In reply to Ben.

It's a blog post, nothing more & nothing less*

I'm a big fan of checklists and performance support tools. We used them in the hospital where I worked and I helped develop them for helicopter aircrew. Checklists are good for ERP (easily repeatable processes) especially when time is critical. However, more of our work is doing BRP (barely repeatable processes).

Best practices for simple environments (there are simple aspects of medicine, like following a safety checklist)

Good practices for complicated environments (rules of thumb, guidelines)

Emergent Practices for complex environments (constantly evolving through use)

Novel Practices for chaotic environments (trying something new or from a different field)

My main concern is that too often we look at successful organizations and just try to copy what they are doing. This is not dogmatic, it's based on my observations of many organizations over a few decades.

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* No blog post or article is going to address every angle or every consideration of a complex issue. This blog is mostly for me. These are my half-baked thoughts which I make public in order to share and to learn. This post will probably be edited several times and may become part of a longer article or white paper. What you see here is the raw material. Much of the nuance is in the flow of the conversations here for the past six years. Most posts are within the context of previous posts, their comments and the references.