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.
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.