The Checklist Manifesto

In his latest bestseller, Atul Gawande shows what knowledge and the everyday human experience reveal about the complexity of our lives, why we fail, and how we can deal with this complexity. The modern world has given us stupendous know-how. Yet avoidable failures continue to plague us in health care, government, the law, the financial industry—in almost every realm of organized activity. And the reason is simple: the volume and complexity of knowledge today have exceeded our ability as individuals to properly deliver it to people—consistently, correctly, safely. We train longer, specialize more, use ever-advancing technologies, and still, we fail.