The Checklist Manifesto is the tale of how Gawande took an idea first popularized by pilots into the operating theater and then out into the hospitals of the world, with the help of the World Health Organization.

It was widely backed and implemented in many hospitals around the US to the great excitement of the medical community.Ĭhecklists, however, are deceptively simple. A case he cites is the development of robots to perform tricky laparoscopic surgery. In his words, if another solution that could be even a fraction as effective would be a new drug or piece of technology it would be backed by billions of dollars, sponsored by the state and be the only thing the worldwide medical journals talk about. Check out the the Checklist Manifesto Review I wrote for more details. The Checklist Manifesto, written by writer/surgeon Atul Gawande, is proof that checklists really work (whether anyone wants to admit that or not). For investors, checklists avoid what is sometimes known as ‘ cocaine brain’ the drive to make snap decisions on high-risk investments that often result in huge losses.įor more information on a similar process, see Warren Buffet’s Investment Checklist. It details the steps taken by the man known as the world’s greatest investor prior to parting with massive sums of money. For pilots, it’s crashing a plane that was deemed far too complicated to fly – the Boeing B-17. What do Johns Hopkins surgeons, anonymous big-time investors and World War II pilots have in common? This isn’t the set up for a terrible joke but a demonstration of how widespread an often-overlooked tool is – they all use checklists to avoid disaster.įor surgeons, disaster is a lethal infection caused by straying from proper precaution.

Checklist manifesto chapter summary