Checklists are great! Until TPTB decide everything should be a checklist, and then that everyone needs to be trained to the checklist and no more than that, and then start punishing any deviation from said checklists, and the all the newbies go 'why should I learn all this technical stuff, it's not needed for the checklist?'.
And then something changes and no one knows how to do anything but follow the checklist that doesn't work anymore....
A few jobs ago, one of the managers of my division read The Checklist Manifesto and decided everyone needed to read and did the Jerry Maguire move of buying everyone a copy to read.
It kind of worked the way you described. Everyone kind of stopped thinking and just became checklist apes.
It wasn’t until a few years later that I realized a major factor about checklists the book mentioned, but that management conveniently ignored: the checklist must only be one page. Any longer and people ignore it.
Critical step that our management ignored. They just saw it as a big, never ending, ever growing list of rules. Which isn’t the right way to think about it.
I think this highlights the most important bit that is missing from most checklists... the why.
Yes we have a list of things to do, and we know that if we don't do all those things then bad things can happen, but the most important thing is to know why we are doing those things... Because when bad things start to happen despite following the list, you need to know why you are doing those things so that you have some hope of making it better.
And then something changes and no one knows how to do anything but follow the checklist that doesn't work anymore....