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Use this when you need to shift something that is messy, where there are no Always Right answers and 'telling' won't work (or be tolerated!)

You’ve probably heard the word ‘playbooks’ tossed around over the last few years. You might well have read some or developed one yourself. 

I’d love to share exactly what they can do and how I create them.

First... what is a playbook? It's a way to socialise ideas and to get people experimenting with new ways of working. Official definitions vary but mine literal version is 'a document sharing mindsets to consider and techniques to try'. It's about helping people play with new ideas.
 

|  When you hear ‘playbook’, think ‘how to play with these new ideas’. 

You might have spotted brand playbooks, operational playbooks, culture playbooks and in smaller businesses you might see whole company playbooks.

I create collaboration playbooks to help people think about and design how they collaborate to get more done and reduce overwhelm.

Between mandating things and allowing a free-for-all is important design space

OK, something to think about.

There are some things we want to lock down in an organisation about how things work. For example, what platform you use and where the office is :-) and what people's jobs are.

And there are other things we want leave entirely to teams' and individuals' discretion - like what they wear and what they have for lunch.

In between this is a wide range of things we might want to start facilitating, like how people work together in teams, meet, communicate and make decisions.

(thank you Elise Keith for this illustration, fresh from your hub of insight and creativity!): 

A collaboration playbook is a way to facilitate more conscious design and alignment around something in a messy space with no rules. For me, it’s collaboration. For you, it might be something else. 

The goal of every playbook I create is to:

- Get people thinking

- Grant freedoms and give people permission

- Kickstart action

- Give people some easy ideas to try out

- Encourage people who are already thinking along the right lines to keep going

- Open the door to more ways to play!

(Also worth noting: there are some very tightly defined playbooks and there are more open, fluid and idea-based playbooks. I definitely produce the latter!)

How I design playbook content  

My favourite way is to get a small group of people to do some experiments over a period of a few months. They have to try stuff, improve it at least once - and get someone else to try it and improve it too. It it works, it can go in the playbook.

This way, the playbook only includes things that we know definitely work in this organisation that have gone through a couple of rounds iteration already. We can say "here are some things that these people tried that worked for them and why - have a go and see how you get on". 

This massively reduces the 'tell' element where content is just stuff that we have decided they should do. 

That's a high bar for inclusion and there is nothing wrong with creating a playbook based on ideas you'd like people to try for the first time, as long as that's how you position it.

In parallel, I derive some overarching principles that all these techniques fall under. These are our north stars - what we are shooting towards (and often a mindset shift for many people). The techniques are how we might try to get there.

So if that's the source of the content, how do we assemble and position a playbook? 

For me, a playbook is usually a deck of slides, divided into chapters and laid out with loads of blank space, principle by principle.

Here's how I often lay out those slides.

Start with orientation: what actually is this thing?  

First I help readers understand what they are reading. What is it trying to achieve, where did it come from, who created it and how and how should it be used? 

The we start with the first principle

I use 'what it is' and 'what it isn't' to make it crystal clear and avoid overuse (i.e. negative use of it). For example, if the principle is "Make space for deep work", I might share something like this:

What it is:​

- Carving out the time and headspace you need to do deep work​

- Asking for what you need from others to make the best use of your time​

- Setting up protocols that help you get work done​

- Scheduling breaks so they happen​

What it isn’t​

- Being excessively rigid about timeboxing ​

- Forcing others to work round you unnecessarily ​

Then I'll lay out the norms

We get specific again - what is it normal and expected to do? For example, is it ok to say no to a meeting, can you block time out for deep work? We are often granting freedoms in this section.

And now I'll share some techniques

Here's where we add the techniques we'd like people to try. I often sign them off with a quote from the person who experimented with them first.

Importantly, we'll have a way for people to add their own preferred techniques

Playbooks are living documents which develop over time. This slide helps emphasise this.

And on we go through the principles until we have a complete deck.

I will often then share individual techniques or principles in emails or on internal social media and then link through to the whole playbook. 

Some real life examples to explore

That's my way! There are lot sof others. Here are the playbooks shared openly by a range of companies. Some are more prescriptive than others. All will give you some ideas...

Atlassian Team Playbook

GitLab Handbook:

Spotify Engineering Culture (and also this blog)

Basecamp Guide to Internal Communication:

Buffer Culture Handbook

Zapier Guide to Remote Work

Netflix Culture Deck

Trello's Remote Work Guide

InVision's Distributed Work Guide

Automattic’s Creed and Company Manual (the company behind Wordpress)

Have you used playbooks in your organisation? What did you find worked best?

With my best wishes as always 👋

Dr Carrie Goucher 
FewerFasterBolder

Follow me for daily collaboration techniques on LinkedIn

References 

(1) You can read about this entire methodology in my PhD thesis here.

Work with me to become the fast, agile organisation you know you can be.

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