Does Automation Diminish Our Basic Skills?

Photo Credit: Rui Caldeira

Pilot Patrick Smith has another interesting article on cockpit automation and flight safety, something this blog has considered before.

Has automation reduced pilots' basic "stick and rudder" skills?  His answer:  "Probably, yes."

But the more interesting discussion is how automation has grafted a new technological skill set onto basic flying:

[A]utomation is merely a tool. You still need to tell the airplane what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. There are, for example, no fewer than six different ways that I can program in a simple climb or descent on my 757, depending on preference or circumstances. The automation is not flying the plane. The pilots are flying the plane through this automation.

A fitting metaphor for other knowledge work.  Technology hasn't changed what we do, as much as changed how we interface with machines to get it done.  The tools have changed.  The work, fundamentally, has not.

Of course, interfaces are complicated and can even add to our overall workload:

If you ask me, the modern cockpit hasn't sapped away a pilot's skills so much as overloaded and overburdened them, in rare instances leading to a dangerous loss of situational awareness.

A danger for all of us.  Alarms, notifications, badges, and our ever-expanding landscape of electronic inputs, distract us from real work.  Whether that's landing a plane, or delivering a project.

This has given birth to a meta-skill: the ability to sift, filter, and organize the elements of our work.  Our first challenge, then, is to maintain situational awareness in a complicated world.

Update:  Interesting post on maintaining situational awareness in e-discovery.

Does Technology Make You Complacent?

Is autopilot dangerous? The National Transportation Safety Board is holding a three-day conference in Washington, D.C. to discuss pilot and air traffic controller professionalism, including whether automation makes pilots complacent.  The New York Times reports:

Automation is generally considered a positive development in aviation safety because it reduces pilot workload and eliminates errors in calculation and navigation. “The introduction of automation did good things,” said Key Dismukes, chief scientist for aerospace human factors at NASA. But it changed the essential nature of the pilot’s role in the cockpit. “Now the pilot is a manager, which is good, and a monitor, which is not so good.”

...

Finding the balance between too much technology and too little is crucial, according to William B. Rouse, an engineering and computing professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Complacency is an issue, but designing the interaction between human and technical so the human has the right level of judgment when you need them is a design task in itself,” Mr. Rouse said. “When the person has no role in the task, there’s a much greater risk of complacency.”

Law offices certainly don't run themselves. But some functions are now automated, like document assembly, which utilizes software, templates, and the organization's knowledge base. There's no dispute this is a good development, reducing the time and expense of legal work and producing higher quality and more consistent work product.

Yet the danger of complacency exists. The technology makes it easy to produce good looking work product without dwelling on the details of the process. Professionals can be lulled into clicking buttons rather than thinking carefully.  They can overlook special circumstances or reasons for deviating from standard work.

Good countermeasures might include checklists to ensure people think through the issues. There should be a good review process to ensure final quality. And most importantly, as mentioned in the article, humans must maintain a role in the task -- important work shouldn't be completely automated.

Lean bonus: Discussing the Northwest Airlines flight that overshot its destination, the article quotes Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the captain who famously landed the US Airways plane in the Hudson last summer, reminding us to look for root causes of problems rather than reflexively blaming technology:

“Something in the system allowed these well-trained, experienced, well-meaning, well-intentioned pilots not to notice where they were, and we need to find out what the root causes are,” he said. “Simply to blame individual practitioners is wrong and it doesn’t solve the underlying issues or prevent it from happening.”

Also see this post by Mark Graban on aviation, standardized work, and automation.

Using Aviation Checklists To Improve Your Work

(updated below)

I've nearly finished reading The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. In developing his surgical checklist, Dr. Gawande looked at examples from aviation, which has a long and successful history of using checklists to improve safety. Below are checklists for the Boeing 747-400 and 737-600 (click on images for entire lists)(PDFs).

737-600 Normal Checklist

Boeing 747-400 Normal Checklist

Similarly inspired, I radically re-worked my GTD Weekly Review checklist. One of the major ideas I borrowed from aviation was to replace the checkbox with an abbreviated description of what "complete" means. For instance, an aviation checklist won't just list the landing gear next to a checkbox. Rather, the landing gear should be "down" on final approach, and that's how it's set out in the checklist.

Adapting this idea, my checklist omits the checkbox and instead describes what complete means. For example, my voicemail boxes should be "empty," my briefcase should have "no paper/items," and the prior week of my calendar should be "reviewed/updated." Here's a copy of my new checklist (click to enlarge).

Weekly Review

Hope this inspires you to create or improve your own checklists.

Update: Pilot and commentator Patrick Smith makes an important point:

My feeling is that boredom and automation have relatively little to do with one another. Or, better to the point, they haven't any more to do with one another than they've had in the past. Pilots are at times extremely busy; at other times there are long periods of quiet. Duties come and go, ebb and flow. It has always been that way. Boredom was a factor 60 years ago when planes had rudimentary autopilots and propellers spun by pistons. It's going to be a factor in any profession where there are long stretches of reduced workload -- such as when flying across oceans -- and when a large percentage of tasks becomes repetitive and routine.