Book recommendation: Atul Gawande — 'Checklist manifesto'
A guidebook on how to avoid preventable mistakes and design high-quality procedures.
We keep sharing materials that we believe help to be a better leader.
This time it’s about Atul Gawande’s — ‘Checklist manifesto’.
Why it’s worth reading
The book draws valuable insights from high-stakes industries like construction, aviation, and medical surgery. These industries take the human factor as granted and work hard to minimize avoidable mistakes.
The software industry is way less disciplined about safety. Only a small fraction of software is life critical. Yet software has killed people1, sent them to jail2, or caused outages of emergency services3.
More often, preventable mistakes cause financial and reputational loss to the business. Once in a while, such mistakes literally destroy the company4.
Takeaways
Human memory is unreliable, even experienced and highly intelligent professionals can make mistakes.
Checklists are a powerful tool to reduce preventable mistakes.
It’s crucial to field test your procedures and get feedback.
A good checklist has a clear “pause point” where you stop and think.
Checklist aren’t to turn humans into robots. Rather, they complement existing knowledge.
Have you had a situation where bad things that could absolutely been avoided happened to your company?