reading list: the checklist manifesto

January 7th, 2010 • posts i've written

I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto and from the substance of two interviews I’ve seen, I already recommend this book.

From Malcolm Gladwell’s review,

Gawande begins by making a distinction between errors of ignorance (mistakes we make because we don’t know enough), and errors of ineptitude (mistakes we made because we don’t make proper use of what we know). Failure in the modern world, he writes, is really about the second of these errors, and he walks us through a series of examples from medicine showing how the routine tasks of surgeons have now become so incredibly complicated that mistakes of one kind or another are virtually inevitable: it’s just too easy for an otherwise competent doctor to miss a step, or forget to ask a key question or, in the stress and pressure of the moment, to fail to plan properly for every eventuality. Gawande then visits with pilots and the people who build skyscrapers and comes back with a solution. Experts need checklists–literally–written guides that walk them through the key steps in any complex procedure. In the last section of the book, Gawande shows how his research team has taken this idea, developed a safe surgery checklist, and applied it around the world, with staggering success.

Related posts:

1. how to write a checklist
2. the modern uniform, a manifesto
3. done with reading

Tags: checklist, reading

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