Checklists and Unforced Errors
On Succeeding When There's No Opposition
It seems to me one can get pretty far in life just by avoiding unforced errors.
What do I mean by ‘unforced error’?
Unforced Errors
In tennis, an unforced error is “an error in a service or return shot that cannot be attributed to any factor other than poor judgement and execution by the player.”
More generally, in any game or sport, an unforced error is a mistake or deviation from optimal play *not* caused by enemy action or an act of god. Losing a queen in chess when you didn’t have to, for instance, or fumbling the ball in American football without being tackled.
In life, an unforced error can be thought of as a mistake that you didn’t have to make. Nothing went wrong, you weren’t compelled or pushed or rushed into making the mistake - you, on your own, made the error.
To be clear, there are situations where you make a mistake because there’s no way you could have known how to avoid it - or even known that it was a thing you needed to avoid - which is a little different from what I’m talking about. That’s more in the realm of unknown unknowns, not unforced errors.
I’m talking about every mistake you make in your life where you look back on it after it happens and think: That was dumb. I should have known better.
Things like forgetting to set an alarm or locking your keys in your car are smaller examples of unforced errors, although they can be a pain to fix. Larger unforced errors can be things like mismanaging your finances (as in, squandering your existing money or spending irresponsibly), being cruel or unkind to others unprovoked (especially when those others are either important to you or have power over you), or failing to follow up on an opportunity you’ve been working towards.
Fundamentally, unforced errors are errors made in the absence of enemy action.
Enemy Action
We humans spend a lot of time and energy thinking about - and trying to win - conflicts. Sometimes those are literal, physical conflicts over land or oil or whatever. Sometimes they’re abstract, over prestige or rank or social cachet.
Most of game theory1, at least the parts I’ve studied, deal with this: given the rules of a conflict, how does one outmaneuver an enemy, all while knowing that the enemy is trying to outmaneuver you at the same time?
There’s a saying about when things go wrong:
Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action.
But large swathes of life don’t involve enemy action. In fact, in the modern world, most things don’t involve enemy action.
Nobody is trying to get you to lock your keys in a car. No one is trying to throw you off your game when you’re at home with your family so you yell at your spouse. There’s no secret agent trying to get you to forget to bring lunch with you to work or wear your shirt inside out.
Without Unforced Errors
Imagine, just for a moment, what a life with zero unforced errors might be like.
It’d almost be weird, wouldn’t it? Smooth, frictionless, just going through each day without the small hassles and inconveniences caused by forgetfulness or hurry.
It wouldn’t be a life without regret - forced errors still happen, after all, and there are other kinds of mistakes - but broadly, there would be no looking back and thinking a decision was dumb or that something should’ve been done better.
(Decisions can be wrong without being dumb; a decision is made based on the information available at the time. If that information was insufficient or incorrect, the decision can still be good even if the outcome turns out to be bad. And sometimes the correct decision is: get better information before making this decision.)
Seems nice, right? But how would a person go about living such a life?
Checklists
A checklist, when you think about it, is a mechanism for avoiding unforced errors.
(It isn’t a coincidence that a checklist prevents you from forgetting things, and that many unforced errors involve forgetting things.)
It makes sure that a certain series of conditions are met each time you take an action.
Packing for a trip? Here’s the checklist of everything you’ll need over the next week.
Leaving for work? Here’s the checklist of everything you’ll need for the day.
And so on.
Real World Examples
Pilots
The US Airlines have stellar safety records - flying in an airplane is safer than driving.
How do they achieve this safety record?
Well, unlike driving a car, which involves a heavy dose of enemy action (other drivers), pilots of airplanes don’t generally have to worry about other airplanes colliding with them. Instead, most of the problems they face don’t come from enemy action, but from the airplane itself not functioning correctly - an unforced error.
And the airlines guard against unforced errors with checklists.
There’s much to read on the topic - here and here, for instance, and here is an example of one such checklist for a Gulfstream:
Surgeons
Checklists were also introduced to surgery, to great success.
In ICUs across the United States, catheter-related bloodstream infections (CR-BSIs) are a routine complication due to the high rate (48%) of catheterized patients.[48] The 15 million days that patients spend with a central venous catheter (CVC) every year in ICUs in the USA lead to approximately 80,000 cases of CR-BSI.[47,48,51,60] It has been shown that 5% of all ICU patients with a CVC will develop an infection after 8 days.[64]
Dr. Peter Pronovost and a team from Johns Hopkins proved this when they implemented a checklist aimed toward ensuring evidence-based practices for catheter insertion procedures.[8] The checklist was simple, comprising a one-page sheet administered during every CVC or arterial line insertion. It prompted the staff to wash their hands; clean the procedure site; drape the entire patient; wear sterile gloves, hat, mask, and gown; and apply a sterile dressing once the line was inserted. An observation period at the beginning of the study revealed that only 62% of procedures incorporated every step. Once the intervention phase began, nurses were given the authority to stop a procedure if a step was missed, which occurred in 32% (12/38) of cases in the first month.
At the conclusion of this study, the investigators had effectively eliminated the incidence of CR-BSIs in their study ICU. The rate of infections had decreased from 11.3/1000 catheter-days in the first quarter of 1998 to 0/1000 catheter-days in the fourth quarter of 2002.
Conclusion
While no one could possibly avoid every unforced error in their lives, a lot of people could probably avoid a lot of them just by implementing a few checklists themselves.
If you find yourself making a mistake that you didn’t have to make, just remember the slightly-less-catchy paraphrased quote:
Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is an unforced error: make a checklist for it so it doesn’t happen a fourth time.
We could even benefit, as a society, from sharing more general checklists for things people do. There are checklists for vacation packing and going to the grocery, but what about writing a book? Starting a company? Selling a piece of art? Learning a language? Going on a date? Having a happy marriage?
Ironically enough, maybe I need to add a checklist for when I write posts, including an item like: “if someone wrote a book about this exact topic that you haven’t read, read the book first”, because I only discovered while researching that a book called The Checklist Manifesto exists.
As a closing statement, I’d like to encourage readers to post their own checklists in the comments, whether mundane or absurd, literal or metaphoric. Maybe there’s a dumb mistake we could all avoid, just by using it!
Afterward
I use Stable Diffusion to generate the headline images for this substack, and this is apparently what it thinks a checklist looks like (as in, I literally just put in “checklist” with “cinematic-default” style):
I mean, she likely checks a lot of people’s boxes, but still.
As opposed to Game of Thrones theory, which is about how to end a TV show in the worst possible way.