I read ‘the checklist manifesto’ by Atul Gawande. I am a firm believer in books and advice in general from anyone in practice oriented profession: doctors, investors (not speculators), pilots and so on. The professinals in these fields have generally a large skin in the game (money, reputation, their own life), making their advice worthy as compared to academic advise. The checklist book was then just the right fit for a lazy afternoon reading at once.

The book is sure a captivating read and the author has a knack of keeping you curios about ‘what happened next’. The central point of the book is that ‘under a complex situation (due to number of people or processes involved) as well as due to stress of what’s at stake (your own or people’s life), you can’t trust your brain to make right decisions based on purely memory and cognition. You need a precise and useful guidebook to keep it on track’. There is a parallel thread about value of communication in team work too.

Somehow I couldn’t resist drawing comparisons with the book Thinking Fast and Slow. The book explains the heuristics used by the so called system 1 in the brain and its biases. Daniel Kahneman has infact given a catalogue of such biases. Then I started to wonder: ‘do checklists in fact serve the purspose of avoiding (or atleast minimizing the impact) the biases of sytem 1?‘. For example, the checklist can make sure that your brain doesn’t make financial investment decisions due to ‘pevasive optimism bias’ explained by Kahneman.

May be I should read both books together in one session next to draw even better connections.