Playbooks: an elegant tool for digital strategy
Playbooks are all the rage here at WF, and for good reason: they’re a powerful tool to distribute strategic intent.
Playbooks are all the rage here at WF, and for good reason: they’re a powerful tool to distribute strategic intent.
By Mark Wilson, Founder Partner, Wilson Fletcher
With a nod of recognition to its American football origins, the Playbook has become a useful tool in the digital strategy arsenal in recent years, and we find ourselves using them more and more as a way to bring strategic principles and key tactics to life.
Their role in the stratospheric rise of Airbnb and Uber has been well-publicised, but what are they, and why do they work?
In essence, the Playbook is a tool: it’s a way to package up and communicate strategy and tactics. It is sometimes used within small, senior teams but more usefully is used team- or organisation-wide for specific initiatives like digital transformation, service experience design or expansion strategies.
Typically, we use them as a compact and succinct way to make the outcomes of some of our strategic programmes easy to access and consume — and most importantly to make them actionable by anyone with a stake in that initiative.
They’re not a new concept: as I mentioned earlier, sports teams have used them for years. But there’s something about the basic concept of them that makes them particularly effective tools — when they’re done well, and of course when the content of them is relevant and, here’s that word again, actionable.
Plays, the basic currency of the sports playbook, are specific, actionable sequences that a team can use to out-manoeuvre the opposition. Their origins lie in winning: distilling down specific characteristics of how that team should play into a form that the whole team can follow — and by doing so, giving themselves the best chance to win. A team with a unified philosophy of play and a well-refined set of plays give themselves the best chances of success.
They’re basically a rulebook for winning — based on the key assets (players) and strategic ethos (playing philosophy) of that specific team. They’re always custom-made to fit: there’s no such thing as an off-the-shelf Playbook. A great Playbook for any given team is almost guaranteed to fail if copied by one of its peers, and of course they must evolve and adapt to changes in the team, the competition and the governing rules of the sport.
That’s exactly the role they play in a digital strategy context too, and perhaps why the concept is an attractive one to organisations looking to drive strategic progress. It’s easy to understand what they’re for, and that gets you over the first hurdle with any form of tangible output from a strategy programme: making it genuinely useful.
We use a range of different formats — from posters to videos — to make strategic outputs actionable, and to keep them front-of-mind for those people who need to use them (usually entire teams or organisations). Increasingly, we’re finding that the concept of a Playbook is a compelling approach alongside or instead of some of those other techniques.
The key is not the format though; it’s the content. The Playbook nicely captures the concept of what service-led strategy should lead to: clear, actionable, customer-originated strategy that drives executional excellence and common purpose. Create a great Playbook — inferring that it contains great strategy — and you give yourself the best chance to win out over all of your peers. Fill it with the wrong plays and it’s no better than any other technique… and relegation is a more likely outcome than success.