Be Ahead Of The Plane
Millions of things compete for your attention as a pilot. After decades of research into the human factors that affect aviation, scientists have learned that standardizing procedures and following checklists reduces the chance of errors. These types of procedural advances in aviation have resulted in making flying the safest way to travel today.
By following checklists, pilots relieve themselves of cognitive load required by routine tasks, keeping their mind and attention available for the unforeseen things that may surface. This is especially important in times of emergency—but even in normal operations, this helps keep the pilot “ahead of the airplane.” The pilot can remain alert and recognize anomalies early, before the problem ends up compounding into an emergency.
As a leader, you are required to deconstruct complex problems into easy, predictable workflows. The routine of the checklist will ensure you don’t forget something critical when you end up distracted by other events. For critical workings, my team has built run books, the concept derived from the aviation checklist. These are important when deploying services in production or handling on-call requests. Sometimes there are dependencies that have to be honored to ensure graceful shutdown and restart processes to guarantee zero data loss.
I encourage my teams to have two sorts of lists. A “do-then-verify” list—here they perform the tasks and then go back to the checklist to verify—and a “read-then-do” list, where they stick to the chronological order of the list and perform them one by one. Standardizing your business procedures also allows you to analyze patterns of inefficiencies, making product life-cycle easy to adopt and automate in the near future.
