Checklist

I just finished reading the book “The checklist manifesto”, despite of a doctor, Dr. Gawande, structures lots of examples in his area to demonstrate that applying checklists improve results in terms of avoiding failures. I agree that a simple to do list can concentrate a team effort to do things right.

All efforts dedicate to guarantee that a group works as a team is important in order to achieve better performance, consistently and correctly applies, making sure that our team follow each necessary step without skip any one.

I have had a chance to work with different generations teams and the approach is completely different despite good results we had got in each case having great experiences. If I have a new chance to work with someone, again I would be sure that we would have been following a structure checklist for main activities, which are connected to our main business purpose.

After reading this book, I realize that as a manager I could work better with my team doing simple checklists to canalize all their knowledge available and be sure that each one offer his best to achieve the result that we agreed achieve.

When I was reading I have in my mind some doubts as the same Dr. Gawande wrote and that`s catch me:

• How could the team be sure that they had the right knowledge in hand?
• How could the team be sure that they were applying this knowledge correctly?
• When you deal with project management, the biggest failure is regarding miss communication. How can I improve tracking and better communication on projects?
• How can I integrate a team without disturb an organization culture doing simple things and getting better results?

Dr. Gawande wrote interesting things and not just write a piece of paper with bullet points, however how think about the checklist construction and operation, one of those things was about “activation phenomenon”. It that`s mean: Giving people a chance to say something at the start seemed to activate their sense of participation and responsibility and their willingness to speak up.

Another great point about checklists is their qualification, under his text:

“Good checklist are precise, they are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps – the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical. (...) The wording should be simple and exact and use the familiar language of the profession. Even the look of the checklist matters. Ideally, it should fit on one page. It should be free of clutter and unnecessary colors. It should use both uppercase and lowercase text for ease of reading.”

Four good actions to improve after reading and apply checklists:

1. To avoid mistakes.
2. To be predictable.
3. To be disciplined and not to skip steps.
4. To be more efficiency.

You can also read more about this book on the link from The New York Times Review: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/books/review/Jauhar-t.html

Regards,

Leo