How to Work with Me

In 1935, Boeing had a new bomber prototype, the Model 299, which later became the B-17. It was impressive, and it was also easy to mess up because it had more switches and steps than pilots were used to. During a demonstration flight, the aircraft lifted off, climbed, then stalled and crashed.

The investigators did not conclude that the pilots were bad. They concluded that the system was too complex to run from memory. The controls had been left locked. A small step was missed, and once the plane was airborne, it was too late to recover.

The response was neither better pilots nor more training. It was the checklist. I first came across this story in Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. His core idea is simple: once work becomes complex enough, expertise alone stops being a reliable safety system. Not because people are careless, but because even experts consistently fail in two predictable ways:

They skip small, critical steps under pressure.
They fail to coordinate cleanly with other experts in the room.

A good checklist does not replace judgment. It protects judgment. It forces the basics to stay basic, and it creates a shared moment of alignment.