An aviation crew runs the checklist before every takeoff, no matter how many thousands of hours they’ve logged.
The expert who skips is showing arrogance.
Atul Gawande’s work on checklists in high-stakes fields like surgery and aviation showed that a simple, structured verification step cuts catastrophic error rates even for the most experienced practitioners. His work proves that memory and attention get unreliable under stress, distraction, and routine.
In multifamily, the same thing happens when the experienced maintenance tech skips the make-ready checklist because he’s done a thousand of them, and it feels beneath him to work through a list. That’s the operational version of skipping the pre-flight check.
A multifamily corporate or property culture that treats checklists as beneath its veterans is really operating on assumption, and assumptions here turn into the make-ready callbacks and fair-housing exposure that cost far more time and money than the checklist ever would have!
Thousands of hours in, that crew still ran the list before every flight, because the expert pilot who skips a step and the rookie who skips it get the same result when the skipped step is the one that matters. Do the rep, use the checklist.
The checklist is the discipline of an expert who knows what it costs when memory fails. — Mike Brewer
Direct action: Pick one process at your property this week where checklists exist but get used inconsistently. Work out why they’re being skipped, and take out the friction that makes skipping them feel reasonable.