Free The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

it struck me, were as monstrous as anything I had encountered in medicine. He tried to explain how he and his colleagues made sure that all those people were doing their work correctly, that the building would come together properly, despite the enormous number of considerations—and despite the fact that he could not possibly understand the particulars of most of the tasks involved. But I didn’t really get his explanation until he brought me to the main conference room. There, on the walls around a big white oval table, hung sheets of butcher-block-size printouts of what were, to my surprise, checklists.
    Along the right wall as we walked in was, O’Sullivan explained, the construction schedule. As I peered in close, I saw a line-byline, day-by-day listing of every building task that needed to be accomplished, in what order, and when—the fifteenth-floor concrete pour on the thirteenth of the month, a steel delivery on the fourteenth, and so on. The schedule spread over multiple sheets. There was special color coding, with red items highlighting critical steps that had to be done before other steps couldproceed. As each task was accomplished, a job supervisor reported to O’Sullivan, who then put a check mark in his computer scheduling program. He posted a new printout showing the next phase of work each week, sometimes more frequently if things were moving along. The construction schedule was essentially one long checklist.
    Since every building is a new creature with its own particularities, every building checklist is new, too. It is drawn up by a group of people representing each of the sixteen trades, including, in this case, someone from Salvia’s firm making sure the structural engineering steps were incorporated as they should be. Then the whole checklist is sent to the subcontractors and other independent experts so they can double-check that everything is correct, that nothing has been missed.
    What results is remarkable: a succession of day-by-day checks that guide how the building is constructed and ensure that the knowledge of hundreds, perhaps thousands, is put to use in the right place at the right time in the right way.
    The construction schedule for the Russia Wharf project was designed to build the complex up in layers, and I could actually see those layers when Bernie Rouillard, Salvia’s lead structural engineer for the project, took me on a tour. I should mention here that I am not too fond of heights. But I put on my hard hat and followed Rouillard—past the signs that said WARNING: CONSTRUCTION PERSONNEL ONLY, around a rusting nest of discarded rebar, over a trail of wood planks that served as a walkway into the building, and then into an orange cage elevator that rattled its way up the side of the skeleton to the fourteenth floor. We stepped out onto a vast, bare, gray slab floor with no walls, just twelve-foot vertical steel columns ringing the outside, a massiverectangular concrete core in the center, and the teeming city surrounding us.
    “You can see everything from here,” Rouillard said, beckoning me to join him out on the edge. I crept to within three feet and tried not to dwell on the wind whipping through us or the vertiginous distance to the ground as he good-naturedly pointed out the sites along the waterfront below. I did better when we turned our backs to the city and he showed me the bare metal trusses that had been put into the ceiling to support the floor being built above.
    Next, he said, will come the fireproofers.
    “You have to fireproof metal?” I asked.
    Oh yes, he said. In a fire, the metal can plasticize—lose its stiffness and bend like spaghetti. This was why the World Trade Center buildings collapsed, he said. He walked me down a stairway to the floor below us. Here, I could see, the fireproofing material had been sprayed on, a gypsum-based substance that made the ceiling trusses look gray and woolly.
    We went down a couple more floors and he showed me that the