The Checklist Manifesto

This article presents a body of research demonstrating how checklists can be a motivational and error-reducing tool. The research focuses on the benefits in surgical institutions, but the results are applicable to other industries and there is much to be learned from them. A few resounding messages in the article are: the reason humans fail is because we forget or misuse information or don’t know exactly what we’re doing, checklists can greatly reduce the margin of error, we can design checklists to reflect the difficulty of the task at hand, and we can become more disciplined as we master the checklist. Read this article to learn more about the science behind checklists and how we can learn from it.