In the book 'The Checklist Manifesto,' Mr. Gawande shares an example of a checklist for operating an airplane door.
Bridge gives all members a Success Checklist to help them avoid mistakes, save time, and grow their business,
Software is often made up of a series of endless checklists. In the movie RoboCop, there were three Prime Directives (checklists) that the protagonist abided by with each action. In the finale, we learn about a fourth, hidden Prime Directive.
In a 2007 article in The New Yorker, Atul Gawande, a surgeon and an author, advocatedthat more hospitals use checklists. He cited many medical studies showing how checklists save lives (and money). Implementing one checklist, a hospital "…prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs." The startling part: the list was only five steps long! In other words, people don’t consistently follow best practices that well when left up to their own devices. The article piles on successes derived from lists, but to save one from being numbed by statistics recounts the story of a young girl that almost drowned. After falling into an icy pond and being without oxygen for thirty minutes, her body temperature dipped to 66º. Against all odds, the hospital saved her with the help of checklists. If there’s one thing you remember in an article, it’s saving a frozen child’s life.
Mr. Gawande believes in checklists so deeply that after he penned the magazine article, he expanded his theory into the book, The Checklist Manifesto. In the book, he shared examples of checklists in the aviation industry and even a checklist to make checklists. (Sadly, the book is hidden away in the “Medicine” section at Barnes & Noble; it would be well suited in “General Interest” or wherever they offer Malcolm Gladwell’s paeans to hidden social truths.)
Failures, whether they happen in medicine, aviation, or retail, often happen due to not knowing something (ignorance) or having the knowledge but not doing the right thing (ineptitude). Checklists help highlight ignorance and stave off ineptitude. Checklists are often affordable, foolproof ways to improve our performance. Checklists help us to:
Highlight what we do and don’t know.
Remind us when we forget something we do know.
Endorse standards for what is accepted and how things are done.
Speed up a process.
Reduce errors.
Improve the output’s quality.
In medicine and aviation, these benefits translate to saved lives. In e-commerce, I think they can help save Main Street. Bridge has designed a series of checklists that increase e-commerce sales and help indie stores thrive. One list, the introductory Success Checklist, which helps retailers set up their Bridge account using 20 steps such as bookmarking their Bridge and setting up credit card processing, may save a store 40 hours of hunting for things. If that is worth $2,000 to a store, and we have 1,000 stores, that checklist saved our indie stores $2,000,0000. We also utilize these checklists:
Brands using the Product Syncing marketing service are coached through a 17-step Boarding Checklist.
Our Brand Coaches use their own 10-step checklist during the boarding of brand partners.
When importing a brand’s products, such as Le Creuset or Baccarat, we use a 20-step checklist to ensure the import goes smoothly and the client is happy.
Our coaches have a checklist they use for each member to ensure they received the best customer service. For example, we track if a new store received a welcome call and needs a follow-up call.
This past week, we started creating a new 13-step checklist for registrants. The list will help registrants more easily use all of our registry features.
We plan to make a checklist for store owners, too, for each registry.
In addition to the above checklists, Bridge relies every day on an even bigger, more complicated ‘checklist:’ our Bridge software. Our code is a giant decision tree of checklists that leads users down paths. The code, in essence, says, “Be sure to do X and Y, and, if possible, then Z; If not, then do B and then C." and so forth. This works so well that in 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat Gary Kasparov at chess. Checkmate, mate. Human: 0. OCD computer: 1. In the movie RoboCop, four checklists (called Prime Directives) helped save humans—and protect the software corporation. In fact, the goal of today’s software companies from Amazon to Tesla to Palantir is often to build the biggest ‘checklists’, which take the form of digital voice assistants and artificial intelligence (which actually sounds a lot like the ingredients for: RoboCop). The code for Alexa is longer than my checklist for Mykonos this summer. One’s impact on the world may be proportionate to their lines of code. If I’m leading Bridge properly, we’re gonna need a bigger server farm.
One may rebut that checklists are limited by what is on the list. Sure, there is truth to that. Yet, a checklist can be adjusted to account for new issues and expanded to take more and more variables into account. In fact, the more variables there are, the more a checklist is often needed. In a hospital, there are tens of thousands of potential outcomes. In software, millions. When running an indie retail website, a store owner faces hundreds and maybe thousands of variables. A store owner can’t remember these factors or do them in order. Enter stage right: our Bridge software and checklists designed for indie store owners.
Since checklists help our clients (and staff), it’s prudent to consider how we can use checklists more often. How do we go about getting more benefits from checklists? Processes are often express-able via checklists.
For starters, we need to look for things that we do often and / or are important.
We need to break these repeated actions and things into a process.
Then, we convert these processes into a list.
We convert this list to a checklist.
For example, I charge clients once a month. I could turn the steps in this process into a checklist. This will likely reduce errors and speed up the process—and save me from sitting at my computer on a Friday afternoon and accidentally undercharging someone.
If you wish, please try this exercise:
[check box] Please think about something you do every day or week.