Check It Out
In Prepare for the Worst, Plan for the Best: Disaster Preparedness and Recovery for Small Businesses (Wiley, second edition 2008), I wrote (p. 118) that even the most experienced airplane pilots need checklists in case of an emergency because under stress, they can simply overlook a small, but important, detail. I wrote this in the context of advising codified procedures for your business to provide consistent, reproducible results. This is particularly important to reduce the risk for error when responding to a disruption as stress levels will be high. Harvard Medical School professor and surgeon Dr. Atul Gawande addresses this concept in his book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. Dr. Gawande describes how the use of a basic five-item checklist in the operating room dramatically reduces the incidence of post-operative infections, which kill close to 100,000 Americans each year. Marshaling examples from other industries, the book makes an impressive case that the incidence of even fatal errors can be reduced with a few tick marks listing critical procedures on a single piece of paper. What I particularly like about this approach is its simplicity; in addition to reducing errors, this systems approach can be the basis of your business operations manual.