| The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right |  | Author: Atul Gawande
Publisher: Profile Books
Category: Book
List Price: £12.99
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Rating:  24 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.5 x 1
ISBN: 1846683130
EAN: 9781846683138
Publication Date: January 28, 2010
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Product Description
Explores the significance of the lowly checklist, and how it has revolutionised medical practice and saved lives. This book looks at 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.
Amazon.co.uk Review
Amazon Exclusive: Malcolm Gladwell Reviews The Checklist Manifesto
Malcolm Gladwell was named one of TIME magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2005. He is most recently the author of What the Dog Saw (a collection of his writing from The New Yorker) as well as the bestsellers Outliers, The Tipping Point, and Blink. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of The Checklist Manifesto:
 Over the past decade, through his writing in The New Yorker magazine and his books Complications and Better, Atul Gawande has made a name for himself as a writer of exquisitely crafted meditations on the problems and challenges of modern medicine. His latest book, The Checklist Manifesto, begins on familiar ground, with his experiences as a surgeon. But before long it becomes clear that he is really interested in a problem that afflicts virtually every aspect of the modern world--and that is how professionals deal with the increasing complexity of their responsibilities. It has been years since I read a book so powerful and so thought-provoking. 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. The danger, in a review as short as this, is that it makes Gawande’s book seem narrow in focus or prosaic in its conclusions. It is neither. Gawande is a gorgeous writer and storyteller, and the aims of this book are ambitious. Gawande thinks that the modern world requires us to revisit what we mean by expertise: that experts need help, and that progress depends on experts having the humility to concede that they need help. --Malcolm Gladwell
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 24
 A defence of rational, systems-thinking approach to handling complex problems February 1, 2010
S. Yogendra (UK)
21 out of 23 found this review helpful
Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right has come close on the heels of Umberto Eco's The Infinity of Lists. Both are about lists and both admit to the ability of lists to bring about order and control. Both books attracted me because I am a consummate checklist-maker. Despite my prejudicial preference for lists and reading about lists, it is a credit to the quality of Atul Gawande's writing that the book kept me absorbed for the 3 hours it took to read all 193 pages of it.
The author proposes "checklists" as a functional tool to deal with the limitations of human knowledge and the possibility of making mistakes in the face of complex problems. Using stories from construction management, airline piloting and disaster management, and surgery, he shows how checklists can be used to break down complex tasks into simpler steps, thus helping prevent expensive mistakes. The author delves further into two kinds of lists (Do-Confirm or Read-Do) using a story from how the airline manufacturing industry writes their "user manuals".
Early on, he points out that checklists are not some silver bullet, and that there is judgement involved. Some situations may benefit from checklists, while others may not need any. Later in the book, he also admits that to many, lists are protocols and embody rigidity. He then proceeds to illustrate why this needn't be so and to demonstrate the importance of team work and how checklists enable that discipline, especially in disasters.
I found Chapters 7 and 8 most fascinating. The stories told so far describe the complexity of the work/ task itself but these two chapters introduce another layer, that of institutional complexity.
Chapter 7 details the WHO sponsored study to examine if checklists made any difference to safety, infections, post-surgery deaths in 8 quite disparate hospitals around the world. The results, from using the checklist, regarding reduction in technical problems, complications, infections and deaths were encouraging, for all cultural settings and even allowing for the Hawthorne Effect.
In Chapter 8, much mainstream media coverage of Jan 2009's "Miracle on the Hudson River" is debunked while the author tells the story of the pilots Sullenberger and Stiles and their calm use of appropriate procedures, while their cabin crew prepared passengers for and then monitored safe evacuation, to strengthen his thesis. The other half of Chapter 8 particularly resonated with me because I work with investors and entrepreneurs. I was fascinated by the stories of the 3 investors who have incorporated checklists into their investment decisions, favouring dispassionate analysis over irrational exuberance, so to speak.
The title is deceptively simple for this is a profound book, written accessibly and clearly. It is a defence of rational, systems-thinking approach to solving complex problems, to creating team work and collegiality amongst narrow specialists while ensuring desirable outcomes, no matter what the setting. Managers, entrepreneurs, investors as well as professional project managers such as event planners would do well to read, ponder and practise the idea proposed by the book.
The highly thoughtful Gawande, is a treasure April 18, 2010
CharlesA (London UK)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Atual Gawande is an American-raised indian Born surgeon practicing in Boston and he is also a writer for the New Yorker
he has written 3 books, all three of them excellent. Complications his first is a revelation, better his middle one I enjoyed less, and this third one, the Checklist, is spellbindingly good
Gawande is no mere doctor he was also a Rhodes Scholar (i.e seriously bright) earning a PPE in Oxford England in the late 90s.
To me, it seems that this is the secret to his appeal, he is a seriously intelligent and gifted academic, who later turned to the practical art of surgery. So he is very well rounded. The central feature of his writing is to convey to the layperson that there are no easy choices, no bravura macho surgeons who can reliably fix everything. He is searingly honest about the shortcomings of medecine and his own shortcomings in particular, relaying again and again over all three books where he has screwed up, often very badly. These accounts read very well as fair accounts of how difficult it is to actually do any significant surgery on anyone without killing them, or making them iller. He is neither too harsh nor seeking to exculpate himself. He starts with the premise that (nearly) all doctors want to help, but that medecine can be horribly complicated and difficult, that they make mistakes and they are sometimes out of their depth, and that they are all learning on the job.
What is magnificent about checklists is that, you'd think there wouldn't be much to say about them, that could hold your interest for very long. In this you'd be seriously wrong. it turns out that our prejudicial views on checklists (we don't like them and find them patronising) is in inverse proportion to how useful they are regardless of your levels of commitment to excellence, ingenuity or sheer brilliance. In the heat of an emergency many of the things that go wrong are EXACTLY the kinds of things that simple checklists can help you spot when your mind skips steps to focus on what you think is essential.
in this book, Gawande focusses on the usefulness of checklists in medecine, commercial flying, architecture/engineering and finance and he does a masterful writerly job of keeping you engaged and enlgightened as he slowly builds a very compelling case for dropping the prejudice and adopting the checklist in more and more areas of life.
One fascinating aside to me, is that the going through a checklist with other people (say before operating) was no mere mechanical procedure, but that it had a 'activating effect' of equalising the status and hierarchy of all concerned, suddenly you were no longer just some nurse or mere technician in awe of the surgeon. In fact, taking responsibility for your own part of the checklist made you a vital member of a team, and it was this team building spirit that made people work better together, think better and most importantly handle disasters with far greater focus as they knew each other and didn't waste time on blame or evasion. Much more commonly checklists even prevented disasters because since everyone felt part of a team, the junior members were not so intimidated into not pointing out errors which could later develop into disasters. It's a list on a piece of paper, but adhering to it in this public and collegiate way, had a profound impact on the psychology of the practitioners solidifying their sense of being part of a team and therefore being steadfast in calling things as they saw them, rather than simply deferring to authority and keeping quiet (a frequent cause of all types of disasters).
Gawande is a good friend of Malcolm Gladwell, but he is no mere wannabe, Gawande has his own unique authorial voice and he comes across as a genuinely likeable, clever decent and highly sophisticated but down to earth human being. He is such a good writer that not least of his skills is how funny he sometimes is when he points out the absurdities of human foibles (especially his own) and of taking on any ambitious human endeavour. He is no pious preacher.
Paradigm Shifting! July 6, 2010
Stephen Manley
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
It's true that you can learn so much about your field of expertise by taking a 'fresh eyes' approach - this book does just that. I'm not a surgeon. I would recommend this book to anyone involved with implementing change or organisational transformation. All too often in business simple solutions to known problems are dismissed as they are deemed to be 'insulting to our intelliginece' - yet this book offers a refreshing perspective. This provides a great analysis (in a simple-to-read-fashion) into the risks of relying on knowledge and expertise alone in todays knowledge-hungry world. It's difficult not to relate to the significance of this books' revelations - due to many examples coming from a field that we all have some level of experience of - hospitals - even as patients. I would especially recommend this book to anyone inlvolved in implementing 'Lean' who has an audience who is a little tired of hearing Toyota Toyota Toyota references......
A Must Read July 6, 2010
Val
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is Atul's best book yet, combining a gripping (if at times firghtening) story with some really practical solutions. Although the main focus is the use of checklists in the operating theatre, it covers a range of other issues and has general applicability and principles that apply to everyday life. It should be compulsory reading for health professionals, and the proper introduction of checklists should be mandatory in all our hospitals - any one of us might be the beneficiary one day.
A great discussion on the use a check lists June 17, 2010
John Nunn (Coventry, U.K.)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book puts forward a very compelling case for the use of simple check lists to assist in healthcare. These check lists should not be the controlling factor but should act as an aid to helping improve the levels of care given. This is an idea which has been received quite well in the healthcare profession in the U.K. With checklists for bothe Pre and post operative procedures being part of Lord Darzi's recommendations.
I first came across this book after Atul Gawande appeared on the Daily Show with John Stewart, and the common sense arguments that he put forward for the use of checklists were very compelling. Their use in scenarios such as Pre-flight have been invaluable and saved counless lives, and not by being monotonous list that dumb down procedures but provide an aide memoir to a skilled individual which helps ensure no critical element of a procedure is overlooked.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 24
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