[cushychicken]

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.

[gowld]

https://www.checkmateaviation.com/ seems to agree, but they pack a lot into a 3-column checklist, where most items are just a few keywords.