I’ve seen some good check lists developed from Charles Perrow’s study of “Normal Accidents”*. In the book he suggests differentiating organisational problems related to technology by determining whether their components are tightly vs. loosely coupled and have complex vs. linear interactions. Proven Models has a general summary*.

*http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6596.html *http://www.provenmodels.com/41/technology-typology/charles-b.-perrow

One advantage of checklists and other such solutions is that they are sufficiently generic that they can be shared and replicated elsewhere. It is also easy and quick to test whether they are helpful or not.
Now, fortunately, complex environment do not necessarily have complex problem. Most problems are the kind that can be solved using generic, easy to replicate, easy to test solutions. In fact, most environment are like that (complex environments with simple problems). I do not know of any environment that can plausibly be called simple without a certain amount of abstraction or simplification.
It gets sticky when the problems themselves are complex; that is they cannot be solved in a systematic way or are too unique to test alternative solutions.
But I wonder if there is a quick and easy way to distinguish between simple and complex problems. A checklist perhaps?

This post was mentioned on Twitter by timkastelle: New blog post: #Innovation Lessons from The Checklist Manifesto- Atul Gawande’s book can help us all be more innovative http://bit.ly/9oCPnp...