The Heroic Checklist

While looking up the book "Make it Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die", I ran across the article "The Heroic Checklist" in Fastcompany. The article recounts how a hospital reduced intraveinous line infections by putting a five item checklist in operating rooms. The list included such things as "Doctors must wash their hands before inserting IVs". It met resistrance initially but ultimately saved 1,500 lives and $175 million.

The story point out something I wish I had done when working at Microsoft: using checklists to make sure I didn't overlook the important things I was supposed to do. Microsoft's intranet does contain a daunting list of development practices (a huge hierarchy of information known as the Engineering Excellence guide). It was overwhelming and too much to digest, and any idea of using it as a checklist would have been unweildly. To be fair, though, it was great information but it was also up to the team to use it. I find myself wishing I had worked with my team to create a checklist of the most important of the practices to ensure we all knew and agreed on what was most important. I was surprised how easy it was for me, and even much more experienced team members, to overlook the big and important things when working on a complicated and detailed project. (A similar phenomenon often shows up in page design where a large-font headline will have an overlooked typo but the smaller text is error-free.)

David Allen's "Getting Things Done" also advocates the use of lists. It's amazing how much easier it is to think clearly when all the chatter and ideas in the mind are captured externally so that the brain doesn't have to keep remembering to remember them. I think this is one reason the story cited in the Heroic checklist succeeded.