Who wants to admit they’re frail? Who wants to admit their independence and skill has peaked, or is fundamentally limited?
Not many of us, frankly.
And so we do not act in our own rational best interest. Maybe this is known to everyone else, but to me it came as a bit of a shock.
Of checklists – Atul Gawande has an excellent (no, really, excellent) book called “The Checklist Manifesto”. He looks at aviation, construction, medicine etc. And at one point (I shall dig it up and insert into this post), he speculates that although checklists are proven to improve performance, folks don’t use them because it offends the ego – the idea that something as simple as a checklist would help ’em.
And at work, a brave and intelligent person is determined NOT to use a banana-board for his/her transfers, presumably because they symbolise frailty….
It’s not about what is in our best interest, it’s what fits our narrative of our own selves.
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