Ask an organization which methodology it follows, and you will almost never receive an answer. You will receive an inventory. “PRINCE2,” they announce, and produce a folder. “Agile”— and produce a different folder, thinner, with better fonts.
What is being described is not a way of working. It is a shopping list. And nobody in the entire history of appetite has been nourished by a list of ingredients.
The Sacrament of the Tick
Somewhere on every shared drive, there lives a spreadsheet called Stage Gate Deliverables, and beside each line, a box.
Business Case: tick.
Project Initiation Document: tick.
RAID Log: tick.
Communications Plan: tick.
Lessons Learned Register — created on day one, virgin on day four hundred, ticked throughout.
The gate opens. The project proceeds. Somebody’s name goes on something. And at no point in this entire liturgy has a human being been obliged to decide anything whatsoever. A recipe for disaster.
What a Recipe Actually Is
A recipe is a compression. It is the residue of somebody else’s judgment, flattened into imperatives so that a stranger may approximate a result he does not understand. Two hundred grams of flour. Fold, do not stir. Rest for an hour, covered.
This works, as far as it goes, which is not far. The card does not explain why the butter must be cold and therefore cannot help you when your kitchen is warm. It offers no guidance on your oven, which runs hot, as all ovens do, in the testimony of people who cannot cook. It assumes eggs of a size you do not have.
Every one of those corrections lives in the chef, and none of them lives on the card, the card being precisely what remains once the thinking has been extracted and thrown away.
Escoffier — king of chefs, chef of kings, and a better methodologist than your PMO — left us no list of dishes. He left a system: the brigade, the mother sauces, an architecture from which ten thousand dinners follow for anyone who grasps the principle. The recipes were the output. Confuse the two, and you have a kitchen full of index cards and nobody in it who can cook.
The One Checklist That Works
Honesty compels a concession here, and a substantial one. There exists a checklist that saves lives daily, and it lives in a cockpit.
At Wright Field in October 1935, the Boeing Model 299 lifted off, stalled, and came down in flames. The pilot did not survive. The aircraft was not defective; the gust lock had simply been left engaged. Too much airplane for one man to fly, concluded the newspapers. The airframe burned with a few thousand miles on it, but the design lived on as the B-17, and so did the modest document its pilots drew up in answer: the pre-flight checklist.
The checklist vindicated, then? Not quite — and the distinction is the whole of my argument. That one was written in the wreckage of a specific catastrophe, by the men who would have to use it, and every line of it commands an action: gust lock — released.
It presumes a trained pilot who knows what a gust lock is and precisely why the other man died. Strap me into that cockpit with the very same card in my hands, and you will have documented my death, not prevented it.
Your stage gate list presumes nothing and commands nothing. It does not say risk — priced. It says Risk Register — attached. It is not a checklist of actions but a checklist of stationery, composed by no one you can name, after no disaster anyone remembers, for a project that was not yours.
Ingredients are not a Meal
Observe what the tick can and cannot certify. It can solely establish the existence of a Risk Register. It cannot establish that any person has actually thought about risk for eleven consecutive seconds. Two entirely different claims, and only one of them is auditable, which is exactly why it is the one audited.
And so the register is duly filled: twelve risks, because twelve looks conscientious where four looks idle, and forty looks alarming; each scored on a five-by-five matrix nobody in the room can justify. The file is dated. The file is signed. The file is, in every respect that matters to anybody, a bowl of raw flour.
The Dreary Adult Part
The remedy is dull, as remedies invariably are, and it is not the abolition of the checklist. Keep the thing. Merely have it drive decisions rather than documents.
Who arbitrates scope against cost, and by what authority?
At what threshold does a risk stop being watched and start being funded?
Which changes may be absorbed, and which oblige us to halt and concede that the plan is now a work of fiction?
What will we say to the Steering Committee when the news is genuinely bad — and who, precisely, is permitted to say it?
Each of those may well culminate in a document, and documents are a perfectly respectable place to store a decision. What is not respectable is manufacturing the container and announcing that the contents may be assumed.
To answer such questions, somebody must exercise judgment in public and remain accountable for it long afterward. To tick a box requires a mouse and no witnesses.
Offered that choice, institutions choose the mouse—every single time—and then call the choice “governance.”