The Checklist Manifesto

And the interesting thing about aviation is my wife is an emergency consultant and an attending physician in emergency medicine.

So we've both read the checklist manifesto, which comes straight from aviation.

But the medical sector initially were quite resistant to the idea of checklists.

You know, I'm a doctor, I'm a genius, why do I need to do this? But Auckland Hospital was actually cited in the checklist manifesto.

And checklists are now used in medicine.

Yeah, absolutely.

It actually comes from the same folks that gave us Naval Aviation Crew Resource Management, so Team Science.

So there's something there.

And usually it's not the sexiest thing that people want to talk about.

But, you know, when I go back to who is the deepest thinker on checklists, I go back to the book by the surgeon, Atul Gawande, in his book, The Checklist Manifesto.

So Gawande's big question was, why do smart, highly trained experts still make mistakes, whether that's surgeons, pilots, people at the very top of their fields? And the answer is fascinating.

It's not that they don't know enough.

So I'm going to pick a different one.

I would say for me, it would be The Checklist Manifesto would be the book by Atul Gawande, I think.

That to me was if Unreasonable Hospitality is the art, then The Checklist Manifesto is the science of doing business.

And that to me was an incredible mind-shifting book about – how to run a business.

So that would be the science behind it.

You all just kind of drink a bit too much at nighttime and you kind of get there.

But as you grow, you need to go from that to the Navy mentality, you know, of, you know, there's a set time that you get up and everyone has very, very clear standards of everything that you can't operate as the pirate ship anymore because it just doesn't work.

So the checklist manifesto kind of franked that very clearly in my head about the importance of accountability, important about standards, the important about checklists and all how they work in life, and then how I can apply them to business.

They are a key party of the inspection to make sure killer items don't get skipped.

And killer items is the exact term that authors like Atul Gawande in The Checklist Manifesto describe it in the medical field as those things that if you miss it, like people's lives are at stake.

And true or false, we have those issues here too.

We discussed this in some of our earlier episodes.

I make my execution expectations clear from the start and I remove scramblers from my team if they can't meet expectations.

Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto shows how the world's most high-stakes professionals eliminate the scramble.

In your next project, work back from your delivery date and account for the dependencies.

Once you have this work back schedule, set your personal completion time 48 hours before the actual delivery date to give yourself those final two days to ensure quality and finish cleanly.

That's the primary thing that I've learned, is how to go after tacit knowledge.

We hear a lot about checklists and Atul Gawande's Checklist Manifesto.

So how do you blend the necessary tasks with the intuition that comes on top of that?

Right, and that's an important part, is that it is a blend.

Um, don't es- underestimate the power of a great checklist.

Um, "The Checklist Manifesto" is a, is a, a fantastic book.

Um, you know, pre-flight checklists, no matter how many times a, a pilot has, has flown, um, how many hours they have, they still have a pre-flight checklist every single time before that plane takes off.

One of the great examples in "The Checklist Manifesto" is the, is the post-surgery infection rates that dropped dramatically when operating rooms instituted, um, instituted strict checklists before every procedure that happened.

Doesn't matter how many surgeries that surgeon has done, doesn't, uh, matter how many patients the nursing staff or the anesthesiologist had, had, uh, had served The checklist dropped the rates.

So checklists are proven to work at a high level.