Friday, February 12, 2010

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande. nonfiction-Medicine, Quality Control-209 pages.
Atul Gawande's third book combines his cool medical stories of surgeries going horribly and unexpectedly wrong, with his studies of how we humans deal with and should deal with increased specialization and increased complexity. A lot of time we deal with the specialization and complexity badly (the author uses many examples from surgery), working on our own small parts of projects and not communicating well when things go wrong. Studying which things go wrong, why they went wrong and developing checklists to avoid the same problems in the future are the way airplane pilots and buiding construction crews have dealt with these problems and allowed for greater communication. Gawande posits that adopting these procedures could be of great use in many endeavors. Gawande is, as always, readable, accessible and enjoyable.-- Patrick

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