The checklist technique, like anything else can be abused to the point of ineffectiveness. (So what's new?!) When I was at Intuit, we had a VP (who was a manag

The checklist technique, like anything else can be abused to the point of ineffectiveness. (So what's new?!) When I was at Intuit, we had a VP (who was a management consultant in an earlier life) develop an "innovation pipeline" with checklists at each stage of the pipe line. Anyone who had an idea for a new product had to run through this checklist before they could produce a prototype , get some funding, time etc. IIRC there were about a 20 questions in all and to move from stage to stage each set had to be answered in some detail. In theory it should have worked. In practice it was disaster. The answers to these questions had to make sense to the VP (who was very bright but knew nothing about prod dev or the local market, so nothing would get past her "approval sense") and a whole array of managers(and Intuit has a LOT of managers. Oh boy did we have managers everywhere) who had to approve of every item in the checklist before the person who proposed the idea could start moving on it. Soon enough, anyone foolish enough to submit an innovative proposal would have to send endless powerpoint slides in support of every checklist question, usually to be gathered by a set number of what Intuit called "Follow Me home"s. When one manager was satisfied, the next would ask for more data on some other point. Then the first would have a rethink and ask for more data. People spent months gathering data for something that could have been bulit and deployed over a weekend and got real data from real customers (and people wonder why Intuit is stagnant!). What I took away from observing this "pipeline" in action, is that anyone using a "checklist approach" to creative work should be well aware of its limitations. I guess this is good advice for any tool. Use it as a tool, not a crutch - a substitute for thinking or deciding.