Embrace the Checklist

That is a picture of the 1st pilot checklist used for the B-17 Bomber in World War II. Experts consider the B-17 Bomber one of the most important weapons used by the Allies to defeat the Nazis. Interestingly, this was the first time in history that a pilot used a checklist to fly an airplane.

I've told this story before, but for those who haven't heard it, I'll share it again. In 1935, the US Army held a competition for airplane manufacturers to build long-range bombers. Everyone expected the Boeing corporation to win since they had made the biggest plane. But what happened next surprised everyone. During its test flight, as it took off, it stalled about 300 feet in the air, turned on its side, and crashed, killing two of the five crew members. The investigation into the crash revealed that nothing had gone wrong with the plane. They blamed the crash on pilot error.

When a group of test pilots got together to figure out what to do, they did not require more training. Instead, they came up with this simple approach. They created a pilot checklist for the very first time. In the past, it never occurred to anyone that you needed a checklist to fly a plane because it wasn't any more complicated than backing a car out of the garage. Still, this new plane was much more complex and couldn't be left to the memory of any one person, regardless of how experienced they were. That simple checklist changed the course of history, and I like to say, it's why we all don't speak German today.

This story is from the book The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. The book's premise is that as the world continues to advance and become more and more complex, the simple use of a checklist can be massively impactful.

I know that most people think using a checklist slows them down, and I know this because here at Zenith, we've built checklists for many parts of the loan manufacturing process. And usually when we first introduce them to new staff, they are a bit overwhelmed. But the opposite is actually true.

When you use the checklist, you can identify potential issues much earlier in the process, saving a lot of time. There's a great example in the book about how fund managers have adopted checklists to improve the results they're getting for their investors. One investor even claimed to have improved his results 100%.

A more recent example and one of the most famous stories in the book is the one about US Airways flight 1549 that took off from LaGuardia Airport and eventually landed in the Hudson River, where it became known as the miracle on the Hudson.

As the story goes, Captain Chelsey "Sully" Sullenberger was a "Hero" that day because he and the copilot were able to save 155 people. But the truth was much less a story of a hero than it was about a pilot and a copilot who followed the systems and used the checklist to produce a miracle outcome.

I'll share more about that story next week. But for now, I'll leave you with this question: if you were one of the 155 people aboard the flight that day, would you have wanted those two men to follow the procedures they had been trained on and use their checklists, or would you have preferred they went by memory and hoped they got everything right? I know what I would have wanted.

Quote of the week:

“Under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists of help, they are required for success.”

Atul Gawande – Author- The Checklist Manifesto