Making a List, Checking it Twice

This time of year is about lists: Lists of New Year’s resolutions, Santa’s list of naughty and nice kids, Christmas card lists, top ten lists of the year just finishing, etc. For a great book on the simple, yet powerful, concept of list-making, read Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. A surgeon by trade, Gawande shows the power of checklists in the medical world, but his manifesto goes beyond merely extolling a common learning tool. To Gawande, a checklist is the quintessential embodiment of captured and communicated knowledge and is the perfect “swiss army knife” to use on our increasing complex world.

Checklists can overcome the strange cognitive deficiencies that we humans are subject to. For example, Gawande cites the fact that surgical errors drop dramatically when the operating team knows each other by name, so pre-operation introductions became part of his checklist.

Much of the resistance to checklists comes from experts thinking they don’t need to rely on such crutches- I have seen that complaint from lawyers- but in my experience checklists liberate the professional to focus on the cutting edge of their practice- the unknown frontier where human intuition operates at its best. For the thousand routine, yet highly critical and complex tasks, it’s best to automate those factors, and a checklist is a great place to start. I intend to develop many new checklists for my practice next year.

In the meantime, put The Checklist Manifesto on your 2011 reading list.

Best wishes for a very Happy Holiday Season to all !