What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can?

Just using a checklist requires [doctors] to embrace different values from ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork.

I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.

What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can?

Practice is funny that way. For days and days, you make out only the fragments of what to do. And then one day you've got the thing whole. Conscious learning becomes unconscious knowledge, and you cannot say precisely how.

As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems.

Having great components is not enough, and yet we've been obsessed in medicine with components. We want the best drugs, the best technologies, the best specialists, but we don't think too much about how it all comes together.