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Published August 2004

Think Like a Pilot to Remedy Performance Issues in the Enterprise

  

  Kellye Whitney

The Institute of Medicine estimates that between 45,000 and 98,000 patients die every year as a result of medical mistakes in hospitals. That number includes instruments accidentally left inside patients on the operating table. Imagine if surgeons and doctors were required to engage in a kind of "pre-flight" procedure, similar to the pre-flight sequence that pilots engage in, before operating or afterward when it's time to stitch patients up. A checklist would indicate that instruments were missing and could save a life. Not a bad idea, and while the stakes are different, it's not a big stretch to conclude that similar thinking would also help to increase productivity and best-practice task execution.

EduCel's Will-it-Fly? Dynamic Knowledge Transfer System (DKTS) was engineered with the pre-flight premise in mind to help cure professional performance issues in the enterprise. By focusing on psychologically grounded prompts to trigger the right thought processes and encourage best practices, enterprise leaders and workers can take advantage of a more specialized type of learning that will enable them to do their jobs right the first time and avoid costly, time-consuming mistakes.

"Look at pilots who have a high success rate of task execution. Pilots have a very specific procedure that they use to affect best practices called pre-flight," said Evan Berglund, founder, EduCel. "There's an acceptance that the type of procedure that pilots perform is the most efficient way of affecting best practices. We've bottled that procedure."

The Will-it-Fly? DKTS is a standards-based system using a methodology created to emulate a pilot's mission-critical operations, encourage a high success rate of task execution and allow for the rapid development of new training modules as needed. The mobility and ease of use in creating modules reduces the number of hours needed for prep time, facilitates productive collaboration, promotes higher project execution success rates and reduces failures in recurring tasks. Will-it-Fly? acts like an automated tutor and provides the user with interactive feedback and assessments in real time.

Berglund's DKTS was created to be learner-centric and easily adaptable when fed any kind of information for any type of task execution in an enterprise. "There are three main reasons that people fail in task execution," Berglund said. "The first and most important reason is that we forget. Number two is not knowing or accepting what constitutes best practices. Number three is no ready access to support material at the time of need. You don't want to take a course or sift through a book at the time of need."

We all could benefit from a refresher course every once in a while. People frequently forget to do the right thing at the right time in high-pressure or stressful situations. Thankfully, forgetting to engage in a mission or strategically critical task in the enterprise won't cost a life, we hope! However, it can cost a lot of money and time not to engage in best practices the first time around. Productivity and cost savings are key issues in any organization. "The fastest way to remedy that is with a set of prompts," Berglund said. "You can call them diagnostic questions or a checklist. This is all at the front end of a module, and it's not a test, nor do we record any scores. It's designed to prompt the right thought processes."