Checks With Chart!

On Checklists and Complacency: a mea culpa

It’s easier to see faults in other people (and benefits, too).  You could say that this is part of the problem addressed in Matt 7:5.  The challenge is to get past thinking the other person’s faults make him a bad person, and instead use the experience to look at our own lives, and find where we also have a mote (or a plank) obscuring our vision.

In a way, this happened to me last week.

My job causes me to travel quite a bit, especially the past few months, and usually this travel is to secure facilities that require my company to have sent a visit request.  The travel arrangements can get quite complicated: on one occasion (years ago, when still in uniform) I was to fly to Rhode Island, stay for two days, then fly to Fort Lauderdale, get on a submarine, ride to the Bahamas, stay in the Bahamas for several days, and fly home.  Did I mention it was February?  Try packing to stay warm in Rhode Island in February, but in a small enough bag to fit in the negligible space available on a submarine, with warm weather clothes for the Bahamas.  Now double that, because I needed both uniforms and civilian clothes.

It took me a while to learn that I needed to have a checklist to make sure that I had made all the arrangements: get approval for travel, book flights, rental car, hotel, send visit request.  And after not being reimbursed one time, I added to my checklist verification that I had submitted the travel claim, that it had been received, and finally liquidated.

Using the checklist, travel became routine.  I actually got quite good at it.  Sending of visit requests was in automatic.  I stopped using the checklist.

You know where this is going, don’t you?

Last week I went to the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island, to watch several teams performing a submarine navigation task in a high-fidelity navigation trainer.  But I found at the security office outside the gate that they didn’t have my visit request.  I knew I had sent an email to our Facility Security Officer (FSO) requesting she send a request; and I remembered she had replied “request has been sent – check with your point of contact to ensure it has been received.”  I have a fear of calling people I don’t know; always have had.  I frequently even fear calling people I do know.  So I didn’t check on the visit request.  On further investigation, the response from the FSO I was thinking about was to an earlier request: she had never seen my email about last week.  I began to think that I needed to resurrect the checklist.

It was very instructive to watch the teams operate in the navigation trainer.  We watched one team from a submarine in the shipyard, who did really rather well considering how new many of the members were.  We also watched two teams of officers attending department head school who, not surprisingly, were less a team and more a group of individuals.

In navigating a submarine in shallow water, we take a sounding – measure the distance to the ocean bottom using a fathometer – at frequent intervals.  Each time we do this, we compare the measured water depth to the charted water depth at the position on the chart (map) where we think the submarine is.  If the two depths match (near enough), the senior navigator on watch announces “Checks with chart!”  It’s a routine; a boring one.  It has become so much a part of submariners’ (and presumably surface sailors’) lives, that the previous Captain where I work used the phrase “checks with chart” every time he was told something that matched his expectations.

The second day of observation last week, one team got a sounding that was 100’ off from the charted water depth.  The sounding did not check with chart.  The team did the right thing: they investigated thoroughly, and found that the source for determining ship’s position that they had just started using was not properly calibrated to the chart.  They weren’t where they thought they were.  The cross-check with the sounding allowed them to discover and correct the discrepancy early.  During the discussion after the exercise, I pointed out to the young officers how important an event this had been: however boring and meaningless it feels checking every sounding with charted water depth, even though the previous 2½ million soundings had checked, it is vital not to get complacent, not to stop doing the check.  People have died when the cross-check was not performed correctly.  That day’s event demonstrated the vital importance of this boring cross-check.

Like calling my point of contact to ensure that my visit request has been received.

I learned my lesson, and resolved to write this entry to reinforce the lesson, and share it with others.  But even before I had had an opportunity to write, in attempting to send my travel claim for reimbursement, I discovered that I had not finished learning the difficult lessons of complacency.  I had never sent a request for authorization to travel!

Checklists and routines are there for a reason: embrace them!  And learn from other people’s mistakes (and triumphs); it’s less painful than learning from one’s own.