A Defense Against Failure: The Checklist

“…checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realize. They provide a kind of cognitive net. They catch mental flaws … And because they do, they raise wide, unexpected possibilities.”

The Boeing B-17, known then as the Model 299, crashed and burned in 1935 in a flight competition between Boeing, Martin and Douglas while they were all vying to build the next-generation long-range bomber for the military. The Model 299 was the most complex aircraft of its time and the crash, due to simple human error, prompted some to deem the aircraft “too much airplane for one many to fly.” Following the crash, the army made an ingeniously simple fix: a pilot’s pre-flight checklist. With checklist in hand, the army flew 1.8 million miles without incident and ordered over 13,000 of the aircraft.

Marketing sophistication and the need for specialized know-how have increased dramatically in the lifetimes of all of us who read this newsletter as part of our profession. Whether we’ve experienced it as a consumer or practitioner, we know, and feel, that the world around us is just getting more complex every year.

In his book, The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande tells several engaging stories of extraordinarily complex problems where the common solution to each of the challenges lie in the creation and execution of a simple checklist. One particular case involved of a series of hospitals in Michigan that, in their first 18 months of implementing a checklist program, called the Keystone Initiative, save an estimated $175 million in costs – all because of, as Atul puts it, “a stupid little checklist.”

QUESTIONS & ACTIONS

Think about your own world and your own marketing challenges – are there any complexities that you could minimize…to a “stupid little checklist”?