In the early 2000s, I learned to fly. This was, depending on your perspective, either a magnificent life-enriching pursuit or a spectacularly expensive way to spend Saturday mornings. My wife was supportive, on one non-negotiable condition: I was cleaned up, earthbound, and sitting opposite her in Selfridges for lunch by early afternoon.When you need to do something in precisely the right order, you need to get yourself a checklist. By Richard ForssEvery Saturday, I would drive up to Elstree, a small airfield in north London that sits, rather improbably, between a film studio and the suburban sprawl of Hertfordshire. For an hour, I would experience something genuinely extraordinary. There is a particular feeling you get when you are alone at the controls of an aircraft, a few thousand feet above the English countryside, that is very difficult to describe to anyone who hasn't done it. It is equal parts exhilaration, concentration and the quiet awareness that you are one bad decision away from a very short career.But this is not, despite appearances, a story about flying. It is a story about checklists. And, more specifically, about why the most tedious part of aviation turned out to be the most important thing it ever taught me.The checklist ritualBefore you start an aircraft engine, you run a checklist. Before you taxi, you run a checklist. Before you take off, you run a checklist: the engine run-up, the magneto checks, the carb heat, the instruments, the controls, the hatches and harnesses. After take-off, there is another checklist. Before you land, another. After you land, yet another. And you do not skip items. You do not do them from memory because you're feeling confident. You read them out, every single time, even if you have done it five hundred times before, because the one time you don't is the time something is wrong and you find out about it at entirely the wrong altitude.I learned those checklists so thoroughly that I can recite them today, more than two decades later, despite not having flown in years. They are engraved somewhere in the back of my brain, alongside my childhood phone number and the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody. The reason they stuck is not because I have a remarkable memory (I routinely forget where I've put my car keys) but because they were taught as a matter of life and death. Which, in aviation, they literally are.The aviation checklist, incidentally, exists because of a crash. In 1935 Boeing's Model 299, a plane the US Army had already decided to buy, stalled on its demonstration flight because the pilot, overwhelmed by the cockpit's complexity, forgot to release a locking mechanism on the controls. Two crew died. The plane was declared "too complex to fly." Boeing's answer was not to simplify the aircraft but to create a checklist. That checklist helped the 299, later known as the B-17 Flying Fortress, go on to fly 1.8 million miles without incident and play a decisive role in winning World War 2. The plane wasn't too complex to fly. It was too complex to fly from memory.Every checklist I have ever used, from Elstree to the server room, owes its existence to that insight.Nobody dies (probably)Releasing code into a production environment is not, I will concede, quite the same as lifting a single-engine aircraft off a runway in a crosswind. In fintech, nobody is going to die if your deployment goes wrong. Probably. But in a regulated financial services business, a botched release can produce consequences that, while not fatal, are certainly career-limiting and occasionally front-page-worthy.The parallel, though, is closer than most technology leaders would like to admit. A production release is a moment of controlled risk. You are moving from a safe test environment into the real world, where real clients have real money and real regulators have real expectations. The moment you push that button, you are the pilot on the runway. Everything up to this point has been preparation. What happens next depends entirely on whether you did the preparation properly.At EXANTE, we treat production releases with the same disciplined ritual I learned at Elstree. There is a checklist. It is followed every time. Not because our people are incapable of remembering what to do (they are experienced, talented professionals) but because memory is a liar. It tells you everything is fine. It tells you that you definitely checked that thing. It tells you this release is basically the same as the last one, so you can skip a few steps.Memory, in short, is the enemy of rigour. Checklists are the antidote.The boring magicThere is nothing glamorous about a checklist. Nobody has ever written a Hollywood screenplay about a man who diligently confirmed his deployment rollback procedure before cutting over to the new release. But there is a reason that aviation, where the consequences of error are as severe as they get, has built its entire safety culture around them. They work. Not because they are clever, but because they are relentless. They do not care that you are tired, or rushed, or confident, or distracted by the fact that someone has just pinged you on Slack about something unrelated. They simply sit there, waiting for you to confirm each step, one at a time, in order.The technology industry, for all its talk of agility and innovation, could learn this lesson more deeply. We have monitoring tools, automated tests, CI/CD pipelines; all wonderful things. But somewhere in the process, a human being needs to pause, look at a list, and confirm: have we actually done what we think we've done? Is the rollback ready? Have the stakeholders been notified? Are we confident this is the right build? Do we know what "good" looks like once it's live?These are not exciting questions. They are the most important questions.Cleared for take-offI no longer fly. My Saturday mornings have been reclaimed for less vertigo-inducing pursuits, and my wife no longer has to wonder whether I'll make it to Selfridges in one piece. But the checklists stayed with me. Not as a quaint memory of a hobby, but as a fundamental conviction about how serious work should be done.Every time we release code at EXANTE, I think of that little airfield in north London. I think of sitting in the cockpit, reading out each item, confirming each check, knowing that the ritual was the thing keeping me safe. The stakes in technology are different. Nobody dies. But the principle is identical: you follow the process, every time, because the one time you don't is the time you wish you had.And unlike flying, at least I can do this bit sitting down with a cup of tea.Richard Forss is CTO of EXANTE, a business of over 700 staff, where he leads a technology team of 230 and has not crashed anything, aircraft or production system, in several years. This article was written by FM Contributors at www.financemagnates.com.

Read full article on FINANCEMAGNETS