Gawande The Checklist Quotes & Sayings

When afternoon came to Vidyasagar Road, wet clothes ... hung from a clothesline which stretched from one side to another on the veranda of the first floor. The line, which had not been tightly drawn anyway, sagged with the pressure of the heavy wet clothes that dripped, from sleeves and trouser-ends, a curious grey water on to the floor, and, especially in the middle, one noticed the line curved downwards, as if a smile were forming. — Amit Chaudhuri

That moment, when you first lay eyes on that field - The Monster, the triangle, the scoreboard, the light tower Big Mac bashed, the left-field grass where Ted (Williams) once roamed - it all defines to me why baseball is such a magical game — Jayson Stark

He also found he made mistakes in handling complexity. A good decision requires looking at so many different features of companies in so many ways that, even without the cocaine brain, he was missing obvious patterns. His mental checklist wasn't good enough. "I am not Warren," he said. "I don't have a 300 IQ." He needed an approach that could work for someone with an ordinary IQ. So he devised a written checklist. — Atul Gawande

Instead they choose to accept their fallibilities. They recognised the simplicity and power of using a checklist. — Atul Gawande

no matter how careful we might be, no matter how much thought we might put in, a checklist has to be tested in the real world, which is inevitably more complicated than expected. First drafts always fall apart, he said, and one needs to study how, make changes, and keep testing until the checklist works consistently. — Atul Gawande

I hate to see great writers like Ringel and Ansen and Jan Stuart (among many others) being put out to pastures because print media is suffering. — Alonso Duralde

All involve risk, uncertainty, and complexity - and therefore steps that are worth committing to a checklist and testing in routine care. Good checklists could become as important as doctors and nurses as good stethoscopes (which, unlike checklist, have never been proved to make a difference in patient care). The hard question - still unanswered - is whether medical culture can seize the opportunity. — Atul Gawande

( ... ) always regretted that good memory often prevents us from thinking for ourselves. — Frank Harris

Much of our work today has entered its own B-17 phase. Substantial parts of what software designers, financial managers, firefighters, police officers, lawyers, and most certainly clinicians do are now too complex for them to carry out reliably from memory alone. Multiple fields, in other words, have become too much airplane for one person to fly. Yet it is far from obvious that something as simple as a checklist could be of substantial help. — Atul Gawande

With a DO-CONFIRM checklist, he said, team members perform their jobs from memory and experience, often separately. But then they stop. They pause to run the checklist and confirm that everything that was supposed to be done was done. With a READ-DO checklist, on the other hand, people carry out the tasks as they check them off
it's more like a recipe. — Atul Gawande

So for any new checklist created from scratch, you have to pick the type that makes the most sense for the situation.
The checklist cannot be lengthy. A rule of thumb some use is to keep it to between five and nine items, which is the limit of working memory. — Atul Gawande

And there is such a strategy - though it will seem almost ridiculous in its simplicity, maybe even crazy to those of us who have spent years carefully developing ever more advanced skills and technologies. It is a checklist. — Atul Gawande

The truth is messy. It's raw and uncomfortable. You can't blame people for preferring lies. — Holly Black

Good checklists, on the other hand are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything
a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps
the ones that even the highly skilled professional using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical. — Atul Gawande

You must decide whether you want a DO-CONFIRM checklist or a READ-DO checklist. With a DO-CONFIRM checklist, he said, team members perform their jobs from memory and experience, often separately. But then they stop. They pause to run the checklist and confirm that everything that was supposed to be done was done. With a READ-DO checklist, on the other hand, people carry out the tasks as they check them off - it's more like a recipe. So for any new checklist created from scratch, you have to pick the type that makes the most sense for the situation. — Atul Gawande

Just using a checklist requires [doctors] to embrace different values from ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork. — Atul Gawande

Just ticking boxes is not the ultimate goal here. Embracing a culture of teamwork and discipline is. And if we recognised the opportunity, the two-minute WHO checklist is just a start. — Atul Gawande

We don't like checklists. They can be painstaking. They're not much fun. But I don't think the issue here is mere laziness. There's something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us - those we aspire to be - handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocols and checklists. Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating. — Atul Gawande

There are good checklists and bad, Boorman explained. Bad checklists are vague and imprecise. They are too long; they are hard to use; they are impractical. They are made by desk jockeys with no awareness of the situations in which they are to be deployed. They treat the people using the tools as dumb and try to spell out every single step. They turn people's brains off rather than turn them on. Good checklists, on the other hand, are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything - a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps - the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical. The power of — Atul Gawande

So you want to keep the list short by focusing on what he called "the killer items" - the steps that are most dangerous to skip and sometimes overlooked nonetheless.
The wording should be simple and exact, Boorman went on, and use the familiar language of the profession. Even the look of the checklist matters. Ideally, it should fit on one page. It should be free of clutter and unnecessary colors. — Atul Gawande