I brought to surgery my particular persona, which is to want to have more planning and more deliberation inserted into situations where there doesn’t seem to be time.
One of the really striking things is, we get this complaint for example that using a checklist in surgery, well, that’s fine, but in emergencies we don’t have time for that kind of thing.
And we demonstrated that in that situation, taking the one and a half minutes [to go through the checklist] for the very beginning part of it has enormous value – it’s in fact the group in whom we have the highest reduction in death, are those in which the time is the most pressing.
Atul Gawande with Tyler Cowan in Conversations with Tyler Ep. 26.
See also: The Checklist Manifesto