Summary: The Checklist Manifesto Atul Gawande

Good checklists get the routine and obvious tasks out of your mind so you can instead focus on the hard stuff

we have nearly five million commercial buildings, almost one hundred million low-rise homes, and eight million or so high-rise residences. We add somewhere around seventy thousand new commercial buildings, and one million new homes each year. But ‘building failure’ – defined as partial or full collapse of a functioning structure – is exceedingly rare, especially for skyscrapers. According to a 2003 Ohio State University study, the United States experiences an average of just twenty serious ‘building failures’ per year. That’s an annual avoidable failure rate of less than 0.00002 percent. The checklists work.”

terms, people from the various trades involved talk with other and figure things out. On most building projects, a schedule will be run alongside the construction time line proper which details the variances which have cropped up and who will talk to w

items on a c

hecklist can be READ-AND-DO (where you read the item and then go do what’s specified) or CHECK-ONCE-DONE (where you confirm you’ve carried out the action specified.) The way checklists can be put together is unlimited and therefore checklists can be developed and then applied to any and all situations.