The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

Getting the steps right is proving brutally hard, even if you know them.

balancing a number of virtues: freedom and discipline, craft and protocol, specialized ability and group collaboration. And for checklists to help achieve that balance, they have to take two almost opposing forms. They supply a set of checks to ensure the stupid but critical stuff is not overlooked, and they supply another set of checks to ensure p

Just ticking boxes is not the ultimate goal here. Embracing a culture of teamwork and discipline is.

The fear people have about the idea of adherence to protocol is rigidity. They imagine mindless automatons, heads down in a checklist, incapable of looking out their

give people the room to adapt, based on their experience and expertise. All you ask is that they talk to one another and take responsibility.

An inherent tension exists between brevity and effectiveness. Cut too much and you won’t have enough checks to improve care. Leave too much in and the list becomes too long to use.

and lets it rise above to focus on the hard stuff

buttress the skills of expert professionals. And by remaining swift and usable and resolutely modest,

You must define a clear pause point at which the checklist is supposed to be used (unless the moment is obvious, like when a warning light goes on or an engine fails). You must decide whether you want a DO-CONFIRM checklist or a READ-DO checklist.