Playbooks not procedures, part 2

The intent to do or not do something is a plan, but how often do our plans, or intentions fully play out? Contingency plans, plan B’s, changes all happen, but there is a difference, a crucial difference. Some people, teams and organisations are structured and aligned with their variances to plan, where there are others who are unstructured and misaligned.

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.

Playbooks help us to demonstrate our strength in numbers, bringing together our analysis and understanding of data, past performance and trends to help us to shape the future.

As we build on our strength in numbers our next step is to shape the future, and take control of what happens. Lead ourselves to shape our future and not just allow to be shaped by what is happening around us.

What stops us, and why isn’t everyone doing this? In some way we all use the concept of playbooks, using our experience and sometimes collective experience to make decisions. The time it would take to capture all this experience and knowledge would take too long, there is also a danger that this information would be out of date once captured. Therefore, it’s easier to leave this to chance and assume that everyone knows what to do, what their role and responsibility is and hope that more decisions are aligned than not.

What can we do?

1. The first step is to understand the broader view, the more holistic view of your organisation and identify the different people and roles. This first step should act like stakeholder mapping, where you can identify different people with different levels of power and influence. In addition, this can help you recognised how involved they need to be and what level of information they require.
2. Develop your Scenario Models and supporting forecasts, bring together our analysis of the data and predictions based on different techniques along with a more discussion based approach to explore and imagine different outcomes. This can’t be done on your own, as you will require the diversity of thought from the different stakeholders and roles around the business. Step one, will help you to identify the key players.
3. The final step is to start mapping out different scenarios, at different stages of the planning cycle, or different time-horizons to support the acceleration of decisions and consistency in taking the best next action.

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. Register to watch on-demand recording.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 and how to book, go to: https://theforum.social/events/conferences/2023-autumn-community-conference-virtual

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

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