Love the Checklist

The year is 1935, and the U.S. is holding a competition between Boeing and McDonnel Douglas - airplane manufacturers competing to win a contract to build the military’s next long-range bomber. It’s almost a foregone conclusion that Boeing will win the contact, with the design and capabilities of their entry – the plane that would become the B-17 Flying Fortress.

The day of the demonstration comes, the pilots are the most experienced, and the plane is more than capable. The plane takes off, adds power, becomes airborne…and crashes after climbing only a few hundred feet.

Boeing discovered the crash was not a design flaw, but rather it was pilot error. The new plane could fly farther and faster than any plane that had been built to this point. But it was also very complex to operate. The pilot had to keep track of four different engines, the wing flaps, the landing gear, and everything from start to finish that goes in to taking off, flying, and landing safely. Pre-occupied, the pilot had simply forgotten to disengage a new locking mechanism on the elevator and rudder controls.

Instead of making the pilots go through more training, Boeing came up with a simple yet brilliant solution – the pilot’s checklist.

The checklist included the most basic of information. At the time even the pilots thought it was stupidly simple. But armed with that checklist, pilots went on to fly the B-17 1.8 million miles without a single accident. The Army ended up ordering 13,000 planes, and the B-17 became the most recognizable bomber of World War II. That plane is credited with turning the tide of World War II and securing a victory for the Allied Forces.

I first read the story of the B-17 Bomber in the book The Checklist Manifesto – How to Get Things Right by Dr. Atul Gawande. His theory is that there are two main factors we have control over- ignorance and ineptitude. We fail because we either don’t have the information to perform a task or if we do have the information, we fail to apply that information consistently and correctly.

And for most of history, we’ve failed because of ignorance, having only a partial understanding of how things work. But today we know everything we need to know, and the information we need is always available. At the same time, the complexity of the work we do has grown exponentially.

That book was the motivation behind the many checklists we use here at Zenith. But what we’ve learned over the years here - and the biggest challenge with checklists - is people using them properly and accurately.

There is a myriad of reasons why someone doesn’t follow a checklist - or follows it halfheartedly. But I keep thinking about the pilots that fly those airplanes, and what’s at stake for them. Do they ever skip really checking an item? I don’t think they do, or we’d be reading about a lot of plane crashes.

It’s quite simple. People’s lives are at stake when a pilot is flying an airplane, but that’s not enough. The difference is the pilot’s life is at stake, too. If he forgets to check something - and the plane goes down - the pilot goes down with it. The magic formula for getting someone to follow the checklist, right?

If one of us forgets to check something, our lives are not at stake. But what if our lives were at stake, would that change anything? I’m thinking it would.

It would be a giant mistake on our part to think we don’t have a serious stake in the outcome when we “just missed it” when it comes to following and completing the tasks on the checklists we use. We owe it to the clients that choose us. We owe it to the referral partners that trust us. We owe it to each other - our co-workers - that are counting on each other to do our jobs with accuracy. But most importantly we owe it to ourselves to be the very best we can be. To be elite.