Playbooks
From GPWiki
Saturday 31 of July, 2010
Some decisions are simple; some are complex. Note the words “simple” and “complex”. What’s the difference? A simple decision is one that is easily understood, that involves few stakeholders, for which there are a limited range of choices, where the trade-offs are easy to make and of small consequence, and for which the feedback loops are very short. For example, “What movie should we go to?” fits all those criteria.
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A complex decision is different in all those dimensions, particularly the depth and range of choices and the high degree of uncertainty involved. The problem with complex decisions is that the feedback loops are so long and the consequences are so great, and although the win premium for getting it right is high so too is the cost of getting it wrong. So what do you do? You have to use process. You have to satisfy yourself that you've thought the right thoughts, considered the right alternatives, understood the right set of values, made the right trade offs, and looked at and evaluated the right data.
It takes more that a few paragraphs to ground you in the concepts at work here. You can read more about decision making elsewhere.
A “Playbook” is a highly evolved tool for helping you take a complex problem apart . . . to see with clarity the full range of alternatives and how they might be combined into coherent strategies.
The heart of a Playbook is something called a decision table. Think of it as an analogue computer. Each column represents an area in which you can make choices. In each column you want to develop a full range of choices: from mild to wild, cheap to expensive, easy to hard, etc.
What is a playbook?
A Decision Playbook describes specific, fully integrated strategies. It’s the linking of a large number of choices that’s critical. For example, in the case of a go-to-market playbook, the linking could span the following:
- Business model
- Financial exit strategy
- Customer segmentation
- Product strategy
- Pricing
- Branding
- Demand generation
- Customer service
- Site selection
How do you build a play/strategy?
Once you’ve built your decision table (another conversation), you want to identify at least three plays or strategies that explore different ideas or values. For each play/strategy, identify one or more choices in each column of the decision table that best deliver(s) the purpose of the play. For example, we did one for a motorcycle company that explored these strategic themes . . .
- Race team: sell bikes to homologate
- Bikes as works of art
- Bikes as ads for IP and Engineering
- Be like McLaren
- Be like Ducati
The difference between a “choice” and an “objective”
The distinction between choices and objectives is an important one. “Choices” describe what you can do with your time, money, or other resources. “Objectives” are what you want. So while you want things like “market share,” “increase sales,” and “customer satisfaction,” you don’t get to choose them. Instead, you choose to do things like investing in marketing, improving your computer systems, and introducing new products because you believe they’ll help you get more of what you want.
While, the playbook and the plays in it describe choices you’re making in order to achieve one or more of your values or objectives, a decision table is meant to represent the field of available choices. This is where the action is. This is where the opportunity is for orthogonal thinking. Here are some examples of what I mean:
- Different businesses price differently. For example, some give their products away and make money somewhere else. Some attach conditions, like dog breeders do. Some bundle. Some don’t. Some license. Some sell. If the accepted practice in your business is to price one way, definitely consider doing it in a completely different way in order to emphasize a different source of value.
- Distribution creates similar opportunities. The norm in cars and motorcycles is to sell through franchised dealers. There are reasons to do that. There are reasons not to. Subaru in Australia figured out that sales and service didn’t need to be done in the same place and broke the mold.
- Customization is a big part of how people personalize the products and services they buy. In some cases, this is done post sale by the customer or by the manufacturer's agents. Sometimes the manufacturer does it. Many companies have used customization in unique ways – and in so doing have generated great value.
What will the Playbook help you do?
Because a play describes how all the necessary success factors come together, the playbook will help you:
- Improve performance Plays describe a linked and related set of choices and activities. You combine the resources available to your organization in various ways because you believe that you’ll get the results you’re looking for. One of two things will happen: either the play will work like the way you thought it would or it won’t. In either case, you’ll have a clear view of what you thought and what you chose. This means you'll be much better placed to diagnose what’s working and what isn’t.
- Connect the dots You waste so much energy when you don’t bring to bear all the talent and resources of your organization on your go-to-market strategies and tactics. The playbook helps everyone understand the levers you have to pull, and how hard you need to pull each one if you are to achieve your objectives.
- Identify trade-offs You can’t do everything all the time. If you invest in one project, by definition that means you can’t invest in another. In the same way, if you allocate time to one pursuit, you can’t allocate that same time to doing something else. So you need to make trade-offs. The playbook helps you see what they are and how you might make them.
- Avoid burden shifting One of the things that happens when you fail to “connect the dots” or identify the trade-offs is that you do something called “burden shifting” . . . you force someone else to make the trade-offs or connect the dots for you. The problem is, the people who wind up with the burden often wind up with the burdens of many other people as well. It’s often the case that they also don’t have the big picture needed in order to make sense of all the conflicting priorities. The playbook will help you minimize the amount of burden shifting you do.
- Create leverage Plays don’t exist in a vacuum. You never have just one initiative going on. You’re never trying to do just one thing. The playbook allows you to overlay several plays so that you can see the resources and tactics that are being used to support many plays, and the specific requirements for doing something unique. When you build new plays, you should as much as possible leverage existing investments and existing plays.
- Identify costs Because plays are built up across organizational functions, the playbook helps you see all the choices you’re making, and by implication therefore, all the cost levers you’re pulling.
Creating Plays Using a Playbook
Plays are very “prescriptive,” but they may not be fully “descriptive". What does that mean? It means they prescribe or call out what should be done to achieve the objective. The descriptive detail of specific projects, plans, and activities will generally be found someplace else.
For example, if a play calls for an aggressive pricing strategy, that’s the prescriptive part. The details of the pricing strategy will be found somewhere else. Ideally, however, those details will be referenced or in some way linked to in the play.
So for example if you are responsible for describing a particular part of a strategy, your job is to do that in reference to the play, remembering that someone coming along later should be able to easily understand the linkages.
If you’re responsible for doing something that’s needed in the strategy, the customer contact parts say, you should be able to understand all the basic moves just by reading the play. To the extent that you don’t know how to do specific bits, those resources should be referenceable from the play: for example a hyperlink on a web page or a list of programs or courses that support the play.
While it is possible to use a playbook to explore strategies on your own, the real value shows up when a broad cross-section of people come together to work on unrelated “plays” or strategies using a common decision table.
- Up-Front Buy-In A broadly representative group works together on common problems/plays. This is a powerful way to accelerate the thinking process because it creates productive conversations and surfaces potential pinch-points immediately. The process creates up-front buy-in.
- Efficient Get all the right people in the room to work the play and make all the preliminary design decisions on the spot. Do resourcing, load-leveling, investment rationalization later (but in the same way). Working in this way creates high decision-efficiency.
- Non-Correlated When the work is “non-correlated” (meaning different people with different perspectives working different problems without reference to each other), overlaps between strategies become significant. For example, if everyone working on different problems separately identifies training as a need, it’s safe to say training is a need.
- Costs and Loads Building plays means identifying how to allocate resources. The plays have integrity because they identify resource requirements across all relevant parts of the organization. Add up the plays you want to run and you get an accurate picture on the aggregated costs and loads to the system.
- Governance Cross-functional activities often run foul of turf issues ("that's my patch"). Creating plays, and particularly doing it in this way, creates a companion structure for resolving governance issues.
- Rational Cross-Subsidization Often cross-functional plays require one part of the organization to bear a cost so that another area can win. For example, reducing a rate or fee in order to acquire a household name or balances. These moves are hard to deal with without context. Working in this way helps identify trade-offs and cross-subsidizations early.
 Collective Intelligence || Cognition || Complexity || Consciousness || Contemplation || Dunbars Number || Emergent Properties || Idea || Imagination || Logic || Meaning || Purpose || Rationality || Reason || Rigor || Subconsciousness || The Human Network || Thinking Process || Visualisation || |
