Positive Deviance
Atul Gawande is one of those sage medics who you would happily let cut you open and explore your innards - not because he is just an outstanding surgeon but because he has thought hard about what surgeons do, and writes so engagingly - I am sure he simply charms his way under his patients' skin.
His latest book is a long meditation on the art of scalpel-weilding and explores what makes a good surgeon (and by implication a good professional) - diligence, doing right, ingenuity. His account of when he was training and trying to perform an emergency tracheostomy (do you cut lengthways, or sideways?) on a patient who was literally slipping away is simply edge-of-the-seat stuff and made me sweat until relief came when his more senior colleague took over, executed the procedure and brought the lady back from the brink. You realise that these surgeons have to be absolutely meticulous in the things they do.
At the end of the book is a short piece of his wisdom on how to live in the modern workplace which he calls being a 'positive deviant'. His five principles are:
- ask an unscripted question (by which he means, take off the professional persona)
- don't complain
- count something (ie, good analysis needs hard facts)
- change
- write something
I did something deviant, and wrote this post.
