Checklist Manifesto Discussions

Last time checklists came up on HN someone linked to a talk by Atul Gawanda about the checklist manifesto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfl8Xt8W09A. He differentiates good and bad checklists: sounds like those are bad checklists you’re working with. But not all checklists are bad.

If you have a chance I'd recommend reading The Checklist Manifesto [1]. There's data showing that checklists are effective in medical settings. The point of checklists is not to give you a flow-chart of exactly what to do. Their purpose is to minimize human error in routine-but-complex tasks while still allowing professionals the freedom to respond to irregular situations. Medicine, like flying a modern aircraft, has become so complex that even the best practitioners make errors in rou

are you using "checklists" internally? how do encourage people to use them?

I recently read Atul Gawande's "The checklist manifesto" which covers applying aviation style check-lists to surgery. The outcome was a 30% reduction in post-surgical complications.From reading this, I see how bad most software process check-lists are. They tend to be laundry lists mixing obvious minutia and vague uncheckable goals. They are not practical executable tools but well meaning documents that are ignored at the error prone moments when a check-list has the most poten

The reference article for the power of checklists: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklistAnother article, with HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20293246

What's your take on checklists?

Checklists applied rigorously have been _demonstrated_ to make a huge difference, see The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande [1][1] http://smile.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right...

You are talking about the book The Checklist Manifesto.I use checklists for planning vacation trips and for grocery lists.I also use them to describe processes at work. This has been the most helpful when on-boarding new employees in our group.

Don't be so hard on checklists :) the bigger problem is applying ill conceived checklists no?

I'm currently in the process of introducing checklists into a process, and the hardest part of the entire endeavor is giving the people who are using the checklist the power to modify them, and keeping other people from forcing the system to have chiseled into stone type checklists.So far, the biggest contributor to 'checklist fatigue' among people using the system is from them not being able to modify the checklist to suit the task at hand. Checklists really need to be living