Play Template
The form every play in a collection follows. Consistency of form is what lets readers scan a collection by situation, and what makes the Is It a Playbook test cheap to run.
Play: [name the action, as a verb phrase]
Status: candidate | provisional | tested | retired Owner: [who answers for this play] Last tested: [date of the most recent real use]
When: [the situation the reader is standing in. What they would be seeing, not the topic. If this takes more than three sentences, the play may be two plays.]
The action: [what to do. Short. If the action is the longest section, the play is probably a procedure in disguise.]
Forces: [what pulls in each direction and what the play trades away. Cost before payback. Dependencies on sponsorship or skills. Omit only if the tension is genuinely trivial.]
Signals: [how the reader would know it is working. Observable within weeks. Not "alignment", not "buy-in".]
When not to: [the conditions under which this play does not apply, or applies with a different variant. Mandatory. A play without this section is an instruction.]
Instance: [one to three sentences of the real run this play was extracted from, anonymised as needed. If you cannot write this section, the play has not earned its place.]
Notes on using the template
Write the instance and the when first. Those are the sections that fail when a play is being written from hope, so writing them first surfaces the problem before the effort is sunk.
The status field does the governance work. A play enters as provisional, becomes tested when uses by people other than the author confirm it, and retires in the open with its reasons attached. Candidate-status plays live in the candidate list, not the collection.
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