Author: Karthik Suresh

In sports, a playbook describes plays, a preset plan of action.

It’s a number of moves – a strategy – to move a team into the right places to score.

A playbook is not a woolly wishlist – it’s practical, tactical stuff.

So, how can a business playbook help us be more effective?

Let’s take a very simple example and draw out the most basic business operation possible in a consulting firm.

In basketball playbooks, the court has a number of zones and a basket.

Offensive players are denoted with a O and defensive players with an X.

Lets start with an engagement – a practice lead (O1) enagages with a customer contact (X1).

O1 dribbles the ball (the wavy red line), starting the conversation.

What this very first interaction reminds us is that X1 is not the target.

The target is to be useful – to solve a problem, make money, save money and so on.

That is the basket we are heading for at the end of the court.

When X1 and O1 have decided that there is some merit in this and worked out a problem they would like to solve together (identified the basket), the practice lead passes to an operations lead (O2).

The pass is shown by a line with two slashes. Quite often, people just assume others should know what to do, but a playbook shows that a clear pass is needed, perhaps with an update meeting or formal handover.

X1 may also involve other stakeholders, X2 and X3. O2 now needs to dribble towards the stakeholder team and come up with specific work packages and deliverables.

Finally O2 passes to a consultant or analyst (O3) that does the work, shoots and scores.

Drawing the play in this way also brings out a few other aspects.

O3 needs to deliver the work quickly.

The player is in the 3-second area, and you can’t linger in there. Get things done fast and the customer will appreciate it.

O1 is stood in the three point area.

It might be possible to shoot from there, but its a long shot. Instead, it makes sense to do the play and get closer to the basket.

In other words, rather than guessing and trying to make a quick decision, engaging and understanding the client’s requirements is more useful.

In some cases, we might be offered a free throw – a chance to prove ourselves – with a demo or a pilot piece of work.

We need to put the best player on there to try and make the shot.

It’s interesting how, with just a few components, one can draw out a fairly complex business interaction and make the crucial elements clear.

For example, how many projects have you seen where not having a clear handover or pass meant that requirements weren’t understood and it took longer?

How many times have you seen players going for the long shot when actually getting closer to the basket may have delivered the project?

Running a business is less about wishes and more about action oriented plays with our teams – and those are the things that need to go in a playbook.

We often want to know how something happened – what was the story behind it?

This approach to looking the world is powerful because it takes everything that happened and puts it into a sequence.

Most storytellers, as a result, follow a linear format – like unrolling a carpet.

First, this happened. Then that. And so, this happened in the end.

Even if you don’t know the ending, it’s going to happen one thing at a time. History is what happens, tomorrow.

This kind of thinking is also dangerous.

It leads us to think that things can only happen in the way they happened.

The extreme version of this is a complete belief in fatalism – the belief that all events are predetermined and inevitable.

This is almost never the case.

It is tempting to think that success for some people was inevitable. For every Zuckerberg and Facebook, however, there are people with similar ambitions, resources and opportunities who didn’t make it.

With hindsight, all the moves that he made were obvious. Anyone could have done it. Except they didn’t.

Taking an issue that has had a much greater impact for longer, the economist reports on a dispute between historians and economists, where there is disagreement how to look at slavery in the American economy and its impact on the industrial revolution.

A historic view might say slavery was important in the industrial revolution – it clearly happened, and therefore had an impact.

An economist might argue that because slavery happened, it does not mean it needed to happen. The industrial revolution would probably have happened anyway, just with different methods – for example with more mechanisation.

History describes what happened – it’s a story.

Just because it happened the way it did, however, it doesn’t mean it was the best way for it to happen, or that alternatives at the time were more expensive or unlikely.

To really understand something, it’s not enough to look at what happened.

We also need to look at the counterfactual – what did not happen, or what was not the case.

Getting to Yes: Negotiating an agreement without giving in is the classic text on negotiation by Roger Fisher and William Ury, setting out an approach to something many of us do all the time.

Good agreements should be fair, wise, efficient and capable of lasting.

Many negotiators, however, start with a position – such as price and get ready to bargain.

This tends to be confrontational – imagine that this is like trench warfare, where you dig in for the long haul and try to wear the other side down.

That hasn’t really worked out well in the past.

An alternative, set out by Fisher and Ury, is the idea of principled negotiation – set out as four principles to follow.

1. Separate people from problems

All too often, negotiators identify too closely with the problems they are trying to resolve and take things personally.

Winning or losing a point becomes about personal victory or failure.

We have all experienced the person that refuses to back down even when they are wrong. Sometimes we are that person.

The first step is to try and step back, untangle the personalities from the issues at hand, acknowledge and respond to the emotions swirling around us and use words carefully, listening actively and using language designed not to provocate while trying to see the other person’s point of view.

2. Focus on interests, not positions

A position is a decision. An interest, however, is the thing that led us to taking that position.

Our interests need to be put on the table, discussed and understood. A useful visual tool for this is a compare and contrast diagram, as shown in the picture above.

The idea is that the better we understand each other’s interests, the more likely we are to find a solution that satisfies both of us.

3. Generate a variety of options before settling

We often fall into the trap of thinking there are few options open to us.

This happens a lot with jobs. If someone is frustrated, they think the only option is to quit.

Instead, if they were able to have a principled negotiation, it might be possible to find other approaches that might work better.

Generating options is about being creative – coming up with a range of ideas and working through them, perhaps using a framework such as TOLOPOSOGO.

This is where the idea of win-win comes into it. Alternatives that maximise each parties interests are more likely to go ahead than win-lose.

4. Insist that agreement be based on objective criteria

When we just can’t agree because our positions are directly opposed, then we need to find a form of objective criteria that we can both share and use to resolve differences.

The classic example here is when you share a cake between to children and they both want to cut and choose first.

Resolving this often means agreeing that one child cuts it and the other gets to choose first.

It might be possible to adapt a decision table to make this clear to both parties.

BATNA – the Best Alternative To a Negotiated Position

Sometimes we can’t agree, perhaps because the other side refuses to engage in the open way needed for principled negotiation or thinks that they can get their way through manipulation and dirty tricks – such as deception, trying to create artifical stress (banging the table, eating before a meeting and leaving you hungry) or leaking to the media.

In this situation, we need to call them out.

For example, if someone makes a take-it-or-leave-it type offer, then we need to treat that as a proposal and not simply accept the feeling of finality imposed by one side.

It’s also important not to have a bottom line, especially when there are imbalances in perceived power.

The only reason to negotiate is to get a better deal than one we can get if we didn’t negotiate.

That is our BATNA, the best alternative. Knowing our BATNA helps us make the most of what we have.

The power in negotiations comes from the ability we have, in the end, to walk away.

What kinds of things does work cover?

For many workers, it’s either a task or an appointment.

We handle tasks in to-do lists.

We add to these lists every day, either with a constantly growing one or on scraps of real or digital paper, scattered about.

Items on to-do lists are like weeds, they keep turning up and there is never enough time to get them all cleared away.

Appointments go on a calendar.

They are a commitment that we will meet with someone at a particular time, and they go into a slot.

More often than not, we are pretty good at keeping appointments.

Dan Charnas, in his book Work Clean – The Life-Changing Power of Mise-En-Place to Organize Your Life, Work and Mind, writes about how many people deal with the day.

Underplanners plunge in unprepared.

How the day goes is likely to be a surprise and what they do is determined by how others interrupt, order or interact with them.

Overplanners go to war with the day.

Their schedules are tight, with no space for disruption or the unexpected. They expect you to set an appointment for every discussion.

Both approaches don’t really leave us with a feeling that it’s been a good day at work.

Dan suggests that working clean with time means two things:

1. Work out what you want to do
2. Organise those in sequence

What you want to do – appointments or tasks can be collectively called actions.

He suggests starting with listing three actions that you want to do tomorrow. Put them on your calendar in the order you want to do them – fitting them in around any appointments you already have.

Then, do your actions.

If you did everything on your list, then move to setting out four actions.

Keep increasing the number of actions until you reach the point where you can’t always cross off every item on your list most of the time.

For example, if you can mostly do six things every day but never break seven, then your optimal number is six – what Dan calls your Meeze Point.

Less than that, and you’re probably not pushing yourself enough.

More than that, and you’ll probably just be overloaded and feel like you’re not achieving anything, even though you really are.

Your Meeze Point is the number of things you can really get done today.

Many projects need continued work and commitment over time without providing the kind of feeback that tells us that we are on the right track.

Managing a project, writing a book, doing sales calls, managing accounts, reading papers, writing code – all these require us to do something, day after day.

It’s easy to think that we aren’t making progress on the big goals just because all the small bits of work we do aren’t amounting to anything more than half finished drafts and work in progress.

Part of the the solution, according to James Clear, is to create visual cues that help you measure your progress.

He uses the example of Trent Dyrsmid, now a serial entrepreneur. In his first job, Trent had to make sales calls – and the method he used helped him launch his career.

He had two jars on his desk and filled one with 120 paperclips. Even day, he’d start making calls and after each one move a paperclip from one jar to the other.

He was done when he had moved all the paperclips.

He credits this with helping him develop a large book of business and his subsequent success.

It’s hard to visualize progress on a big goal or objective.

When we can break it into small, manageable chunks then we can make meaningful progress quickly on each small chunk.

If we can also make that progress visible, it also helps motivate us to keep going.

The idea of a visual cue, like a Kanban board, is that it takes things out of our heads and puts them in front of us.

The question to then ask is – what are the things we most want to do, and so what activity should each paperclip represent and how many do we need to know that we have made real progress that day?

And, because we have limited space, we should have the fewest number of visual cues necessary to monitor only the most important things we need to do.