PLAYBOOKS

Using Shared Recipes to Collaborate, Optimise, and Automate

Using Shared Recipes to Collaborate, Optimise, and Automate

While screwing goals and quitting positive thinking is necessary to reach beyond your imagination, it is not sufficient to make way for massive automation and the transformation of organisations. For transformation to happen, people, your people, need to do things differently. Collectively and consistently, at scale. To foster new doing, please allow me to introduce: PLAYBOOKS, defined as: recipes for how something is done.

At work, outdoor shoe brand Icebug, we have made good use of Playbooks as part of our journey from less than 3 per cent in direct to consumer sales to roughly 10X that ten months later, during a quite challenging year. For the detailed-oriented, I talk through that journey in a recent episode of How the Pod.

One of Icebug’s playbooks, Black Ice, where advertising is directed towards locations with slippery conditions.

The secret is in the doing. In fact, there is little outside doing that has any impact on the surrounding world at all. Thinking and feeling by themselves are not making much dents if not accompanied by creative work shipped, to speak with Seth Godin’s The Practice.

Playbooks are simple recipes for how something is done, shared in a wiki or similar, made available to all at your company. A Playbook simplifies collaboration, imagine you doing step A & B while leaving step C for a colleague. Playbooks are optimised over time as people in your team and in other teams can see them and suggest improvements.

A key aspect of creating Playbooks is to identify tasks that can be automated. Perhaps there is a piece of software who can do step A & B instead of a human? This can be deployed widely, as your Playbook Library grows, so does your opportunities for finding tasks ripe for automation, at massive scale.

Transformation does not happen on its own when introducing new tech. The key is fostering new doing. The bigger story here is one of scale, imagine your organisation, Playbooking everything and creating an extensive Playbook Library. With that, how would you collaborate, optimise, and automate? What unique combinations of data would you create? What would you model from that, and where would you use artificial intelligence?

Interested in the detail? Or do you want to explore how to apply this take on Playbooks in your organisation? Feel free to connect at detnya -a- gmail -.- com or send me a DM on Twitter or Instagram.