Purchase The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

Why, with all our expertise and training and technology, are there so many mistakes?
Atul Gawande goes a long way toward answering this question. As it turns out, we can probably do vastly better at what we do by employing a humble, low-tech tool: the checklist. Through a variety of stories, the kind that make him such an entertaining read, Gawande demonstrates that it is not a lack of talent, or lack of desire to do a good job, or lack of expertise that diminishes outcomes. Rather, it is that our brains are not dependable or exhaustive record keepers. We can develop skill and create, but we forget.
And depending on what we forget, that can have a dramatic effect on our outcomes.
More expertise won't help. The age of the master builder, who knew everything about the structure being erected, has yielded to the age of the super-specialist where even the separate disciplines of medicine are being further split and differentiated. Surgeons are more educated and at least as skilled in their practice as architects and pilots are in theirs. So, why do so few buildings fail and planes crash and so many patients have complications? The answer may be alarmingly basic.
My experience coaching investment advisors present me with exactly this conundrum, one reason I was drawn to the book as soon as I heard about it. As in medicine, financial professionals have more knowledge and skill than at any time in the past. And we routinely make mistakes. Leave things out. Forget stuff. Sometimes, it means a disappointed client. Sometimes it leads us to make an investment that hurts a portfolio.
We have so much knowledge to track and catalog. Our brains routinely fail us in recalling what we need to know and when. Fortunately, we can utilize external tools to ensure we address all the critical issues, and it can be as simple as a piece of paper. But how do we design an effective list? How do we successfully integrate it into the activity we want to accomplish? And why, when the power and reliability of this device has been so widely proven, do we so ardently resist using it? These are questions Gawande explores in his engaging style. He works through those questions to assist the World Heath Organization in improving surgical outcomes globally. And demonstrates the challenges and rewards of developing and implementing checklists in his own practice.
He doesn't tell us how to design our checklists, probably because he can't. Each situation will be custom. But in recounting the history and describing his own frustrations and successes, he shows us a path to make this tool our own.
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