Accuracy is the winner's specialty

by Lionel Wijesiri

The electrician wiring my office room worked swiftly and efficiently. But I asked him, "Couldn't you put those outlets in closer to the floor? Six inches down, perhaps, where they would be so conspicuous?" He shook his head. "No" he said, "it's the code-the electrical code. They've got to be this height."

"Municipality law?" I asked. He nodded. "Electrical installation code, too."

Next day I made a few telephone calls. The codes did not specify anything about the height of outlets. What the electrician referred to must have been just the contractor's own custom. What difference did it make, six inches up or down? Not much, perhaps. Still, the electrician had been inaccurate about a matter in which he should be expert, and so had undercut my trust in him. If he made an obvious error like that, that I could see, what might be hidden behind the walls where I couldn't check?

Examples

Our safety and sense of well-being -our life, in fact-depend on the degree to which we can trust the accuracy of the people we deal with.

For example: years ago, a jumbo 747 jet was damaged on takeoff in San Francisco. Fortunately, no one was killed, although there were serious injuries. Later, the pilot testified that the flight dispatcher had told him his runway was 9500 feet long. Which it was; however, mostly because of construction work, only 8400 feet were available.

This led to a miscalculated takeoff speed and the accident. Investigators thus came down to the use of incorrect takeoff speed, resulting from a series of irregularities, tiny pieces of misinformation, or lack of information.

Every day thousands of passengers stake their lives on the gamble that bits of information vital to their safety will be transmitted with absolute, scrupulous accuracy.

On the other hand, the degree of accuracy maintained in the NASA space program is extraordinary. For example, NASA Mars Exploration Program Team (MEPT) are now achieving such a level of accuracy in landing craft on the Martian surface that the targeted landing area for their luxury car-sized rover, "Curiosity", was like an arrow hitting the bull's-eye from hundreds of kilometers away.

Proportionally this bull's-eye equates to a landing zone on Mars measuring 20km by 7km.Although this may sound like a huge area to us when we realize that this spot on Mars is a minimum of 56 000 000km away, and that the projectile has been travelling full speed across this distance for the last eight months, the facts quickly regain our awe.

However, mistakes are a fact of real life ... they just happen! It is however important to learn from our mistakes, which is a natural process that will result in us getting better. If we don't learn from our mistakes then we miss a huge opportunity ... and yet many people fall into this trap.

Learning

Accuracy is extremely important no matter what work you have, whether at home, office or outside. In some circumstances accuracy is critical.

For example, 99% accuracy might be great for many professions, but for an aircraft pilot or a cardiac surgeon it isn't great enough!

So how do you go about improving your accuracy so that you make less mistakes? Here are few points:

(1) You have to care! You cannot adopt an attitude that accepts mistakes, but strive to be "mistake free". (2) You need to learn and that means actively understand why the mistake happened and making sure it doesn't happen again! (3) Sometimes you need to slowdown. Many mistakes happen because activities are rushed, or because the person doing the activity has not taken time to become accurate in the process. In the same way that children learn to walk before they run, it is important that we learn to do our activityright first and then get faster! (4) Practice! If you perform some tasks infrequently then you are more likely to make mistakes, so practice, and take special care on those kinds of activities.

(5) Check your work! It is easy to complete a task, but if you take a little extra time to double check your work you will reduce the margin for error. (6) Develop checklists for yourself. If an activity requires 5 steps in the process, use a checklist to make sure you completed all 5 steps every time. Pilots use these, surgeons use these and a mistake from either of those professions could be very nasty! (7) Take advantage of "best practices". Find how other people do the activity and learn from them, ask for help, and get a mentor or anything that will help you to get better at your job.

Not Easy

You may be certain there is a book called Alice in Wonderland, and that it mentions a 'Mad Hatter'; that there is another book called Alice Through the Looting Glass; that Sherlock Holmes said, 'Elementary, my dear Watson'; and that in the Bible story of Adam and Eve,an apple is mentioned. In all five cases you are wrong.

The first book cited was originally Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It refers only to the "Hatter," never to the "Mad Hatter."

The other Alice book is "through the Looking glass." The Holmes passage runs: "'Excellent,' said I; Elementary,' said he." Finally, Genesis mentions no apples. Finding what is true is not always easy. We have to discover the facts and thereafter carefully weigh the conflicting evidence and build one observation on another. This takes discipline, as well as a healthy skepticism.

The accurate person will more often withhold his judgmentthan hazard a wild guess. He is more willing than most to say, honestly, "I do not know." At its best, accuracy is a painstaking, caring, patient and reasonable faculty of mind. And ultimately it is creative, too. For it not only looks up facts, it discovers them in the first place.