Checklists and cheat sheets

In our age of the electronic screen, old-school techniques are fading fast. Some of those techniques are still useful, though. I’d like to refresh our awareness of one such technique, a technique that has many uses in the tourism industry. This is the technique of quick-reference lists, by which I mean “cheat sheets” and checklists. Quick references come in all shapes and sizes. For many business tasks a single, laminated page, often cropped to a small and handy size, is the best bet.

I am a complete geek for this stuff. It’s a big part of aviation. That’s where I picked it up. Today, however, my context is business management.

You might tell me that this is a boring subject. Fair enough. So I’ll tell you something that’s even more boring: Going out of business in the tourism industry, whereupon you have to leave paradise and take a 9-to-5 cubicle gig in some gray city somewhere.

That’s a scary thought. Here’s another one that’s related: One of my friends almost went out of business recently. This was not in the tourism industry, nor on Saipan, but the lesson is still ripe.

My friend’s company had one critical, flagship supplier. The supplier sprang a procedures audit on his company. His company failed it. As a result, the supplier yanked its products, yanked its joint marketing, and yanked its credit. This occurred in a prestigious, high-dollar industry where suppliers are very careful about who is selling their brand.

In this case, the entire problem could have been avoided if my friend had issued a simple checklist to his staff. He says it would only have taken about two hours to develop. However, faced with all the demands of running the business, it was always easiest to just kick the can down the road for another day.

If we want to get a headache by pondering imponderables, we can consider that. While you could impute some sort of cost to spending two hours developing a checklist, you can’t really assign a value to it nor to the problems that it can avoid. After all, problems that are avoided are problems that can’t be counted. So it’s easy to overlook the checklist as a productive tool.

Boiling things down to normal, every day management on Saipan, an example of a checklist is something that enumerates the necessary routines for the daily opening of a retail store, and another checklist could be used for the daily closing of a retail store.

This not only guards against things being overlooked, it also provides a means of enforcing standards on staff. After all, you can’t really blame a worker for forgetting to perform some small task on occasion. Everybody forgets stuff. That’s just human.

But you can hold someone to task for refusing to use a checklist. That’s an act of volition.

A well-designed checklist follows a logical pattern. For example, if you’re dealing with an array of switches on a piece of machinery, you can create a “flow” that goes, say, from left to right and from top to bottom. This is a lot better than jumping around to items at random. In our store example the same concept can be followed, using a flow that starts in one part of the store and then sweeps through the area.

Another type of quick reference is the time-honored “cheat sheet,” which is just a handy compilation of selected information.

One example is a sheet that has a few canned phrases in the languages used by tourists. This won’t solve all your problems in customer service, of course, but it can solve some of them. For other problems it can buy your front-line staff some time so they can call in reinforcements.

Overall, checklists and cheat sheets should be succinct, human-friendly, and designed to make things easier, not harder. This isn’t rocket science. It just requires a certain knack for meshing the hands-on world with the notion of systemization. It’s old school, but it works.