Creating Playbooks

This playbook is for practitioners and teams codifying how they work so that the practice transfers, improves, and retires. It treats playbook creation as a system with a lifecycle rather than a writing exercise, grounded in Toyota Kata, standard work, Argyris's theory-in-use, and pattern language thinking.

Creating Playbooks

Codifying practice so it transfers, improves, and retires

Most playbooks die one of two deaths

  • The museum piece: written once and never revised against evidence. Stale plays carry false authority. The tell: every play has the same date on it.
  • The enforcement tool: made mandatory, with the when-not-to deleted. The tell: teams comply in public and ignore it in private.

Both deaths have one cause. Nobody resolved the tension between standardising and improving.

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The standard is the baseline that makes improvement visible

Codification standardises. Improvement requires variation.

The resolution is Toyota's. The standard is not the ceiling. You cannot see a local improvement without a standard to see it against.

This holds only if every play is provisional and a local improvement can become the new standard cheaply.

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A play is a situated action

  1. Entry conditions The situation the reader is standing in
  2. The action What to do. Usually the smallest part
  3. Signals How you would know it is working, within weeks
  4. When not to Where the play does not apply. Mandatory

When you see these conditions, this move tends to work, and here is how you would know.

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Most things called playbooks are something else

Does it break into plays? Does each play say when it applies, when it does not, and how you would know it is working? Does it still need judgement? Any no, and it is a neighbour:

  • Checklist: items to verify, with no situation
  • Runbook: deterministic steps, with judgement minimised
  • Methodology: adopted wholesale, with the when-not-to deleted
  • Values statement: aspirations without moves or signals

Something else is fine. Mislabelling it is not.

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Every stage pairs its plays with an antipattern

  1. Sense Wait until a move recurs a third time
  2. Extract Write down what actually happened
  3. Codify Put entry conditions first and name the forces
  4. Publish Publish before you are confident
  5. Govern Make improvements standard and retire in the open

The antipatterns: premature codification, the espoused playbook, the context-free recipe, the broadcast, and the museum piece.

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Extract the play from what actually happened

People describe their espoused theory. What they actually do is their theory in use. The gap is widest where practice is most skilled, because skilled practice has gone tacit.

  • Write the instances out raw first, then extract the play from them.
  • Keep the failure in. If it took three attempts, that becomes a force in the play.

The tell: a real play contains at least one detail you would rather leave out.

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A local improvement becomes the new standard

  1. Vary A team varies a play locally
  2. Prove The variation survives three uses and beats the standard on its signals
  3. Decide The owner adopts, adapts, or declines with reasons
  4. Shift Other teams' behaviour changes too

The change path must cost less than the workaround. Otherwise the playbook forks into an official version and a real one.

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Nobody should need wizardry to read or change a play

  1. Default to public. Make exceptions play by play.
  2. Reading needs only a browser. Keep the source under version control and the reading path at a stable URL.
  3. Proposing needs no tooling. A form, an email, or a comment counts.

The tell that this has failed: the people closest to the work are not the people proposing changes.

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Three plays that transfer beat fifteen that do not

  1. Start a candidate list today, with one line per repeated move.
  2. Write one play from a real instance, using the template. Put the entry conditions first.
  3. Publish before you are confident. The first three uses are the test.
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Read the full playbook

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These slides are a projection. The plays live, and change, at the source.

All slides

The playbook is structured in nine parts:

  1. The Core Thesis - codification standardises, improvement requires variation, and the playbook only survives if it resolves that tension.
  2. What a Playbook Is - plays as situated moves, and why a playbook cannot codify your culture.
  3. Sense - noticing practice worth codifying, and the discipline of not codifying too early.
  4. Extract - getting the play from what happened rather than from the official story.
  5. Codify - entry conditions, forces, signals, and the when-not-to that makes a play a play.
  6. Publish - publishing before you are confident, and findability as a situation problem rather than a taxonomy problem.
  7. Format and Access - public by default, org-wide as the floor, and why neither reading nor proposing may depend on technical wizardry.
  8. Govern - the local-improvement-to-new-standard loop that the whole system exists to serve, and retirement as a first-class outcome.
  9. Open Questions - solo versus organisational collections, evidence thresholds, and what a play library owes its forks.

Each lifecycle stage pairs its plays with the antipattern they exist to prevent. Elements of the playbook are hypotheses rather than proven positions. They are marked as such throughout.

The Artefacts section contains the operational tools that put the playbook into action: the Is It a Playbook test for auditing a draft or an existing collection, the Play Template for writing new plays in a consistent form, Worked Examples running the test against well-known playbooks in the wild, the intro slides (a projection, per the format rules), and a 90-minute back-of-the-room training session for remote delivery over Teams and Mural.

Also: Acknowledgements and References and Changelog.

Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.