Examining The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right (Part 1)

I first became aware of Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto from C-SPAN's Book TV.  One Washington Journal interview is here.  Of course you can watch an entire speech on YouTube.



His thesis is simple.  Simple, well written, checklists save lives in the operating room.  It doesn't matter if the hospital is in the US or India or Jordan; when the surgical team used checklists, the number of infections and other complications dramatically decreased.

I intend to post more later, but three or four things stood out from this book.  First, Van Halen's demand from a bowl of M&M's with all of the brown candy removed was really a checklist.  Gawande quotes David Lee Roth who claims, "When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl, well, we'd line-check the entire production.  Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error . . .Guaranteed you'd run into a problem" (80).  Today is Sunday, so I guess it's fair to say that Van Halen believed the scriptural injunction that those who are faithful in the small things will also be faithful in the large things.

Second, Gawande  reports that pay for performance programs for surgeons have had modest results.  In fact, he concludes that "incentive programs have thus far been expensive, incremental, and of limited benefit" (91).  Merit pay advocates probably will just skip that page.

Third, Gawande reminds readers that "ticking boxes is not the ultimate goal here.  Embracing a culture of teamwork is" (160).  In short, one should have a goal and use things like checklists, computers,or homework assignments as a tool to achieve that goal.

Most importantly, Gawande reminds readers that failures must be studied.  He writes, "[w]e don't study routine failures in teaching, in law, in government programs, in the financial industry, or elsewhere.  We don't look for patters of our recurrent mistakes and devise and refine potential solutions for them" (185).

It seems The Checklist Manifesto has some implications for education.  Teachers, students, and administrators all seem to repeat preventable errors.  If checklists can save lives in the operating room, perhaps they can help in the classroom.