Why Smart Innovation Teams Keep Missing the Obvious
Developing and launching great innovation can feel so sweet and satisfying. But it also reminds me of Groundhog Day. New keen people coming through the business, full of enthusiasm, but lacking the hard-earned knowledge. Or even with highly experienced teams we sometimes missed something obvious that became a real pain in the proverbial to fix down the track.
To help here, I’m seeing lots of people using AI as a sense checker and process guide. No doubt AI’s truly an amazing tool for creating things and giving things a once over, but it’s not a magic bullet. The problem with AI is by default it’s just so agreeable. It’s great for helping me feel good about myself but it doesn’t know if something is actually “right”. It gives the algorithm’s best computation and it’s only as good as the learning data that it’s scraped for training. Plus it’s so prolific, keenly offering to produce more and more outputs that give the illusion of progress. .
There is a better tool that in my experience gives a better result.
And that’s the humble checklist. There’s a reason why pilots use checklists during aircraft emergencies, surgeons use them during complex operations and top level manufacturers use them to bake in quality control. Failure often comes from enthusiasm without experience or experience with omissions. I bet you can remember a situation where you assumed everything had been done only to find a small but important part got left out.
A living example for me was improving the quality of new product concepts. We were really good at developing compelling insights, identifying gaps in the marketplace, and coming up with cracking new ideas. However more times than we would have liked, we didn’t end up getting the testing results we were expecting. Diving into this, we found we were so familiar with the work that we were making subconscious assumptions. Assuming that people understood the insight as well as we did, or they already automatically knew the product was new, or the benefit was single minded and obvious like it was in our heads. Getting others to proofread the concepts sometimes helped, but often they would assume that we knew what we were doing and didn’t want to question something that looked deliberate.
To fix this we took inspiration from the aviation industry and decided to embrace checklists.
Here’s what we learnt in the process.
The key to developing an effective checklist was recognizing that the entire team brings different perspectives, so we developed our checklists cross functionally with insights people, marketing, R&D, sales, technology and external experts like research partners.
We were very aware of drowning in too much detail. We defined what great looks like and then went through and ruthlessly prioritized to focus on only the things that really made a difference. One of the first items on our concept checklist was deceptively simple. Does it clearly say new? That single line lifted concept scores by a couple of percent. People did not assume it was new unless we told them. It felt embarrassingly obvious in hindsight.
The results after implementing the checklists were immediate and substantial, with new team members writing noticeably better concepts and the more experienced folks not omitting the obvious due to complacency.
We found there are two ways to use checklists. For junior or new-in-role people ‘Read-do’ ones work best where they read each step and do it in sequence. For more experienced people or high judgement work ‘Do-confirm’ work best, where they do the work from memory and then review in a structured way afterwards.
Like everything, there is a danger of too much of a good thing and that shows up as becoming overly reliant or inflexible when using checklists. They focus common sense, not replace it.
In innovation work I’ve found checklists help to:
Capture hard won lessons that turn knowledge into repeatable habits.
Reduce errors and omissions that can compound downstream
Surface risks early before momentum hides them
Shorten development time by focusing on critical issues
Support teams by creating pause points where everyone aligns
Change the dynamic from reviewing slides to ensuring readiness
If you’re curious about the broader application of checklists, a fantastic read is Atul Gawande’s book “The Checklist Manifesto”. He’s a curious, insightful and hugely readable New York surgeon who showed how simple checklists reduced complications and deaths in complex surgical environments. The principles translate surprisingly well to innovation.
The Insight. If you’re finding that effort isn’t reliably turning into results, or that small oversights keep creating disproportionate problems later, it might not be a capability issue. It might be a systems issue.
If you’re wrestling with inconsistent results or too many “we should have caught that” moments, I’m always up for a conversation about how to build checklists that genuinely lift performance rather than create bureaucracy.
Equally, if you’ve found a way to use them well in your own business, I’d love to hear about it. The best checklists are built from real scars, not theory.
