Early in March, we published Checklist Heaven, a post citing direct marketing wiz Denny Hatch on the value of checklists for direct marketers.

Denny in turn had been inspired by The Checklist Manifesto, a book written by  Atul Gawande.

All of this prompted UK’s John Rodd to go buy the book, and write this review, including the relevance of checklists to fundraisers … and the avoidance of "generational amnesia" in terms of best practices.

The Checklist Manifesto

I read the book – an easy read – he is a good writer and it can be a page-turner as he, being a surgeon, relates dramatic moments  the OR.

What this book is really about is not what the DM veteran who raved about it in The Agitator – it is about managing complexity in situations where there is the potential for great danger.

Gawande is an American surgeon, a top one, and the operating room can be a place where, despite experience and often  brilliance, the teams alarmingly often forget to do things or do them in the wrong order. This  causes  sudden, very dangerous problems. Hence the checklist that ensure things are done in the right order (like a shot of antibiotic at a crucial stage just before cutting and not well into the operation and the basics such as:  Surgeon: ’I’m  here to do an appendectomy on patient Charles E Grant’. Head theatre nurse: ‘No sir, this is Michael F Clarke for a bowel resection.’

He also rates highly the checklist procedure for doing the right thing when an emergency strikes and has several aviation examples, the most recent and most dramatic being when Captain Sullenberger and co-pilot landed in the Hudson river after the bird strike stopped their engines… check listing clear-headed and panic-free from just after the ‘holy f*ck Moment when the engines died.

Gawande says that  aviation was the originator of the checklist. It followed  the crash of the prototype B17 Fortress in the ‘30s when the test pilot, experienced as he was, forgot to unlock the elevators and crashed soon after take killing most on board. It was the end of seat-of-the-pants piloting and the move towards something more thorough and careful.

And there is something else in Gawande’s book. It is the decentralisation of authority and the giving of permission for people located far away from any central control to take decisions (using checklists)  without waiting for approval.

And finally, his OR checklists do work. That is, studies with WHO of before and after checklist introductions in operating theatres (ORs) show measureable, significant and  sustained reductions in mortality and post-operative complications.

So, what does this have to do with direct marketing  / fundraising?

Really not a lot. Or does it?

Fundraisers  don’t see fireballs dead passengers or patients suddenly spouting blood on the operating table.

But often we do fail to use the systematic procedures that save, if not lives, time and mistakes, and which ensure that something important has not been forgotten.

So far so good. But there is also the question of good practice and ensuring that things are done in the right way, the right order. I’d cite the creative briefing document as an example of a checklist that combines best practice with an aide memoire.

Practical steps

The checklist approach is hardly cutting-edge.  But I’ve been disappointed as I’ve got older by how much collective wisdom gets forgotten – generational amnesia  – with consequences that are all bad and none good.

So in London some of us are building up materials for the launch of a post-graduate training course, thirteen weeks of hard work and powerful learning on CRM strategy and practice, database systems and analytics, and we shall included a checklist for each stage.

John Rodd