When followed correctly it is my believe that checklists can raise the floor of the worst case outcomes. Said another way, actually following the checklist eliminates the low-hanging fruit of preventable mistakes.
There was some pretty significant pressure against having doctors use checklists (like pilots have) - but it has also decreased errors significantly (both in aviation and in the medical field).
They also act as a form of documentation; I highly recommend checklists whenever I can.
As someone who was a mechanic in the Army, I feel that checklists more often helped then harmed. Many mechanical problems we saw in the shop were easily attributable to an operator skipping a step on their PMCS. Doing something relatively dangerous or confusing could be error prone, especially for people who haven't done it much, and a checklist can help ensure the safety of everyone in the shop. A good example is running an engine indoors. Before you did it, there were a serious of steps you had to walk through before you turned it on, that reduced people getting sick from carbon monoxide quite a bit.
I worked at a company that used mandatory checklists for some operational roles, they definitely cut down on the number of mistakes (at least the mistakes the checklist was crafted to address). It made people more accountable: whereas previously a certain mistake might be human error (unavoidable), if it still happened after the checklist then either somebody didn't fill out the checklist (and could be punished for negligence) or lied by checking a box on checklist without actually doing the thing (and could be severely punished for dishonesty). This motivated people to thoroughly check the things.
Banking on discipline in any human endeavour seems to be fool's errand. You will get more reliable results by improving the environment, systems and tools. This can be seen in how much checklists have improved the quality and reliability in fields like medicine. We are in a field where we can literally codify the checklists to enforce them.
This. There are some great bits about checklists and their (underutilized) role in preventing human error in Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things (chapter 5).
We already know the most effective way to reduce, and often eliminate, medical mistakes: rigorously applied checklists. They are still used only here and there, years after this was well demonstrated.
Medicine depends overwhelmingly more on manually applied procedures that would be automated, in a computer, as patients and staff manifestly are not. So, the same mistakes are repeated again and again. A software fix would correspond to changing a checklist.
Still, it would be no bad thing to use checklists for manual processes in software development, but I have never heard of any.
Sure, stupid tools are pointless. But usefull tools...
If the point is to reduce the number of errors then it helps to at least have a checklist of the errors, and someone reminding the team of the checklist. Checklist process is one of the easiest quality and safety tools to implement.
Having a premade checklist that makes sense in the form of a process plan makes things easier.
Even though it seems clear that the checklist itself has to be well designed, I don't think it's a bad idea to ensure they are followed. Strategies like the one the OP proposed are independent from checklist quality.
Over the years, the complexity of our collective knowledge vastly exceeds capacity of any individual to get everything right.
This reminds me of the book checklist manifesto [1]
Even simple tools like checklist can substantially decrease errors and spare much of our cognitive capacity in doing quality work.
Checklists in aviation started in 1939, I think. Airplanes had gotten complicated by then and pilots would routinely forget to set things up properly for takeoff, etc.
Checklists have been incredibly effective in improving safety. It's a crying shame that they are not used elsewhere, like for surgical procedures. Doctors need to give up on the idea that checklists insult their competence.
Also, the health care industry could learn a great deal from the aviation industry about eliminating human error. The health care industry just wings it as far as I know, and hospital deaths due to stupid mistakes are legion.
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