We love us some Atul Gawande here at Faith & Leadership. His kind of smart mirrors the difference between autobiographers and memoirists. Autobiographers write about their lives; memoirists write from out of them. Gawande is a surgeon who thinks and writes from out of medicine -- not strictly about it -- and in a way that has wide application for people in many different fields, including those who work in Christian institutions. The man has range.
He can even survive a Colbert Report interview, which is no small task. Here, he’s talking with Colbert about his book, The Checklist Manifesto. Gawande advocates the use of checklists for highly complex work. This may seem like a mundane point, until you look at the statistics: in the eight hospitals where Gawande first tested the use of surgical checklists, major complications in surgery fell 36% and deaths fell 47%. That’s flat-out remarkable. And as Jason Byassee suggests, there’s something more than a little theological about checklists. They imply a sense of humility about the limitations of human beings; a confession of how pride causes us to overreach; a recognition that -- in Gawande’s own experience -- a surgeon is not God with a scalpel.
In what ways could checklists drastically change how we work together in Christian institutions? What are some instances in our churches, theological schools and organizations where checklists would improve our effectiveness or curb the tendency to overestimate ability?
