I’m sure medical professionals could get together and design a variety of checklists to address unexpected emergency situations. The same techniques can apply to business, and lots of other common scenarios.

Your above comments imply that using checklists prepares you/your plane for unforeseen conditions ahead. What about the use of checklists once you are actually in the middle of a situation marked by high uncertainty? Do you have examples of checklist use in such situations?

I work with primary care physicians who face case-based, clinical uncertainty almost daily in their practices. Intuition and gut feelings play a role, sometimes too large a role, but I’m also seeing that individual clinicians have both generic and condition-specific ‘checklists” (more commonly referred to as rules of thumb) that they go thru when faced with a particular dilemma to help them figure out what to do next. Usually these are not explicitly articulated but surface every now and then, “As in when I see x, you can be sure you better do y.” My colleagues and I are conscientiously trying to collect and catalogue these assertions and look at the evidence that backs them up, see how much agreement exists among physicians on particular ones, look at frequency of use and other such parameters. There just could be a relatively small set of over-arching principles (arranged in a checklist format??) that physicians could turn to when faced with case-based clinical uncertainty in the course of daily practice.

Any thoughts based on your experience with checklists in aviation?

Many thanks,
L. Sommers