I recently picked up The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, recommended to me by rave reviews on Amazon. However, once I picked up the book, I felt like it left much to be desired.
I was really pleased, initially, that it was a mere 200 pages. I reckoned I could knock it out in a week, and I was right. The unfortunate part was that it felt like I really long article that had been fluffed up into a book. They key point the author is trying to drive home is that checklists are useful because humans are fallible and they make elementary mistakes. He does this through the use of many many anecdotes, spread across three industries - medicine, construction, and aviation.
The writing style of the The Checklist Manifesto is in the classic pop psychology fashion - riveting anecdotes told over the course of a chapter or so, punctuated by studies and statistics, often also told in an anecdotal manner. This isn't necessarily bad - the Gawande just doesn't have enough content to support it. Other, similar books have better structure. The Power of Habit is divided into three parts - the habits of individuals, those of organizations, and those of societies. Switch by Chip and Dan Heath has its three steps of change. The Checklist Manifesto is just barely meaningful meandering.
What The Checklist Manifesto does get right, however, is its core point. Atul Gawande is a surgeon, and as a software engineer it's hard for me to relate making websites to the life-or-death situations that surgery brings, it's easy to translate what he's advocating to developer terms - that in the end, human beings have limited cognitive capacity, and that the best way to unleash higher potential is to automate away the grunt work, so that more cognitive capacity can be spared for the really important stuff. Checklists are a means of such automation.
He also advocates checklists as a communication tool - the checklist becomes a tool of who needs to communicate what at different stages of the operation. This makes sure that everybody is on the same page regarding the operation, and allows anybody to bring up any concerns, and makes sure everybody knows all the relevant information before beginning the operation. He cites an example of one operation where something critical the anaesthesiologist should have known was only communicated to him because the checklist caught it. In this case, the patient might have died, had that critical piece of information not been communicated to the anaesthesiologist.
So long story short - the book is a nice, short read at 200 pages, but it could've been shorter still. Check it out The Checklist Manifesto on Amazon if you'd like to read it (disclaimer- that's an affiliate link).
I was really pleased, initially, that it was a mere 200 pages. I reckoned I could knock it out in a week, and I was right. The unfortunate part was that it felt like I really long article that had been fluffed up into a book. They key point the author is trying to drive home is that checklists are useful because humans are fallible and they make elementary mistakes. He does this through the use of many many anecdotes, spread across three industries - medicine, construction, and aviation.
The writing style of the The Checklist Manifesto is in the classic pop psychology fashion - riveting anecdotes told over the course of a chapter or so, punctuated by studies and statistics, often also told in an anecdotal manner. This isn't necessarily bad - the Gawande just doesn't have enough content to support it. Other, similar books have better structure. The Power of Habit is divided into three parts - the habits of individuals, those of organizations, and those of societies. Switch by Chip and Dan Heath has its three steps of change. The Checklist Manifesto is just barely meaningful meandering.
What The Checklist Manifesto does get right, however, is its core point. Atul Gawande is a surgeon, and as a software engineer it's hard for me to relate making websites to the life-or-death situations that surgery brings, it's easy to translate what he's advocating to developer terms - that in the end, human beings have limited cognitive capacity, and that the best way to unleash higher potential is to automate away the grunt work, so that more cognitive capacity can be spared for the really important stuff. Checklists are a means of such automation.
He also advocates checklists as a communication tool - the checklist becomes a tool of who needs to communicate what at different stages of the operation. This makes sure that everybody is on the same page regarding the operation, and allows anybody to bring up any concerns, and makes sure everybody knows all the relevant information before beginning the operation. He cites an example of one operation where something critical the anaesthesiologist should have known was only communicated to him because the checklist caught it. In this case, the patient might have died, had that critical piece of information not been communicated to the anaesthesiologist.
So long story short - the book is a nice, short read at 200 pages, but it could've been shorter still. Check it out The Checklist Manifesto on Amazon if you'd like to read it (disclaimer- that's an affiliate link).
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