For over forty years, if you wanted to see the latest music in the UK you turned on “Top of the Pops.” New, up-and-coming bands eagerly awaited the validation of success that an invite to appear on the TOTP stage represented. When they arrived the band “played” the song but really they were miming to a backing track. The miming is not the noteworthy part — that’s been a staple of music appearances on television. What is interesting is that the music they mimed their performance to had to be re-recorded specifically for the show. That was a direct result of a settlement in 1966 with the UK Musician’s Union who wanted to ensure the people on stage were the ones who actually recorded the song. To ensure that no one cheated, representatives from the union attended the recording sessions.

Flash forward into the late 70s and 80s. Pop music became more layered and intricate; more production and the addition of synthesizers and multi-track recording. Recreating some of those songs in a single afternoon session to play on the show that evening became increasingly impossible and led to a number of more famous bands threatening to skip the show. It was silly, they noted, to re-record a song for which everyone knew they were only pretending to play anyway. Faced with this, the Musician’s Union and Top of the Pops realized clearly what the right answer was…and promptly did the opposite: they would schedule the recording session, leave for lunch and maybe a pint, and when they came back the “new” recording would be magically ready to go. So it was just the original song with a “made fresh today label” stuck over it. No one cared — they decided they would just “check the box.”

I first heard the phrase “check the box” applied to this kind of lazy behavior early in my career. My then boss used it derisively to refer to — and mercilessly kill — actions that had no value but people did them anyway because they wanted to create the appearance of doing something. This is usually because they:

• Had always done it that way.
• Read that other people/companies had done it that way.
• Wanted to cover their six (ask a pilot).

What “check the box” people usually don’t do is stop and ask what the right thing is to do; if the activity itself is important. “Checking the box” is the foundation stone of bureaucracy, the start of process for process sake. It’s also how companies die. More and more energy attention goes to work that exists to feed the bureaucracy rather than move the organization forward. What does it look like?

• Critical security patches that go unapplied for years but are “ok” because someone senior “signed off on it.” Some of the more noteworthy data breaches in the past two years can be traced directly to this.
• A company goes to completely digital records but someone still prints out customer invoices and puts them in a paper file. I actually witnessed this one live once.
• Copying a process from another company and applying it without review or modification because it’s a “best practice.” Keep in mind that bloodletting was once a “best practice” too.
• Collecting information that is never actually reviewed or used in a business process. To prove this happens, I admit I have in the past filled in Hitchhiker’s Guide and Game of Thrones references for questions like this (no one has ever caught it).

So how do you “uncheck?” Keep in mind not all process is bad; not all senior-level review is bad. It starts with understanding how to balance risk and nimble decision making. The people best equipped to decide something are the ones closest to the issue. They have the most data; they live the problem every day. As a leader, you want to ensure that balance by having people who think about risk and impact. But requiring the CEO to sign off on every $10 purchase order to ensure all spending is within guidelines is a colossally bad idea. I witnessed this one firsthand early in my career, too.

It also involves examining and challenging your existing assumptions. Is that meeting still needed? Does this vendor review process scale? Do our teams have enough autonomy? Does this security audit accomplish the goal of protecting our systems? Ask why. And ask why again? And be willing to change when the answer isn’t satisfactory.

No business process is perfect or timeless. Companies grow and change and our processes need to as well. And no one should be emotionally invested in a given process. Instead, be the first one to say, “this can be improved.”

All companies go through inflection points where they way they did things to that point no longer work effectively. Those are forks: one path is finding the right process that scales to current needs and accomplishes the core goal; the other is a road to a checkbox environment that the Vogons would nod at in recognition.