The Checklist Manifesto:How to Get Things Right

From medicine and software engineering to construction and the airline industry, our jobs are becoming increasingly complex. As a result, employees have dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of tasks to do every day. And in many of these, like surgery, missing just one of these tasks can lead to disastrous consequences. How can people possibly keep up?

According to acclaimed surgeon and manager Atul Gawande, all you need is a checklist. In The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, he explains how checklists are critical for managing complexity in medicine, business, and other fields. The idea of a checklist is simple, but it has profound implications for high performance, disaster avoidance and team dynamics.

In 2006, Gawande worked with the World Health Organization to find an effective way to reduce preventable errors in the high-stakes world of surgery. With over 25 million surgical procedures performed annually, the complexity of surgery led to errors leaving millions of patients disabled or dead. And many of these mistakes were preventable.

The humble checklist seemed to be a promising answer to this problem, so Gawande began a journey to understand how other industries such as aviation, building construction, and financial investing use checklists to minimize error and increase standards of performance. Through research, trial and error, Gawande discovered that making a checklist is more challenging than it seems. When done incorrectly, checklists can be confusing, frustrating and demotivating. But when done properly, checklists can not only reduce costly errors and save lives, but they also create better teamwork, empower employees, and improve organizational culture.