The Five Checkpoints, Revisited

We wrote From Problem Solving to Solution Design around five checkpoints. People who have read the book tend to remember them as a list. In practice they work as a sequence, and most of the failures we are asked to diagnose come from taking them out of order rather than from skipping one outright.

One: identify the problem

Organizations rarely arrive with a problem. They arrive with a preferred solution and a budget line already attached to it. The first checkpoint asks a harder question than it appears to: what is actually going wrong, stated in terms that someone outside the room would recognize? A problem that can only be described in the vocabulary of the proposed remedy has not been identified yet.

Two: set goals and design options

Options, plural. A single option is a decision wearing a disguise. The discipline here is to hold two or three genuinely different approaches open long enough to compare them against goals that were written down before any of them existed.

Three: engage your stakeholders

This is the checkpoint most often treated as a communications exercise scheduled after the real work. It is the opposite. The people who will live with a solution hold information about it that no analysis will surface, and the ones who can quietly withhold cooperation are usually not the ones on the steering committee.

Four: act on the implementation

Designs degrade on contact with delivery. The question at this checkpoint is not whether the plan survived, but whether the mechanism for noticing that it did not is working, and whether anyone is authorized to act on what it reports.

Five: make sure the solution is sustainable

A solution that requires its designer to stay in the room is a consulting engagement, not a solution. Sustainability is the checkpoint that separates the two, and it is the one most often declared complete at the moment the project closes rather than a year later, when the answer is actually known.

None of this is complicated. It is simply easier to describe than to hold to under schedule pressure, which is why we keep coming back to it.