Book Summary 47 — Checklist Manifesto

Know-how, expertise and knowledge has increased immensely over the decades. Jobs have become more specialised, niche and specific — now there are thousands of super specialised doctors and handymen, where there used to be one doctor or mason doing everything.

We meet increased complexity with higher training requirements and demand more experience, but even the most knowledgeable specialists make mistakes. Doctors, pilots, engineers — they all still fail from time to time.

Atul Gawande, the author, provides a lot of examples of failures by experts in the aviation, finance and medical industry. He provides a solid case for using short, concise checklists to steer processes towards team work, increased communication, as well as routine checks. In his case study, by providing hospitals with checklists for operations, the death rate drops between 30–50%.

There are 2 types of checklists:

• DO-CONFIRM — everything is done from memory, then stopped and checklist is checked
• READ-DO — you carry out the tasks as you read

A good checklist is:

• Practical
• Concise
• 5–9 items
• 1 page max
• Uses Upper- & Lowercase
• Tested in the real world