Checklist: Check.

I haven’t read Atul Gawande’s new book, “The Checklist Manifesto,” but I am anxious to do so—maybe as soon as I finish David Ploffle’s congratulatory “The Audacity to Win.” But I like the idea Dr. Gawande discusses, as reported on the PBS Newshour (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/jan-june10/gawande_02-08.html) and elsewhere. His premise is that in a world of rising magnitudes of complexity, professionals should revert to the most basic of management tools, the simple checklist, to ensure success.

It’s a great example of how something oh so simple can have a major impact on events. An example: in Michigan every hospital adopted a “cleanliness checklist to help control infections. The result: a 2/3 reduction in hospital-acquired infections, the saving of 1,500 lives and a cost savings of more than $200 million.

(The late great television program “ER” incorporated checklists in the surgical settings in one of its final episodes.)

Now down the food chain to health care public relations. The importance of checklists struck me when I was reliving some old business plans account teams developed for p.r. clients. Many were awesome, but others were, well, less so. Two of sand traps public relations executives fall into are the allure of developing everything from scratch or piling one idea (good or bad) on top of another, as if a bigger pile of recommendations is necessarily a better pile.

The most successful teams and agencies may or may not have a new business or a new year planning processes—sometimes I think the “proprietary” processes are so much hooey. But what they will do is ensure that each issue the client faces is addressed and that each audience is accounted for. In order not to go crazy in the business development process, these winning teams will generally follow established checklists mandating when each task must be achieved and who is accountable for it. (I’ve created several such checklists. Let me know if you’d like to see them.)

Checklists: it’s such a simple concept it is amazing that it take a surgeon of Dr. Gawande’s stature to remind us of their importance.