The humble checklist has been used for may years as a memory aid. Checklists help to ensure tasks are completed to the right quality and standards. The best example of a checklist is the daily “to do” list, a reminder of what needs to be accomplished this day. In some cases checklists are a literally a matter of life and death. The article “Checklist Reduces Deaths in Surgery” highlights the power of well designed checklists being used in hospitals with surprising results…
“’Surgical complications are a considerable cause of death and disability around the world,’ the researchers wrote in the online edition of The New England Journal of Medicine. ‘They are devastating to patients, costly to health care systems and often preventable.’
But a year after surgical teams at eight hospitals adopted a 19-item checklist, the average patient death rate fell more than 40 percent and the rate of complications fell by about a third, the researchers reported.”
Checklists turn out to be powerful leadership tools. Consider John Kotter’s widely used “checklist” for managing organisational change taken from his best seller Leading Change:
- Establish a sense of urgency, leading to a shared need.
- Create a guiding coalition, leading to accountability.
- Develop a vision and strategy, leading to hope.
- Communicate the change vision and strategy, leading to commitment.
- Clear the way for broad-based action, leading to alignment.
- Generate and recognizing small wins, leading to momentum.
- Consolidate the small wins, leading to early successes.
- Anchor the new approaches in the culture and systems, leading to sustainable change.
This checklist contains the most important aspects that you need to consider when introducing change.
Creating a Great Checklist
Some advice to guide you in the creating your own practical checklists.
- Checklists are Small: Checklists are intended to be practical and usable tools. A long list of fifty or a hundred items makes the checklist difficult to use. To remain practical checklists need to be small, focused on results and those critical actions that bring about results. A small focused checklist is a practical checklist.
- Checklists are Personal: The best checklists are created by you. To be effective you need a good understanding of the outcomes and activities to be performed for each point on the checklist. That understanding is best established when you create your own checklist. Taking another checklists without you understanding the context and purpose of their use can lead to failure. That being said, other people’s checklist are a great starting point to creating your own. Great checklists are usable because they’re your own.
- Checklists are Outcome Based: As can be seen from the organisational change checklist above that leadership checklists describe the outcome and not just the activity to be performed. This helps to ensure that you don’t just blindly follow the activity describes without considering the results that you’re looking to achieve in each step.
- Checklists are Evolving: Really great checklists don’t just happen overnight. Really useful checklists have evolved and been adjusted with feedback from their practice use. Checklists are tested in the everyday practice reality of getting results and they are changed and developed in the trenches.
Checklists are a great memory aid. A prompt is usually all that’s required to bring forward the relevant expertise and knowledge to a situation. They assists you in applying the right practices to a situation.
- What three checklists do you need to develop that would increase leadership effectiveness?
- What three checklists would make your team more effective?
- Do you have any checklists to share with us? Why not add them in the comments of this post?
Technorati Tags: Leadership, Checklists, Lists, Practices, Leadership Tool, Management, Business, Getting Things Done, GTD, Execution, Lifehacks
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I have a pretty informal checklist for targeting new prospects and I can always tell when I start to lose focus. I get away from my process and begin taking a shotgun approach. I hadn’t really thought about establishing a formal system for categorizing my pursuits, but this post has inspired me to create one.
I guess this is something else to add to my to-do list (which I keep religiously)
I’ve noticed that my checklists are best when they are task, rather than outcome based. So long as you are clear on your outcomes, sometimes breaking an outcome into small, tangible actions can inspire more movement than lofty goals that are harder to reach.
That’s what works for me anyway.
Cheri
Thanks George, good information for a check-list user, especially the personal aspect. Even something as simple as a shopping list loses its effectiveness when passed on to someone else to complete.
I threw up a couple of posts on my blog discussing the same topic:
http://trainingtools.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/10-tips-to-make-check-lists-work-for-you/
http://trainingtools.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/the-problem-with-check-lists/
I’m a Getting Things Done sorta guy running checklists thru’ my gtd system on my Android phone using ActionComplete.
I don’t think checklists should ever be given from one person to another. Detailing tasks and priority without the option for freedom of thought and behaviour is not a good management technique.
lastly i blogged about the Surgical Checklist here http://ffolliet.wordpress.com/2009/01/20/lies-damned-lies-and-statistics-benjamin-disraeli/
the discussion was illuminating too.
unfortunately, i think your post exemplifies the problem of this sort of interpretation. the checklist in itself did NOTHING to change complications. what did change was the institution of multiple interventions before the checklist was instituted. now, worldwide, people believe the list itself is what makes the difference. it didn’t.
institution of a checklist by people who don’t understand, who expect unrealistic results upon other people is a sure fire way to disaster.
Hi George.
First of all, I am a new reader to your blog, and my first impression is that I like it. I do not have time to read more and deeper at this moment, but I am including your blog in my RSS reader to follow your future updates. Please e-mail me your top 5 articles, that you are most proud of, and I will read them with great joy.
So over to this post: It is great, it gave me some inspiration. Do you know about the fish philosophy? If not read the book Fish, I am in that very same position now, taking over a new departement at work, that do not work as good as it should.
So this post gave me inspiration to create small todo lists, so I will keep my focus. But I will also try to get the employees to create a todo list to remember them to creating results.
What three checklists do you need to develop that would increase leadership effectiveness?
- Great one. First of all, I need to focus on the people, make sure they feel great. A list of a few things to do to make their day would be nice.
A list to remember the live traffic check, to focus on results.
A list to remember my overall goal. Am I on track?
What three checklists would make your team more effective?
I think I would like to challenge my employees to make a checklist, that might be even more effective than I now even can imagine. Looking forward for testing this.
Great blog! I will come back for more.
FrodeH
Perhaps we create a checklist for proposals???