Playbooks in the Dojo

For our purposes a playbook is a collection of techniques, resources, teaching aids, stock questions, or other procedures used to bring consistency to a dojo coaching practice. Dojos often have a playbook covering parts of the team challenge experience.

I have a love/hate relationship with playbooks.

At their worst, playbooks become scripts or curricula written by the thinkers on behalf of the people doing the work, reinforcing a social structure at the center of a pathological or bureaucratic culture your transformation might aspire to dismantle. An immersive learning experience is not training. We don’t follow a set curriculum. Instead, we focus on building new and usually complex skills useful in solving your real problems which is an act of dynamic and realtime adaptation. There's no scripting that.

Playbooks can help mature your dojo offering into a repeatable product. The two main benefits I've seen are (1) smoothing the onboarding of new coaches in your dojo and (2) providing a useful tool for iterating on your practice.

Leave Room for Audibles

The first play in your playbook should be the "audible." An audible is a term from American football, wherein the offense will change their play at the last minute based on new information. Coaches should absolutely reserve the right to mix up any given play should the need present itself. Senior coaches become good at reading the room and making slight adjustments or wholesale pivots. No amount of documentation can account for the complex social dynamics of teamwork. Coaches should use plays as a jumping-off point and a set of guidelines, not as scripts. H/T to my pal Ed Tilford for introducing this term and concept in one of our larger dojos.

Keep Plays Light and Flexible

Don't let plays become training curricula or rigorous standard operating procedures for teams or coaches in the dojo. Fully scripting an immersive learning experience is a terrible idea on many levels. Tacit knowledge and learning can't be scripted.  

Create New Plays Iteratively and Experimentally

The word "experiment" gets tossed around pretty casually these days. It makes us feel scientific and better or more righteous about what we're doing. When we frame our experiments as plays, we introduce some rigor in our experimentation. Write down what you're trying to do and keep a light log of iterations and pivots to that experiment. Maybe the experiment yields a repeatable play, and maybe it doesn't. An experiment that doesn't go as planned might shake out that extra bit of clarity for the next one that does.

Write and Edit Collaboratively

Don't segregate the play creators from the play doers. Writing a play together as a group of practitioners is a valuable collaboration. The play document itself is a happy side-effect of a team building a shared mental model and negotiating collective meaning.

Use a Wiki

Wikis are the ideal format for a playbook. Wikis have this democratic nature that encourages different forms of contribution. Your team grammarians can tidy while your big idea people work out their thoughts. Plays often have connections with other plays, which begs for the hypermedia format. For example, you may document a more extensive play as a collection of smaller plays. This is the case in whichever chartering or framing technique you use; chartering may consist of smaller plays such as goal setting, taking inventory of a team's skill, etc. Being able to break those plays into consumable and linked chunks provides a nice UX for your play consumers and collaborators.

Use Playbooks in Onboarding & Mentorship

Playbooks are no substitute for good mentorship, but they can help speed up the onboarding learning curve for new coaches in your team. I like to sketch out a light play with new dojo coaches as we prepare for more semi-structured sessions, going through the purpose and timings. It's a good coach-coaching practice.

After we do run a session, I like to reflect on the session and trade feedback notes. Having the original plan provides a semi-objective basis for comparison:

1. Here's what we thought we were going to do.

2. What actually happened? What audibles were called?

3. What worked well? What should change?

Plays as Constraints, Plays as Options

Curate a small set of core plays over time. A great place to start is by looking at the team experience in your immersive learning environment and asking yourself, "where do we want consistency, and where do we want options & choices?" The places where you want consistency (intake, framing, exit) tend to be evergreen, core plays – plays as constraints. The places where you want freedom (most places) tend to be options a dojo coach might offer up for a team's choice based on learning and context.

Playbooks are Never the Point

Perfecting your playbook won't ensure good team outcomes. The focus, collaboration, and alignment of the people in your dojo – coaches, leaders, sponsors, and teams – is where the real value is created. Playbooks give us a nice protocol for tuning and focusing a dojo's evolution, but people will supply the ideas, intellect, and energy that make learning outcomes possible and lasting. As with most artifacts, the complex social processes we engage in to iterate on our playbook tend to have more value than the playbook itself.