Executive Summary
As financial planning for clients grows more and more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult for planners to recognize every planning issue, opportunity, and concern from memory alone. As a result, there is an rising risk that planners commit malpractice and make a mistake - albeit by accident - in the struggle of trying to apply everything they have learned to an incredibly wide range of client situations.
However, the reality is that this challenge is not unique to financial planning. Many professions face a similar struggle, where the sheer amount of knowledge required, and the incredible number of client/customer/patient situations make it almost impossible to remember everything that's necessary at the exact time it's needed, mean a rising risk of mistakes, negligence, and ineptitude.
So what's the solution to address this challenge? As it turns out, there's a remarkably simple one: checklists. While it may seem absurd that such a basic device could enhance client outcomes - in fact, as professionals we often bristle at the thought that a checklist could tell us something we don't already know - it turns out that checklists may be an excellent means to deal with the simple fact that we are all fallible humans.
Unfortunately, though, few checklists currently exist in the world of financial planning, especially outside of the operational aspects of an advisory firm. Nonetheless, it is perhaps time to give checklists the recognition they deserve, as a potentially critical step to ensure that we apply the proper due diligence to each and every complex financial planning situation, and that nothing accidentally slips through the cracks.
The inspiration for today's blog post is the book "Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande, a doctor who was the primary driver behind the World Health Organization's "Safe Surgery Checklist" and who makes a compelling case that checklists should probably be adopted more broadly in all industries and professional services - including financial planning - as a way to deal with the incredible complexity that we face as practitioners.
Ignorance Vs Ineptitude
It's important to recognize that in many situations, professionals fail simply because the task at hand was beyond saving; we may have tremendous intelligence and technology available to us, but we are not omniscient or all-powerful, and some fallibility is inevitable. However, Gawande notes research by Gorovitz and MacIntyre who find in the medical context that in situations where success or failure is within our control, there are two primary drivers that lead to failure: ignorance, and ineptitude.
Ignorance has been the driving force for failure for most of medical history. Up until just the past few decades, we simply didn't know what the true causes were for many diseases and maladies, much less how to treat them or fix the underlying causes. For instance, Gawande notes that as recent as the 1950s, we still had no idea what actually caused heart attacks or how to treat them, and even if we'd been aware of contributing factors like high blood pressure, we wouldn't have known how to treat that, either. If someone had a heart attack and died at the time, it was our collective ignorance of the underlying problems that led to the "failure" to save the patient.
By contrast, in today's environment, we have developed numerous drugs to treat high blood pressure, as well as heart attacks themselves. We "know" how to fix an astonishing range of maladies. If an ineffective (or even harmful) treatment is applied now, we don't simply let the professional off the hook on the basis of "well, we didn't really know what to do, anyway." In other words, our collective ignorance of how to treat a problem is often no longer an acceptable answer when there is an unfortunate outcome; instead, a failure of the professional is an "error" and a sign of ineptitude.
Of course, the caveat is that many of the professional situations today are of a highly complex nature. While we might understand far more about the body and how to treat it than in the past, it is still remarkably complex, and many "failures" of a medical practitioner still walk a fine line between ignorance, ineptitude, and a situation that was never really able to be saved in the first place. As a result, Gawande notes that we're more likely to address such situations by encouraging more training and experience for the practitioner, rather than to punish failure, as long as outright negligence was not involved. Unfortunately, though, it's not clear if more experience and training alone are necessarily sufficient; as our knowledge increases, so too does the complexity of applying it correctly, to the point where we may be reaching our human capacity to apply such a depth of knowledge to such a breadth of situations in a consistent manner. We are still only human ourselves, after all.
Managing Through Complexity With Checklists
So what's the best way to manage through such an incredible depth of complexity? Gawande notes that the World Health Organization's classification of diseases now categorizes more than 13,000 ailments, and one study of 41,000 trauma patients in Pennsylvania found that doctors had to contend with 1,224 different injury-related diagnoses in 32,261 unique combinations. To say the least, the difficulty of providing 32,261 different diagnoses in 32,261 different situations is a challenge of enormous complexity for the human brain. So what's the solution? Checklists, to at least ensure the big things don't slip through the cracks.
Initially, Gawande notes that the idea of checklists was soundly rejected in the medical world. Given the complexity of the problems involved, how could a single checklist or a series of them possibly have much of an impact? Yet it turns out that even relatively routine checklists can have a remarkably material effect, for the simple reason that as human beings, we don't always remember to do every single step in a process the exact same way every time, especially when most of the time it doesn't really matter. For instance, one early study applying a simple checklist to implant a central line (a catheter placed into a large vein to deliver important medication) to patients: 1) wash hands; 2) clean patient's skin; 3) put sterile drapes over patient; 4) wear mask, hat, gown, and gloves; and 5) put sterile dressing over insertion site after completion - was found to drop an 11% infection rate down to nearly 0%. It turned out, the doctors were mostly consistent in executing all of the steps, but they occasionally skipped a step for any number of accidental or well-intentioned reasons; nonetheless, being accountable to a simple checklist eliminated virtually all the complications, for what was actually a very simple series of steps. That doesn't mean patients didn't still have complex health problems, difficult diagnoses, and adverse outcomes; nonetheless, over a two year span, the initial study estimated that in one hospital alone, the checklist had prevented 43 infections, 8 deaths, and saved $2 million dollars!
And notably, the application of checklists is already widespread in other professional contexts. They are a staple of the airline industry, ensuring that even well-trained pilots never miss a single step in the proper execution of flying the plane; notably, such checklists include important guidance about how to quickly handle a wide range of emergency situations where, even if the pilots are trained, it may be difficult to recall, unassisted, the exact proper steps to execute in the heat of a high-stress moment with adrenaline rushing. Similarly, the construction industry also relies heavily on checklists to ensure that buildings are made properly, and that crucial steps aren't missed that could result in an utter catastrophe. In addition, Gawande points out that an important ancillary benefit of using checklists in such situations is that, when the checklist requires duties of multiple individuals - and everyone is held accountable to ensure all steps of the checklist are completed - teams end out communicating better, which prevents even more unfavorable outcomes.
Creating Your Financial Planning Checklists
Granted, in the financial planning world, the client situations that present themselves are rarely as dire as landing a plane in an emergency or determining what drugs to administer to a patient who may die in minutes or hours if not properly treated. Nonetheless, the fundamental problem remains: financial planning for individuals with a nearly infinite range of situations entails tremendous complexity, to the point where it's not clear if anyone could really remember every possible question to ask or step to take; at least, not without the assistance of a financial planning checklist.
One version of a quasi-checklist that financial planners already use is the data gathering form, which through its wide range of blanks to fill in amongst various categories, ensures a fairly thorough review of all the client's potential financial concerns. If you don't think checklists can be useful, imagine how effective your financial planning process would be if you had to remember, off the top of your head, to ask every question necessary to capture every single bit of information that's requested on a thorough data-gathering form. Even those who begin using an agenda to guide client meetings often report they help - as a form of checklist - to ensure that all the key issues are covered in the meeting, and that nothing is overlooked in the midst of a potentially complex client conversation.
Similarly, many technical areas in financial planning require not only specialized knowledge, but an awareness of rare-but-potential circumstances that may arise that provide for unique planning opportunities. For instance, with respect to Social Security alone, how often do you ask an unmarried client over the age of 62 if he/she had a former marriage that lasted at least 10 years (potential divorced spouse benefits), or ask retirees over age 62 if there are they still have any children under the age of 18 (extra retirement benefits for children), or ask if the client had a prior (or current) job where he/she did not participate in the Social Security system (future retirement benefits potentially reduced under the Windfall Elimination Provision). While none of these situations are necessarily common, they do occur from time to time - frequent enough to matter, but not frequent enough to necessarily remember to ask every time. The same is true in a wide range of other planning situations, from whether the beneficiary of an inherited IRA might be eligible for an Income In Respect Of A Decedent deduction, to whether a non-qualified annuity was originally funded via a 1035 exchange (which means the cost basis is not merely the premiums paid), to whether a term insurance policy is still convertible (or ever was).
In other words, having a financial planning checklist in each of the various areas of financial planning can serve as a type of "due diligence" process, to ensure that all the important planning issues and opportunities are covered. It doesn't make the planner smarter or more skilled, but does help to ensure that the planner maximizes the knowledge and skill he/she already has. Arguably, at some point in the future, these might even be codified into a more extensive series of Practice Standards for financial planners - as in the case of doctors, this can ultimately help to distinguish between situations where an unfavorable outcome was due to an error or "ineptitude" mistake of the planner, or was simply a situation too complex to possibly be saved. In practice, effective due diligence checklists might also be integrated into a firm's CRM software.
Unfortunately, though, the greatest challenge is simply that we need to build our financial planning checklists - a challenging and time-intensive process. Yet perhaps this is an opportunity for the financial planning community to band together and build something collectively. Have you built any checklists in your firm that you would be willing to share? Would you volunteer time and effort to try to help create a series of financial planning checklists for all practitioners to use? Please respond in the comments if you're interested, and perhaps we can begin this process together. In the meantime, though, it would probably be a good idea to start building some checklists for the most common challenges that arise in your own financial planning firm!
And if you're still not convinced of the value of a financial planning checklist (or having a series of them!), I'd strongly encourage you to read "Checklist Manifesto" yourself; if you are convinced, you may also find the book provides helpful inspiration on the kinds of checklists that may be useful in your practice and with your clients.
