Engineering for failure management, for consistent performance of complex collaborative operations, through team organization, culture, and practices, is... nifty. Aviation, industrial engineering, medicine. An excellent obstetrics team can be breathtaking performance art. An antithesis of Dilbert organizational dysfunction. But wow is the transformation hard - a multi-decade, multi-generational slog. And many industries and professions are still in denial - "we don't have a problem, and anyway, we can't fix it". Decades of work ahead for them. For us.

Airlines have figured out that people suck at multitasking.

Airlines are almost "lucky" in the sense that when they mess up training and processes, people die. As a result, they are somewhat motivated to fix it.

In other industries, we say "that didn't work, VCs, can I have another $2M" and are just told "yup, of course!" As a result, we learn slow.

Personally, I stole checklists from aviation and love it. I remember one week I was on vacation and we needed to do a complicated migration. I prepared a checklist for the migration, and someone other than me did it. There was no downtime. We used the same checklists for future migrations, and again, nothing forgotten, nothing missed. It may be obvious to say "landing checklist: gear down" but it's effective.

Checklists are amazing. Humans are really clever, but we're too good at context, and will completely miss steps, especially if the outcome of the previous step is unexpected.

Plus one for checklists. Checklists are secret sauce

We call them procedures, if you don’t have written step by step procedures with rollback steps, you are not supposed to do any production stuff

We call them runbooks. In SRE good practices, they are required for all actionable alerts.

What do you use to create, update, and recall your checklists?

I used ... Google Docs.

Other checklists? It's checklists all the way down

First task, create checklist.

Check.