Playbooks not procedures, part 1

One of our key messages of the past few years, the Covid dominated years and the post covid time has been the critical part playbooks act to structure our thinking and decisions, supporting us to lead and anticipate making the best next actions, and not to just react, when is often too late.

“It is a bad plan that admits no modification” Publilus Syrus

There are too many decisions made in a day to track them all. Decisions are a crucial part of life, where we must decide what we are working towards, or away from and how and when to react, adapt and change as situations arise.

Choosing to do something, or do nothing is a decision.?

There are still far too many examples of organisations looking backwards for answers and finger pointing blame to bad decisions. When things go wrong, we seem to be able to highlight an individual data point to find individual blame. Working in siloes with misaligned actions along with personal led or team priorities can lead to a destructive culture, which doesn’t learn past lessons.

We believe that by developing a framework to structure thinking, align decision making and most importantly learn we can continual improve. This will support both better strategic and tactical decision making, along with creating a clear data journey of assumptions to track and improve. Ultimately this creates a better culture, with openness and transparency with a safe environment to discuss failures.

This framework to structure thinking will support:

• Systems not segments, and our understanding of decisions being made as part of a system, helping people to understand the broader contact decisions making. Harnessing this way of thinking creates a strategic value-creating system built on relationships, of numbers and people.
• Scenarios not forecasts, moving away from forecasts and predictions of the future, but a move towards scenarios which help leaders create strategies that are robust on the face of uncertainty.
• Playbooks not procedures, this helps us to anticipate our next move, being on the front foot with the creation of playbooks that adapt quickly to changing circumstances.

The Playbook keynote (Tuesday, 10th October ’23) has been designed to help open your mind to the concept and importance of playbooks, along with some practical next steps to support you, your team and your organisation to embed and sustain continual improvement.

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Our virtual conference starts on Monday 9th October with 21-sessions over the course of the week. There are a mixture of keynotes, technology showcases and interactive workshops. For more information on the agenda an dhow to book, go to: https://theforum.social/events/conferences/2023-autumn-community-conference-virtual

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For more information of The Forum please visit our website: https://theforum.social/

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