The Checklist Manifesto
Human memory is unreliable and costly to fill and alter. Pilots diligently use checklists in both normal and exceptional circumstances to ensure consistency and quality. Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto (recommended to me by MB and JS) is an engaging story about their recent adoption in medicine. It discusses one aspect of creating reliable and effective processes (which The E-Myth Revisited explores nicely more broadly).
Takeaways:
- Develop checklists for routine tasks, in particular those performed under pressure.
- Choose between do-confirm and read-do forms.
- Checklists should usually have 5-9 steps.
- Assume people know what they are doing.
- Use several checklists for complex processes if necessary.
- Always test checklists in practice and tweak as necessary.
- Checklists seem to provide a process that teams bond around.
- New teams benefit significantly from name/role introductions.
Checklists improve processes performed by humans, making them more consistent, more reliable, and cheaper to learn.
The book left me curious. The case for checklists in companies and institutions is clear and exciting (again, see The E-Myth Revisited), but how effective could personal checklists be? Perhaps one for the start and one for end of the day? Leaving the flat? Packing? Would checklists for design (for example, requirement lists to ensure a practical kitchen design) work? I assume these exist but have not gained wide adoption? How do declarative (do-confirm) and procedural (read-do) checklists differ in essence? How much does development and adoption cost in effort and overhead?
References
Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right (London: Profile Books, )
Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It (New York: Harper Business, )