The Playlist Manifesto

Atul Gawande made checklists sexy. His idea that a good checklist can help process-driven professionals like pilots and surgeons “get things done right” has proven irresistible to businesses looking to increase effectiveness and reduce error.

As Gawande shows, checklists can be a game changer for professionals many years into their careers, ensuring compliance with safety protocols and making sure nothing gets left out due to absent-minded habits. However, as helpful as checklists are as reinforcement tools, I’ve found that checklists suck as teaching tools.*

Referring to a surgeon-specific checklist to avoid error, infection, and malpractice, Gawande says: “these steps are no-brainers; they have been known and taught for years.”

But it’s crucial not to miss that these steps are “no-brainers” only to trained surgeons, and not necessarily to newly minted residents. This distinction matters for companies trying to scale their business processes with new hires. What is routine for experts, fails to convey the strategic nuance and rationale to beginners. I’ve found that if you want to teach and scale process to new learners, create playbooks, not checklists.

Why?

Checklists don’t give context. They are static and inflexible, without story or situational reference. Sure, a good checklist will go through improvements and refinements. But as a checklist iterates, it also leaves behind all of the anecdotal experience, key failures, and important learnings that don’t make the final list. A checklist is a single set of directions, distilled from a thousand data points. It is incredibly difficult for someone to learn from a sheet of rules without knowing how those rules came to be.

On the other hand, a playbook is a collection of strategies for success. Playbooks contain both best practice processes, as well as the methodologies for creating these processes. A playbook tells you not only what to do, but how to make it happen. Unlike checklists, playbooks include all the pulp that is strained out during the checklist refining process. A good playbook provides purpose, critical context, anecdotal reference, and advice, as opposed to rules. Playbooks equip the reader with enough context and key learnings that they can apply to them to unexpected challenges in the future. While checklists are more often memory aides, playbooks recognize the power of stories in learning. In short, checklists help you do, playbooks help you learn.

Early on at my company AlphaSights, we decided to put together a manual to help train new members on our project management process. We were scaling very quickly (doubling in size every few months) and wanted to document our learnings. We took a few days to put together all of our existing best practices and strategies into a refined, step-by-step checklist. We thought, “This will be great! This is all the good stuff we’ve learned through experience that can now be transferred to our new hires. This will save us time and help us scale efficiently!”

It turns out that the checklist wasn’t helpful for training the new hires. The list was detailed with direction but without context. The purpose and value of many of the steps in the process were unclear and the checklist didn’t, and given the hyper-growth environment couldn’t, consider a wide range of scenarios. Because of this, our new hires struggled to embrace ambiguity, misinterpreted the purpose of key steps, and spent hours puzzling over “what if?” questions.

In the end, we quickly figured out that relying on a checklist is not the best way to scale process. We swiftly pivoted and instead put together project management playbooks, one for each type of common client-ask. The playbooks contained strategies for many scenarios, as well as detailed overviews that highlighted our thinking for each strategy. The playbooks included context in the form of appendices, conceptual time charts, behind-the-scenes thinking, and data-driven graphs. We conducted “bootcamps” to walk through the playbooks for further context.

The results were immediate and significant. Over a 6-month period, my team’s NPS score increased greatly. All of the new joiners on the team hit their quarterly project management goals and our accounts set record highs. By giving context and guidance versus rigid direction, everyone was equipped with the tools needed to successfully execute on projects that constantly change in scope and timing.

We still use checklists throughout all levels of the company; they are an extraordinarily powerful tool for experienced personnel. However, playbooks have supplanted them for onboarding and scaling “noobs.” A process noob benefits greatly from gaining context on where and how a process is actually developed so that they can understand the purpose of each step and build the judgement necessary to overcome unforeseen challenges.