Home / Featured, Maintenance Excellence / Best-selling checklists?

Best-selling checklists?

As an unrepentant checklist fanatic/junkie, I recently had to pick myself up off the floor in an airport newsstand (not a bookstore, but a newsstand!). There with all the romance novels, Dan Brown books and the latest silver-bullet management books was The Checklist Manifesto by Dr. Atul Gawande. A best-selling book about checklists? Checklists! Can you believe it? The world wants to read about checklists?

This is the beginning of hope for the world. It is a great book that I obviously recommend reading. I also recommend giving copies of it to everyone you work with. (The price of the book is nothing vs. the value it delivers). The writer is becoming somewhat of a rock star. I heard him interviewed by Terry Gross on “NPR Fresh Air” and even saw him on the “Daily Show with Jon Stewart” talking about using checklists. (www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-february-3-2010/atul-gawande)

A practicing surgeon, Dr. Gawande goes over the pretty incredible reductions in hospital deaths and infections achieved through the use of checklists. In an eight hospital study, there was a 36 percent drop in major surgical complications and a 47 percent drop in deaths.

Highly skilled, busy people forget basic, key things and don’t even realize it. Just think of the productivity improvement potential. What expensive capital projects can deliver this type of improvement?
 
The point of this book is that with the growing complexity of everything these days, no one - not even the best trained most capable people - can possibly remember everything. So, let’s make sure we don’t miss any of the basic, routine, essential items - the ones we’re most likely to forget. Use checklists.

There was a negative review of the book in the Wall Street Journal, but the reviewer evidently missed the fact that one of the fairly important parts of writing a book review is that you actually have to read the book. (A witty blog comment was that if he had had a book reviewer’s checklist, he wouldn’t have missed that item.) The reviewer made the standard argument that real experts just don’t need checklists because they are just that good and just that smart, and they sure don’t need checklists holding them back.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

The reviewer tries to make the point that checklists would only have gotten in the way of a great pilot like Chesley Sullenberger successfully crash-landing his plane in the Hudson River. The book talks in detail about this, and how Sully was free to focus on gliding the plane because he and his co-pilot had taken care of the emergency basics with checklists, and he didn’t have to think about them.

Even successfully ditching could still have been a disaster if the cabin crew had not followed their emergency ditching checklists and done all the things necessary to get all the people smoothly and quickly out of the cabin.

Sullenberger refuses to consider himself a hero, and insists that this was a disciplined team effort with each member following his or her defined process responsibility. They were successful despite individuals never having worked together before. But that’s pretty boring stuff and we all seem to like the story much better with heroes.

Mark Graban goes into more detail on the WSJ review at  www.leanblog.org/2010/02/did-this-wsj-reviewer-even-read-%E2%80%9Cthe-checklist-manifesto%E2%80%9D/.

It doesn’t hurt either that Dr. Gawande can write. The book is a pretty quick, enjoyable read, but needs to be reread so it all sinks in and get used.

A few other great items in here are:

• Checklists need to include communication items, not just tasks.
• Checklists enable effective teamwork to the point that the more limited, kneejerk, command-and-control approach just can’t compete.
• How to build an actual useable checklist, how Boeing does it, and how the aerospace giant builds checklists for alarm conditions. Focus on the key, basic, routine items that get missed.
• Training by itself won’t succeed. Even the best trained people forget basic things.

Another related item I heard on “NPR Fresh Air” was an interview with author Jonah Lehrer talking about his new book How We Decide and how easy it is to overload the prefrontal cortex of the brain. This is the relatively puny part of the brain responsible for organizing the conflicting signals coming from all of the other parts of the brain into making the best decision.

A Stanford University study compared the resolve of some diet-conscious folks on whether to eat chocolate cake or fruit salad. They were split into two groups. One group worked on memorizing two-digit numbers and the other worked on memorizing seven-digit numbers. The groups then had to make the diet choice and the seven-digit group was more than twice as likely to choose the chocolate cake than the two-digit group. The added mental effort affected their decision to make the responsible choice.

It’s another argument for using checklists - to just plain reduce the workload on the brain so it can work better.

Please respond to this blog column with your own thoughts, questions and first-hand accounts of checklists in the workplace.

Related posts:

1. Skimping on the training puts your CMMS project at risk Training for users of a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS)...
2. Rigor (to the point of mortis)? I really enjoy the writings of Malcolm Gladwell. Both of...
3. Manufacturing improvement and the Rolling Stones If you’re like me, you’ve listened to the Rolling Stones...

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment and subscribing to the email alerts or RSS feed.

Filed Under: Featured, Maintenance Excellence    |  Tags: business management, change management, Lean Manufacturing, maintenance management, management, People Management

Comments