The Checklist Manifesto
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Manufacturer: Profile Books Ltd
Written By: Atul Gawande
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Binding: Hardcover
EAN: 9781846683138
Format: Import
ISBN: 1846683130
Label: Profile Books Ltd
Manufacturer: Profile Books Ltd
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: 2010-01-28
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
Studio: Profile Books Ltd
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Editorial Reviews for The Checklist Manifesto
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The bestselling author of "Better" and "Complications" explores the significance of the lowly checklist, and how it has revolutionised medical practice and saved lives. Today we find ourselves in possession of stupendous know-how, which we willingly place in the hands of the most highly skilled and hardworking people. Yet avoidable failures are common, and the reason is simple: the volume and complexity of our knowledge has exceeded our ability to consistently deliver it to people - correctly, safely or efficiently. Atul Gawande makes a compelling argument for the checklist, which he believes to be the most promising strategy in surmounting failure. He looks at how the checklist has allowed pilots to fly airplanes with more power and range than possible before; and how taking this idea to the complicated world of surgery produced a 90-second checklist that reduced surgical deaths and complications in eight hospitals around the world by more than one-third. Along the way, he will show how checklists (which cost next to nothing) actually work, and why some make matters worse while others make matters better. "The Checklist Manifesto" is a fascinating exploration on the nature of complexity in our lives - and how we can best overcome it.
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Consumer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Commonsense restated: checklists are helpful
Comment: Since Malcom Gladwell ignited the pop-science boomlet, many authors have climbed aboard pretending to search for the deep hidden principles in everyday activities.
Atul Gawande is different in a way since he brings actual credentials to a part of his task. He is a surgeon.
But ultimately his 193 page self-described manifesto boils down to three points. First, procedures should be distilled into easily comprehended checklists. Second, people should be trained and disciplined, particularly in extreme situations, to rely on these carefully prepared checklists. Finally, members of a team or crew should practice utilizing their respective checklists together.
There you have it. Those are the lessons.
There is nothing to be found directly discussing the issues of how to build an effective checklist. No examples of successful checklists are shown. While checklists for commercial aviation operations and surgery are extensively discussed, there are no illustrations, verbal or graphic, of what these effective checklists look like.
In short, Dr. Gawande is hitchhiking on his New Yorker magazine colleague Malcom Gladwell's success and pretending to bring special insight into the ordinary, that is the use of checklists.
Not a very satisfying read for me, but others may find Gawande's great discovery that checklists are helpful in surgery interesting, if it wasn't already obvious.
Jerry
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Checklist Manifesto
Comment: Gawande provides an excellent understanding of how checklists are being used in various industries and how they can be applied to healthcare. What I learned from this book is how checklists provide a framework for communication among members of a project team. As suggested by the title, this is an advocacy book, but Gawande provides a balanced presentation with limitations as well as advantages. I would recommend this book to anyone who manages complex tasks requiring cooperation among multiple people.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent Reinforcement!
Comment: We all use lists and even checklists, but keeping them down to six or seven items was a great tip for me. As an example, we launch rockets. Big rockets, just for fun. And we get busy with ignition systems, launch towers, equipment & electronics. On more than one instance, we have buttoned everything up and forgotten to attach the quik-link to the parachute (sometimes they're over thirty feet in diameter). At ten or twenty thousand feet, it isn't the best time to find out. A short checklist of the critical items is helpful as the group is on the pad, hooking up the wires. We can see that Dr. Gawande's expertise is in selling the idea to folks who don't take suggestions too well. I think everyone can relate to that & it's helpful in my work to implement a little system to avoid errors. It's improved our performance.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Beyond checklists (3.75*)
Comment: The Checklist Manifesto is not just a great book and a valuable resource for all who read it. It is a warning sign on the slippery slope to technological disaster. My first thought, even before I finished this book, was to buy a number of copies, carry them on my various visits to doctors, ask if he or she has read the book, and, if the answer was no, then hand a copy to that doctor and say, "Please read this, my life may depend on it." It's that important, and may save your life, too.
Phrases like the following show he's aware of the problems:
". . . the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual capacity to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably."
"Medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity--and a test as to whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered."
I could add more, but you get the idea. However, the key question, once framed by Mark Twain, is not where we stand but whether we're gaining or losing. For all the good ideas in this book, the answer is still in doubt.
Here's why: As good as this book is, and as important as checklists are, neither are sufficient to the problem at hand. In fact, we don't really know the dimensions of the problem (the most important of these is obviously time). It's not just managing complexity; it's more like triaging complexity. Triage is something doctors like Gawande know about, but here it is in brief for those who might not. On a battlefield someone has to decide quickly (given the circumstance and the resources) if the wounded soldier who just arrived either a) will be worth those resources, or b) won't be (too difficult to save), or c) will probably survive if left alone.
Of course, these categories don't apply exactly to the problem we're discussing here. But there has to be some comparable, and simple, classification system we can use to begin managing this problem. For example, a) can the immediate situation be handled with our standard procedure, or b) do we need to refine our procedure, or c) do we need to completely rethink our approach. If we rephrase Pareto's Principle (more commonly known as the 80/20 rule), we could say 80% of situations can be dealt with using standard procedures (20% of our effort). Fine, but how do we deal with the remaining 20% of situations? We can't simply say they deserve 80% of our effort because it may take more than just effort. It may take a extensive revision of all our procedures.
What we need to understand is that checklists are just the first crude defense -- albeit effective -- against the increasing complexity of modern technology (especially computers). Checklists are just the first step toward addressing the safe flow of the exploding information that necessarily accompanies expanding technological complexity.
Yet, as good a job as Atul Gawande does in telling this story, it is shocking to note he doesn't see the opportunity for our potential extrication. He has discovered that medicine is lacking a much-needed discipline. However, he seems unaware that discipline already exists in abundance and is taught around the world. That discipline is engineering. He touches on this in Chapter 3 ("The End of The Master Builder") about the problems of complex structures. But he doesn't refer to any of the classic engineering books on failure, books designed to improve the discipline (for example see Henry Petroski). Nor does he make the obvious connection between the needed safety of these buildings, the safety we all desire for commercial aviation, and the medical profession: they are all responsible for millions of lives. Nor does he offer any insight as to why the medical profession has been so lax in recognizing the safety procedures of these other industries.
He doesn't but I will. One reason is that I've been told by many doctors, "What we do is not so much science as art." Therein lies the problem. Medicine may be part art and part science, but what it mostly needs to be is engineering. And what it needs to do -- and The Checklist Manifesto is a good first step in the right direction -- is learn from various engineering applications and (as he rightly acknowledges) acquire their discipline. Medicine must acknowledge it can benefit from the methodology of engineering. Only then can doctors exercise the self-discipline necessary to use that methodology.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Protection
Comment: Atul Gawande has written another thoughtful book, this one titled, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. In it, Gawande highlights a simple method to provide protection against failure: a checklist. Even the most expert professionals can benefit from help in the form of a structured approach to ensure that communication and engagement occurs among team members working together to achieve results. He examines the way pilots and builders use detailed checklists, and describes how the use of a surgery checklist led to improved results. His writing style allows readers to remain fully engaged, and any expert upon finishing the book, will be hard pressed to conclude that those involved in complex work can get by without a tool like a checklist. Resistance is futile: try a checklist as protection against unintended ineptitude.
Rating: Three-star (Recommended)
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More Information on The Checklist Manifesto
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If there is one topic that I have no natural affinity for, it is checklists. I don't use checklists. I'm not interested in checklists. Yet, against all odds, I read Atul Gawande ...
The Checklist Manifesto db's Medical Rants
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - HL Mencken ==== "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."Confucius
The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande, Book - Barnes ...
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'The Checklist Manifesto,' by Atul Gawande - SFGate
In his compelling book, "The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right," the surgeon and writer Atul Gawande expands on the ideas popularized in his 2007 New Yorker essay about ...
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The Checklist Manifesto - Stephen's Posterous
In the book The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande writes how using formal checklists can make a major difference in many aspects of life, including medicine, business and law.
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Coming for the April First Friday Book Synopsis: Gawande and Crawford. Coming for the April First Friday Book Synopsis: Gawande’s Checklist and Crawford’s Soulcraft This morning ...
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The New York Times bestselling author of Better and Complications reveals the surprising power of the ordinary checklist. We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where ...
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