Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto is a  powerful book, one of the best and simplest articulations of how to achieve operational excellence that I have ever read.  Gawande’s message is simple: the world has become increasingly complex, and we need to actively create systems and processes that will simplify the tasks that we have to complete in our everyday lives.  His deceptively modest proposal: use a checklist.

Now, I know that seems almost stupid and simplistic at first glance.  We’re all familiar with checklists, and generally associate them with rote tasks, not with complicated procedures.  And we resist the idea that our professional performance could be improved by something so jejune as a checklist, almost as if a checklist would trivialize the important work we do.

As Gawande points out, though, that’s exactly the way a bunch of doctors felt the first time that a hospital administration tried to incorporate a checklist into one of the most common of medical functions — putting in a central line.  He recounts how a critical care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital devised a checklist to try to avoid incidences of infenctions in the placing of a central line.  Doctors all knew the basic steps for central lines: (1) wash hands with soap; (2) clean the patient’s skin for the placement; (3) put sterile drapes over the patient, (4) put on a mask, hat, sterile gown, and gloves; and (5) put a sterile line over the insertion site after placing the line.  Gawande called these steps “no-brainers,” the type of things that doctors know they are supposed to.  But the hospital found that in one third of cases, doctors were skipping at least one of the steps.

So the hospital initiated a simple checklist procedure to ensure that all the steps were taken.   Since the doctors were resistant to the intrusion, nurses were enlisted to ensure compliance with the checklist.  What were the results?  According to Gawande, they “were so dramatic that [the administrators] weren’t sure whether to believe them.”  The ten-day line infenction rate went from 11% to 0%.  Over a fifteen month period, the administrators projected that the checklist had prevented 43 infections and 8 deaths, saving over $2 million in hospital costs.

This was not an isolated result.  After the success at Johns Hopkins, Gawande recounts how hospitals in Michigan initiated a project to use a central-line checklist in intensive care units (ICUs) in hospitals throughout the state.  Here are the results:

Within the first three months of the project, the central line infection rate in Michigan’s ICUs decreased by 66%.  Most ICUs . . . cut their quarterly infection rate to zero.  Michigan’s infenction rates fell so low that its average ICU outperformed 90% of ICUs nationwide.  In the …. first eighteen months, the hospitals saved an estimated $175 million in costs and more than fifteen hundred lives.  The successes have been sustained for several years now — all because of a stupid little checklist.

These are among the powerful illustrations of the effect of checklists on operational performance included in The Checklist Manifesto.  In addition to the medical field, Gawande shows how pilots use checklists to ensure safe operation of aircraft (including an engaging description of how checklists impacted the famous “Sully Sullenberger” flight that landed in the Hudson River in 2009).  And he demonstrates how hedge fund investors use versions of the checklists to protect against making poor investments, including one vivid illustration of an investor turning down an opportunity when a checklist item turned up that the company’s owners had been divesting their personal holdings.

So how does this impact the real estate industry?  I think that our industry could learn a lot from The Checklist Manifesto about operational excellence.  The role of the real estate agent is significantly task driven, but those tasks can sometimes be overwhelming.  Just getting a listing on the market can require dozens of discrete operations: taking pictures, uploading pictures, writing descriptions, checking paperwork, ordering signs, inputting property data, double-checking taxes, etc.  We need to do these things every single time, but rarely do we see a company articulate a simple checklist to ensure that every listing gets that quality service.  The same holds for the far more complicated but necessary task of maintaining ongoing listings, when agents tend to get lost in the frenzy of daily activity and neglect the day-to-day communication and updating responsibilities they have to existing clients, leading to poor client experiences.

For the last year, my company has been working on identifying the “best practices” in the industry — the practices that ensure a quality client experience for both buyers and sellers,  with the idea of coordinating those practices into a series of checklists and a comprehensive  “Project Plans” that cover particular aspects of the real estate transaction.  The goals is to provide with a set of plans that can guide them through the transaction.  The point is not to limit them — people can always do more than is on the plan.  Neither is the point to demean their professionalism– it’s not that we think they’re NOT doing some of these things, but we believe that in a given case they might not be doing ALL of these things because of the overwhelming complexity of the entire task.

Most importantly, we think that these kinds of checklists make a job easier, by simplifying our lives.  Just like computers, we have only a certain amount of “RAM” in our heads.  Computers gain efficiency if they can move information from “RAM” to hard drive memory.  Similarly, most of us become more efficient if we don’t have to store tasks in our memory, but can reduce them to a hard copy that we can refer to anytime we need them.  An agent with a 30-item checklist for getting a listing on the market is going to be more efficient than an agent who has to remember all 30 tasks and whether she’s already done them.  (And it’s definitely more efficient for the agent sitting at the desk next door, who keeps getting a tap on the shoulder asking, “hey, what am I supposed to do next?”)

Finally, real estate professionals should recognize that if checklists can improve execution and performance in life-and-death situations involving surgery and airline flight, and in million or billion-dollar financial investing decisions, then they certainly can be used in the much less urgent field of real estate.  A real estate agent who feels that checklists are “beneath” her should be at least a little chagrined that pilots and doctors are using them to great effect.

Essentially, I think that The Checklist Manifesto should be required reading for real estate professionals; indeed, I would recommend the book for anyone who cares about achieving operational excellence in his or her field.  If you need proof, I’ve already purchased 50 copies of the book at my company’s expense for distribution to our management team, and have saved others as gifts for colleagues in the industry.  It’s a great book.  You should read it.

If you’re interested in some other information about the book, here are some links:

Atul Gawande’s home page for The Checklist Manifesto

144 Reviews (average 4.5 stars out of 5) on Amazon.

Steven Levitt, the author of Freakonomics

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink and Outlier.

New York Times review

Washington Post review.

Interview in Time Magazine.

Gawande interviewed on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

The Safe Surgery Checklist illustrated in a terrific clip from NBC’s ER.