

The Checklist Manifesto - mattmcknight
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/books/review/Jauhar-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3

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tjic
I did a 3 month contract gig with a local robotics firm a while back. I
developed a few cool features for them, but the reason they fell in love with
me was that I worked up extensive testing checklists. During testing I'd be
the one with the checklist hardcopy (printed out from the internal wiki) in my
lap and a walky talky in one hand.

"Range safety officer, do we have your OK? Safety driver, do we have your OK?
Safety driver, throw the switch to manual. Safety driver, is steeting
calibrated? Remote operator, unpark the robot. Remote operator, confirm
feature X is turned off. Safety driver, confirm vehicle feature Y is on..."

Without the checklist, a trial-and-error run through of a certain feature took
3 hours. With the checklist we could do it in 3 minutes.

I came back from an intense demo of the robot to third parties and decided to
decompress in my woodworking shop...and next to my lathe was a checklist I had
written up a while earlier on how to make a certain Christmas stocking stuffer

<http://smartflix.com/projects/3>

...which is when I realized that there's something about checklist that
permeates my personality!

~~~
ardit33
I think it is a completely personality issue. Just like their desk, some
people like to keep things tidy and organized and know whats next all the
time, while some people seem to thrive in a bit of messiness, creativity and
improvisation and getting things done first.

When it comes to jobs that require originality and creativity, a checklist is
not going to be productive. In a job that is more operational, predictive and
repetitive, then a checklist would help.

When it comes to software engineering, the job is semi-structural (you are
bound by certain conventions, languages, computer science principles), and
semi-creative (you can use your imagination in a lot of places).

For QA types, a checklist is a must. For pure new feature programing, a step
by step checklist is basically a creativity killer. Crap in, crap out.

I personally distaste checklist, and try to avoid artificial constrains as
much as I can.

~~~
stuartcw
Doctors were quizzed, "Do you want to use a checklist?", they answered, "No.".
"Do you want someone who is operating on _you_ to use a checklist?", they
answered, "Yes.".

If you read the book you'll find that almost everyone hates checklists but
when used they cut down on mistakes and human error. The surprising discovery
is not that they work, but the reluctance of people to use them...

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gfunk911
"And checklists lack flexibility. They might be useful for simple procedures
like central line insertion, but they are hardly a panacea for the myriad ills
of modern medicine. Patients are too varied, their physiologies too diverse
and our knowledge still too limited."

The problem is that everyone (including doctors) overestimates both their
ability to diagnose based on instinct, and the percentage of patients who
deviate from the norm.

For heart attacks, they found that a 3 step checklist was X% effective in
diagnosing a heart attack, while the doctor alone was Y%, and X was much
higher than Y. Yes, sometimes the doctor would use his expertise to catch
something the checklist would miss, but over time the math was with the
checklist.

~~~
DannoHung
I agree, but the real solution is either a branching checklist for the
situations where there are only a few possible norm deviations, or an honest
to god Expert System when there are potentially very many norm deviations.

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joshstaiger
I've been more interested in checklists after hearing Charlie Munger
repeatedly espouse them:

"...You’ve got all the tools. And you’ve got to have one more trick. You’ve
got to use those tools checklist-style, because you’ll miss a lot if you just
hope that the right tool is going to pop up unaided whenever you need it. But
if you’ve got a full list of tools, and go through them in your mind,
checklist-style, you will find a lot of answers that you won’t find any other
way."

<http://www.tilsonfunds.com/MungerUCSBspeech.pdf>

~~~
zb
That's a great talk, but I sort of took away the opposite from it. Munger
mentions checklists and algorithms a couple of times, but it's clear that what
he is really talking about are heuristics ("I was using some rough algorithms
that work pretty well in a great many complex systems").

The problem with checklists is that they don't allow the possibility that the
checklist may be wrong. Heuristics are in this sense the opposite of
algorithms. It's the reliance on algorithms that leads to the sort of false
precision that Munger is complaining about:

 _When I talk about this false precision, this great hope for reliable,
precise formulas, I am reminded of Arthur Laffer.... His trouble is his
craving for false precision, which is not an adult way of dealing with his
subject matter._

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zb
Gawande's original article in the _New Yorker_ is definitely worth a read:
[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande)

Having said that, I'm pleased that this review mentions unintended
consequences and the limits of this approach. Checklists are not by any means
a panacea.

~~~
projectileboy
If you're interested in the benefits and limitations of checklists, you should
definitely pick up the book. It's a quick read, and there's practically a
whole chapter dedicated to the time he spent interviewing the guy at Boeing
who's responsible for developing checklists for aircraft procedures - both
normal and emergency. He goes into more detail about what does and what
doesn't make a good checklist, as well as where they can and can't be applied
effectively.

