in long-term memory as a single unit, or chunk.

If you think of physical genius as a pyramid, with, at the bottom, the raw components of coordination, and, above that, the practice that perfects those particular movements, then this faculty of imagination is the top layer. This is what separates the physical genius from those who are merely very good.

It’s something that appeals to my work ethic — that by working hard, you get ahead. Sometimes, really far ahead. Though in the back of my head, I don’t tend to connect a work ethic with the notion of genius. Geniuses come by their gifts naturally. They might have to work, but we don’t ever see it.

But these two articles shine a different light on the nature of it all. It’s entirely possible that once we find what an aptitude for something, a work ethic can take us far higher — that practice and repetition can lead to consistency, and consistency can lead to transcendence.

Even for a communications planner?

[x-posted from House of Naked]