The Checklist Manifesto_ How to Get Things Right - Atul Gawande [32]
This was the understanding people in the skyscraper-building industry had grasped. More remarkably, they had learned to codify that understanding into simple checklists. They had made the reliable management of complexity a routine.
That routine requires balancing a number of virtues: freedom and discipline, craft and protocol, specialized ability and group collaboration. And for checklists to help achieve that balance, they have to take two almost opposing forms. They supply a set of checks to ensure the stupid but critical stuff is not overlooked, and they supply another set of checks to ensure people talk and coordinate and accept responsibility while nonetheless being left the power to manage the nuances and unpredictabilities the best they know how.
I came away from Katrina and the builders with a kind of theory: under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success. There must always be room for judgment, but judgment aided—and even enhanced—by procedure.
Having hit on this “theory,” I began to recognize checklists in odd corners everywhere—in the hands of professional football coordinators, say, or on stage sets. Listening to the radio, I heard the story behind rocker David Lee Roth’s notorious insistence that Van Halen’s contracts with concert promoters contain a clause specifying that a bowl of M&M’s has to be provided backstage, but with every single brown candy removed, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation to the band. And at least once, Van Halen followed through, peremptorily canceling a show in Colorado when Roth found some brown M&M’s in his dressing room. This turned out to be, however, not another example of the insane demands of power-mad celebrities but an ingenious ruse.
As Roth explained in his memoir, Crazy from the Heat, “Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors—whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function.” So just as a little test, buried somewhere in the middle of the rider, would be article 126, the no-brown-M&M’s clause. “When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,” he wrote, “well, we’d line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error…. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.” These weren’t trifles, the radio story pointed out. The mistakes could be life-threatening. In Colorado, the band found the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and the staging would have fallen through the arena floor.
“David Lee Roth had a checklist!” I yelled at the radio.
I ran my theory—about the necessity of checklists—by Jody Adams, the chef and own er of Rialto, one of my favorite restaurants in Boston. In the early 1990s, Food and Wine magazine named her one of America’s ten best new chefs, and in 1997 she won a James Beard Foundation Best Chef award, which is the Oscar for food. Rialto is frequently mentioned on national best-restaurant lists, most recently Esquire magazine’s. Her focus is on regional Italian cuisine, though with a distinctive take.
Adams is self-taught. An anthropology major at Brown University, she never went to culinary school. “But I had a thing for food,” as she puts it, and she went to work in restaurants, learning her way from chopping onions to creating her own style of cooking.
The level of skill and craft she has achieved in her restaurant is daunting. Moreover, she has sustained it for many years now. I was interested in how she did it. I understood perfectly well how the Burger Kings and Taco Bells of the world operate. They are driven by tightly prescribed