After decades spent in the NHS, Dalrymple holds up the checklist as the ultimate example of process trumping meaning:

Where checklists are not in fact useful, they become a menace. They become the golden calf of the unintelligent or time-servers, with whom so many organizations are plentifully supplied. They become not an aid to work, but the very essence of work. The people who fill them think that, once they have done so, they have completed their task and can relax, their job done. Checklists have so few disastrous consequences only because so much human activity is completely inessential in the first place.