This is why you need a checklist.

I just read an interesting book, “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande. Mr. Gawande is a surgeon and public health researcher, who wrote this book as an attempt to answer the question, “Medicine, with its dazzling successes but also frequent failures… poses a significant challenge: What do you do when expertise is not enough?”

Check this out: one hospital began arming nurses with a checklist in an attempt to reduce line-infections. That is, infections in the IV lines that carry medicine into the patient’s body. Seemed so basic, that there was some push back. But when the hospital implemented a checklist, the ten-day line-infection rate went from 11% to 0%! Over a fifteen-month period, a simple checklist prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.

You may be wondering: does this example from the field of medicine have anything to do with my daily job? I think it does. Gawande says, “You want people to make sure to get the stupid stuff right. Yet you also want to leave room for craft and judgement and the ability to respond to unexpected difficulties that arise along the way.” That sounds like a balance we would all benefit from striking!

So I’m thinking: Where can my business and my team benefit from a checklist? Something to just “get the stupid stuff right”, so people can enjoy (and likely have more time for) the craft of their work?