It was getting colder and Dark shadows started creeping over me. It has been over an hour of waiting. My wife and I had come for our weekly grocery, and being a guy who would rather eat raw broccoli than do grocery, I let her do the shopping, and tired from waiting, I dozed off in the car.
A loud rattle made me open my eyes. I saw a shopping cart charging down on me. It was overloaded with cartons of strange items. It came to a grinding halt near my car, and I realized the imminent danger of all those cartons crushing my car.
Lucky for me, the boxes managed to maintain their balance. My wife’s face peeked from behind the mound. She was glowing! With a jubilant looking face adorned by a widescreen smile, she handed me a scroll – the bill, and stood like a kid waiting for a pat from her parent for getting A+.
She looked from behind the longer-than-me scroll and announced, “Look… All this, I got for $200! They were on Sale!” I looked again at the truckload, and yes, sadly, I was right the first time, almost everything except the butter cookies looked alien to me. But she was still glowing. Her enthusiasm made me hold my tiredness and frustration inside, and taking a deep breath, I managed to put up a smile and say – “good”.
Enough of this insanity! I had to do something to take the guesswork out of shopping. Back home, I created a list of grocery items that we need to buy every week, and put a check box for each. I bribed my wife to review the list, and accept it. She did keep murmuring about the one mistake that she made, of marrying an engineer, but still agreed to use the checklist.
From then onwards, shopping trips became less frustrating for me. From roam, roam, look, look, pick and again, roam, roam, look, look, pick, it became pick, check, pick, check, and a whole lot of saving in terms of time and money. My wife appreciated it as it let her hand over grocery shopping to me, and spend her time checking on the Apparel section.
Introduced by US Air force, Checklists are the humblest and simplest tools that are also greatly effective. They are mostly created and refined by experts. Checklists not only reduce the chances of human errors, but also give more focus to the task at hand.
Checklists are compulsorily used in mission critical systems. NASA’s missions depend on the hundreds of checklists it has developed. Aviation pilots depend on checklists to get us safely from one place to another. There are checklists for almost every scenario imaginable during a flight.
Elsewhere checklists have saved thousands of lives. Dr. Pronovost noted that even expert doctors seemed to neglect mundane matters like washing hands when dealing with an emergency. These incidents caused a large number of avoidable infections and even deaths. He created a simple surgical safety checklist. Nurses were empowered to question or even prevent the doctors from proceeding with the surgeries until the checklist items were completed. This was piloted in couple of Hospitals, and was initially met with objections from surgeons for whom this was just another bureaucratic paperwork. But, as the results came out, it was found that this simple act helped save thousands of lives - infection rates fell down by more than 60%. Now Dr. Pronovost is hailed a hero.
With experience we become experts in our fields, and we start taking things for granted. In that stage it is natural for us to reject the seemingly silly things like checklists that seem to be just waste of time. Whenever the Project Manager approaches a team with a checklist, it is initially rejected as “bureaucratic time-waster”. But, let us take a moment to recall that these doctors, who were infecting the same patients that they were trying to save, were all experts in their field. So even the mighty ones are prone to error, and checklists are effective in ensuring that we do not make the same mistake twice.
In our daily lives checklists can help us travel hassle-free, avoid repeat trips to the grocery store, conduct meetings effectively. In Mumbai, I have seen people doing this before leaving homes for work – to check if everything is where it should be – transit pass, purse, money, key, identity card, umbrella (optional)
Wondering about the immense potential of checklists, Dr. Atul Gawande, who wrote the recent best seller – The Checklist Manifesto, says, “If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do?” I say, “If something so simple can take the trauma out of my Shopping experience, what else can it do?”
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