The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

I enjoyed this book immensely. It's about a lot more than the value of checklists, though it is absolutely about that. It's a practical treatise, though, on recognizing our own limitations and fallibilities. Even (or especially) if we are highly trained, specialized professionals. It has a lot to say about skepticism as the foundation of science, and how difficult it can be to remember that. Gawande relates the challenges he's faced in getting medical professionals to accept the benefits of this practice, even in the face of research--there is such a tendency to cling to intuition and gut reaction, even in the face of growing evidence that questions it.

Mei Ling's pick. A non-fiction book full of anecdotes around the importance of checklists. A deep dive on how humanity can be better through careful planning and organization. The back of the book has a checklist on how to create checklists.

Loved it until at the end he started using anecdotes from disciplines I am more familiar with and sorta did a “oh that’s not right - wait hang on were the other ones wrong too?”. But I think they were probably right and that the investing chapter was uniquely a bit of an over reach at the end and somewhat more glib.

When Gawande really has his feet under him, he provides nuanced examples of how checklists work in three unique archetypal situations: flying a plane, performing surgery, and managing a multi-disciplinary construction project.

He makes a compelling case that: a) checklists improve performance without requiring an improvement in skill; b) most experts recognize the benefit of checklists after using them but not before; c) checklist design is quite complex - and a poorly designed checklist is as useless as no checklist.

He brings these concepts to life with three examples, which I think of as archetypes. Construction, where the checklist ensures 17 different subject matter experts communicate effectively on a complex project, aviation, where checklists ensure staccato, to the point responses to hundreds of potential in flight complications, and surgery, where a routine of simple preparation and communication can prevent life threatening injury.

You are then left contemplating, which type of problem am I working on and which approach would work best? If you are like me, you will find your career is a mix of the three and will have a great time exploring how these different bags of tricks apply.

Gawande speaks with the authority of a practitioner and the condition-studded run on sentences of an academic. Just how I like it!

Four stars!

I thought this book was going to be one of those nonfiction self-help books stuffed with filler but it was not. The process of developing a solution, studying the results, and the aviation and medical examples were all fascinating.

Update: I read this in 2013 and gave it 4 stars and I've found it's remained in my brain for nearly 9 years now, and the more I've embraced checklists for everything, the more it's improved my life. I'm upgrading it to 5 stars.

Deep insights on following protocols and procedures that can significantly improve productivity while minimizing error/mistakes