Doctor Atul Gawande knows a thing or two about success. His best-selling book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, is a reflection on the use — and value — of checklists in both the medical profession and the business world. It’s a powerful guidebook detailing how people in countless different professions leverage checklists to be more efficient, organized, and productive. 

That’s the most obvious insight in Dr. Gawande’s work. But it’s far from the only one. Beyond detailing the power of checklists, it can also teach us a few things about the ingredients of business success. 

The Importance of Contextualizing Failure

According to Dr. Gawande, all failure can ultimately be traced to one of two things — ignorance and ineptitude. 

Occasionally, we get things wrong because we simply lack the necessary knowledge to do them right. We simply don’t understand how things work and mess up because of it. That’s ignorance. 

Other times, we make mistakes we should, for all intents and purposes, know to avoid. The knowledge is there, we possess it, but we aren’t applying it correctly. Dr. Gawande refers to this as a failure of ineptitude. 

Failures of ignorance are easy to understand, and easier still to address. If we err because we simply don’t know any better, it follows that by expanding our knowledge, we can avoid making the same mistake again. Failures of ignorance are a little more complicated.

They require you to take a step back and ask about why you committed this avoidable fumble. Were there any extenuating circumstances that may have led to the mistake? Examples might include: 

• Stress
• Burnout
• Exhaustion
• Unforeseen complexity
• Carelessness
• Distraction

Sometimes the Simplest Option is Best

Throughout The Checklist Manifesto, Dr. Gawande emphasizes one of the greatest strengths of the checklist — simplicity. 

Sure, you can add a bunch of fancy bells and whistles to your checklist. You can turn it into a kanban board; you can chart out a project management workflow; you can add progress bars and push notifications, and rich media. At the end of the day, however, the core concept remains the same. It’s a list of projects and tasks that help you visualize both what needs to be done and how to do it. 

Sometimes that simplicity is all you need. Too many features in an app can overwhelm users, too much complexity in a website can drive away prospects. The surest and most effective path is very often the simplest. 

Map Out Your Processes

One of the things Dr. Gawande is known for — at least in the medical community — is that he, along with a team of researchers, devised a two-minute operating room checklist for hospitals. The results were almost immediate. Hospitals that leveraged the checklist experienced noticeably better patient outcomes, and staff were less likely to make simple, avoidable mistakes 

Speaking to NPR, Gawande notes that this caused the average number of deaths and complications to drop by a staggering 35%.

That, more than anything, should drive home the effectiveness of established processes. Ensuring that you and your employees know how to operate effectively in the day-to-day means fewer mistakes and greater efficiency. It also frees people up to focus on other aspects of their work, as they no longer have to spend time questioning what they should be doing.