Do you know what is common across operations of surgery, construction, engineering and aviation ?

The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande, which is my most favourite non fiction book, explains with case studies from these domains, why even highly trained and experienced people occasionally fail at process execution.

It is not because they don't know what to do. But because:

• Human memory is falllible. Even highly trained and skilled people can forget routine but critical steps, under pressure or distraction.

• People also consciously skip steps, if skipping a particular step usually did not result in any problems, in the past.

And the solution for both these: A checklist.

A checklist protects against failures caused by above.

It reminds of the minimum necessary steps, makes them explicit, and creates a mechanism for verification.

And this isn't limited to any specific domain. After all, in most operational failures, in any domain, the problem isn't a lack of knowledge. It's a failure in process execution.

And the simple way to avoid it: A Checklist!